More on pants

On a similar note to a previous post about pants sizing, I'd like to talk about another couple of crazy things with pants. Why does it seem that the worse a pair of pants looks, the more you pay for them? It strikes me as odd that guys in particular will pay $80-$100 or more in some cases, for pants that look like a poor farmer's kid has been working the fields in them all summer? The kind of yuppie boys that are able to spend that kind of cash on pants have probably never even seen dirt, let alone worked hard enough to wear out a pair of jeans. A friend was telling me the other day that the darker a pair of jeans is, the sturdier they are likely to be because they have not been "distressed" to the point of being worn out. The moral here: search for the dark indigo jeans. Ok maybe not, but you know what I meant. When I was in high school and the "grunge" thing of the 90s was going on, I actually cut the hems of a pair of jeans with a razor knife so that they would fray. To make matters worse, I also used that knife to slice the knees and under the back pockets of those pants. As if all that wasn't bad enough, I actually hung the pants on the clothes line (we lived on a farm) when my parents weren't home and shot them with my dad's shotgun loaded with a cartridge of buckshot. I only got off one shot because it knocked me to the ground, but man did I have cool pants after that. True, I had to wear biking shorts under them so that my everything important didn't show, but I was "with it". Nowadays kids would be sent home from school for wearing such things, but whatever.
My other thing about pants has to do with men's pants. My dad is built like Santa Clause. He has a big round belly (much like a pregnant lady carrying twins or triplets) and no butt or hips. His pants constantly droop and slide down forcing him to hike them up repeatedly through out the day. He wears a belt, but due to the no hips and butt thing, it doesn't really help that much. He wore suspenders for a while, but the pants slid so much that the suspenders would pop off like elastic rockets so he quit wearing them and went back to the belt for safety reasons. :-/ A few months ago I was thinking about dear ol' dad and his pants dilemma and it hit me, Dad needs "manternity" pants. He needs the same kind of high waisted panelled pants that pregnant women wear. These pants would have an inner jersey like panel that looked like an under shirt and rose to above the belly. It would have a band of elastic at the top to hold it up. On the outside, they would have a normal jean waistband complete with belt loops so that a shirt could be tucked in. They would appear to be totally normal jeans, but when Dad sat down, they wouldn't show his butt. I think this idea is ingenious, and I may one day construct him a pair just for kicks.

Relax, it took our parents years!

While looking at our front yard the other day, I realized that it was time to revamp something we had done previously. It was time to do something outside anyway because it's the time of year when it's not too hot and not too cold, and you can stand to be outside for lenghthy periods of time without being uncomfortable. I also have a rule about alternating inside and outside improvements to the house to keep everything on an even keel. Here's what we had done previously in the yard. Just after we moved in, I purchased two boxes of landscape lights because I wanted some and they were on sale. They were the wired, plug in type because sometimes it's not sunny and your solar lights don't charge and when you come in at night the lights have about the wattage of a lightning bug and you trip on the sidewalk trying to get to the front door. We had these lights for about a year and a half. In the box. In the shed. That's a good place for them, right? No, I didn't think so either. So we decided to do a late fall project last year and put the lights in the yard. We plotted where we'd want our eventual flower bed to go, and installed the lights according to what were envisioning for the future so that we wouldn't have to redo the lights. To cover the cords for the lights, we bought several bags of mulch and made a fake flowerbed. Classy, huh? It actually didn't look too bad until this spring when the grass started growing. You can't mow or weedeat in mulch, at least not without significant risk of injury to yourself and anything in the general vicinity, from flying pieces of bark. The grass that was growing in the mulch was some of our "real and good grass" (with very hearty roots which makes it very hard to pull up) that apparently the previous homeowner kinda sorta seeded with in hopes that it would eventually spread and cover the yard. This has not worked to date. In fact, it makes the yard look stupid because we have a patch of actual grass in the front yard near the house, and then the typical mixed grass consisting mostly of clover and dandelions in the rest of the yard. This real grass takes forever to get green and causes us to have green grass in the typical areas, and a dead lawn in the real area until way late in spring. The real grass, however, is incredibly resilient, and hard to kill. If only it were nice to walk on like our neighbor's lawn (which really deserves the title lawn and not yard). Henry has a goal to someday have a super nice "lawn" with thick soft pretty grass that's nice to walk on. So given that we had this mulched, grassy, well lit area in our yard, I decided that now was the time to re-do it right. I thought about all those yards I've seen where people start things and either do them wrong or don't finish them, and the home owners had such good intentions and the projects had such potential, but in the end the yard looks like crap. I didn't want to be one of those people. I wanted to take care of the project and make it an assett, not a liability. I choose to think that when I make positive improvements to my house, it elevates the standards and standings of my entire neighborhood. I mean c'mon, you've seen the pictures, you know what it looked like before. My neighbors were actually honking and cheering while we cut down trees and painted the house! No joke! Anyway, I have spent the last two days altering this project so that my neighbors won't drive by and think "if only they had... it could have been so nice". I plucked the lights from the grass, raked out the mulch, and started digging scraping. I used my shovel like a sod cutter (which I seriously wished I had) and peeled the grass from the dirt like the rind from an orange. If you have ever done this, you know that it is very hard work. After I removed the grass and most of its roots, I put down a layer of