We were lucky when we moved into our house, because it has a big dining room, and we already had a big dining room table. I know most people who move from an apartment into a house have a smaller, eat-in kitchen style table, and dining room tables are generally expensive, because they are big and fancy. But Jim's dad found a table on the side of the road that was in great condition except that the leg was broken. So he fixed it, and Jim's mom recovered the chairs, and they gave it to us. So that fills up the dining room very nicely. Total cost to us: $0.
In our apartment, that table sat in the kitchen, and we never used it (except as a place to dump all of our crap). Now it's in the dining room, and while it does tend to accumulate crap, I try to clear it off every other day or so. However, we also have an eat-in kitchen, and no table for that. At least not until a few weeks ago.
A nearby neighborhood was having a 'hood-wide garage sale, so Jim and I went, looking for a table and chairs. We found one at one of the first houses that was in pretty good shape, and the right size. It had a few scratches and dings, but it was a garage sale, so what do you expect? I offered the guy $25 and he took it, and we were the proud owners of a new table. No chairs, but chairs can be pretty cheap.
I decided that I was going to refinish it. Besides the aforementioned dings and scratches, it was a pretty dark stain, almost a cherry. I wanted something lighter. Had I known then what I know now, I would have patched up the scratches and dings the best I could and lived with it.
I started off by buying some stripper -- the kind you spray on and scrape off. Keep in mind that I had never done anything like this before in my life. Okay, that's not entirely true. When I was like 12, I decided to strip the paint off my bike (which I had, for some unknown reason, spray-painted black and red, and now wanted returned to its original pink and white colors). But I'd never worked with wood products before. I figured (and this phrase will strike fear into DIY-ers everywhere), "How hard can it be?" I was about to find out.
First mistake: I didn't read the instructions that thoroughly (much beyond "Spray on. Scrape off.") So I sprayed everything all at once. The table top. The leaf. The legs. Then you're supposed to wait at least fifteen minutes. I was working outside, on a nice sunny day, so I hung out and read a magazine while I waited. Then I decided to start scraping. The stripper took the finish off fairly easily, but for some reason, I thought one application would take everything off down to bare wood. Apparently, I thought it was holy water, and not chemical stripper.
So I scraped and scraped and scraped some more. And while I was working on one part, everything else dried in the sun. So now I had not just the finish and stain to contend with, but also the dried stripper. (Heh. Stripper.) I got really frustrated and just closed up shop for the day. Plus, the table legs are fairly ornately carved, and I wasn't having much luck with the scraping. So I gave up for a while.
At some future point, I gave it another go. This time, I only sprayed a small section at a time. I finally got to the point where I had removed the finish and some of the stain from the majority of the table top and leaves. I ignored the legs for a while, because I had no clue what to do there. Some books I consulted suggested using a special steel-wool type string, but that just seemed way too time-consuming. Anyway, after removing as much stain as I could with the stripper, I started scrubbing the table with steel wool and water, as per the directions. This removed the rest of the stain and pretty soon I was down to bare wood, for the most part. It sound so easy when I type it out, but this took place over about four or five days of working six hours or so.
Then I moved on to the panels below the table. I had to prop the table up on end to reach these. Bad idea. While stripping those panels, the stripper-plus-finish-plus stain goop dripped all over my nice clean table top. And no amount of re-application of stripper/washing with steel wool/sanding/crying would get those drips off.
And still, I had no clue what to do with the table legs.
So after like a month and a half of working on this table, I just decided to paint it. I went to Home Depot last week and bought primer and paint (Cottage White) and painted it this weekend. Yesterday, I put on the final coat. Today, I reassembled the table, and now it is standing in my kitchen.
I realize now that with all of the money I spent on the stripper/steel wool/scraper/paint/brushes/rags, I could have just bought a nice table in the first place. I estimate my total cost for this table to be about $120. But that's not really accurate -- I can use everything but the stripper again. I have lots of paint left over, and it's the color I want to paint the trim in most of the other rooms in the house. So all is not lost.
Now I just have to get some damn chairs. Right now I have folding chairs sitting there, and it looks a little goofy.
Here is the table as it appeared the day that we bought it. You can click on any of these pictures to see them full-size. Please ignore my ugly kitchen floor and cheesy wallpaper. One step at a time. You can't really see all of the damage to the table in this picture, but trust me.
Here is the freshly-painted table. Roxanne wanted to get in the picture, and there wasn't much I could do to stop her, so she's the dark spot in the lower left corner. Please ignore any imperfections in the paint job. I did the best I could. It's good enough for me.
Thought I would throw in some bonus pictures. This is a wicker chair that Jim's mom picked up for $20 at an estate sale. I'm not a big fan of the wicker, but I think this is pretty nice. Roxanne likes to sleep here. And claw the chair. I'm trying to get her to stop that last part. But it filled up an otherwise empty corner of the kitchen.
This is a flower. Duh. I bought a hanging plant yesterday for the hook by our front door. I realized after I hung this one up that it looked kind of dumb and I should have picked something a bit more trailing. Oh well. Live and learn. I also realized after I took this picture that I should have deadheaded the dried-up bloom on the right before taking the picture. Oops.
This is Roxanne, lying in her Cat Napper, thoughfully purchased for all of our cats as a house-warming gift by Tara. I liked this picture best because it looks like she's winking at you, which would be a very Roxanne thing to do.
So I had my wisdom teeth out on Friday. I only had two, and they were on the top, and they had fully come in, so at least they weren't impacted or anything. They were, however, kind of crumbly due to the fact that my toothbrush doesn't reach back there as well as it should, so my choices were to get lots of fillings and probably eventually a root canal, or just have them yanked, since they were kind of extraneous. So I chose to have them yanked.
Jim had a tooth extracted by the same dentist about a year ago (actually, it was the same day we found Roxanne outside our apartment), so at least I knew what to expect. I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight, so of course I was starving and dehydrated. Even though normally I probably wouldn't eat or drink anything, just knowing that I couldn't was killing me. And I was too anxious about the procedure to go to sleep.
But I did finally go to sleep, and I woke up the next morning and went right to the dentist. I had to sit around for a while, and then rinse my mouth out with peroxide, which is really unpleasant, especially first thing in the morning. Then a lady came in and put an IV in my arm, which I've never had done before, so that kind of freaked me out. Then she didn't tell me that I would go to sleep, or anything. She just told me to lie back, and then the dentist told me to bite down on this hard rubber thing to keep my jaw propped open and then next thing I knew, the lady was waking me up and telling me to come with her to the recovery room, and I was like, "No! I want to go back to sleep! Mmm, sleep." And I was very confused, but I eventually figured out that the gauze packed into my mouth meant that the teeth were gone.
So then the lady took me into this little cubby with a bench, kind of like the cot in the nurse's office in high school. I curled up and then Jim showed up. All I remember is that I felt like I needed to hurry up and wake up and get out of there. No one told me that. I just felt that way for some reason. And I was very, very cold. After a while, the lady came back and rattled off like a million instructions, and she was like, "You understand?" And I just looked at Jim and he laughed and said he would take care of it.
Then we went home and Jim tucked me into bed, and then he went and filled my Tylenol with codeine prescription. I was a little disappointed that I wasn't given more powerful pain killers. I wanted something that would knock me right out. I mean, Tylenol with codeine is OTC in Canada. How powerful could that be? But I guess it did the trick, because I slept most of the day Friday. When Jim got back from work, I convinced him to carry our small TV upstairs and hook it up. Then, I was living large. With my yogurt and my blankets and my cats and my TV. The only problem was that if I needed something (or just got lonely), I would yell to Jim but he couldn't hear me. So he brought my cell phone upstairs and then when I needed something, I just called him. I got the biggest kick out of talking to him on the phone even though he was in the same house. I blame the drugs for the fact that I kept calling him just to say hi. I was bored, too.
So on Saturday, I pretty much felt better. I don't know if I have a high tolerance for pain, or just a really uncomplicated surgery. Some people were like, "Oh, plan on being out of it for like three days!" and I was worried because I had to teach class on Monday. But I could have taught on Saturday. I still can't eat, like, popcorn or anything. But my stitches came out (i.e. I pulled them out) last night and the parts where the teeth were have nearly closed up.
So, in conclusion, I don't think I lost any wisdom I had. And Jim is a really good nurse!
Welcome back to the newly redesigned journal. People (i.e. Mary and Molly) have been giving me shit about never updating. But then I was overwhelmed with the amount of updates that I would have to do to get caught up. So I just kept putting it off and putting it off. And then I was like, "Wouldn't it be cool if I could postdate my entries?" And there's probably a way to do that in Greymatter, but I've been meaning to move my journal over to Moveable Type for a while so that I could have the whole site on one system. And this seemed like a good excuse.
Anyway, in reading back through my entries, I realize that way too many of them start with, "Wow, it's been a long time since I've done an entry. Sorry about that!" So no more. I'm not saying I'm going to update any more often. I'm just saying that I won't apologize for it. It's like a Guess? jeans ad over here.
There are definitely going to be a few bugs in this time of transition. One cool new feature is that you can leave comments on my journal entries, much like you can on my weblog posts. Just click the link at the bottom of each entry that says "Holler back" and type in whatever you want to say. I'm finally caught up to 1995 in terms of interactivity.
I'm also working on moving my notify list locally so that I don't have to deal with the whims of whatever ads various notify-list software companies decide to put on their e-mails. So look for that fairly soon.
There's something goofy where none of my pictures are showing up on past entries. I don't know what's up with that. Oh, and I've only imported entries back to January 2001, but I'm working on getting them all in here eventually. I have to do the older ones by hand, which is a pain, but I want them all in one place.
So I'll be backdating some entries to fill you in one what's been going on while I've been gone. Join the notify list (see the subscription box in the sidebar there) if you want to know when new entries are posted.
"Yeah, we tease him a lot 'cause we've got him on the spot, welcome back. Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back."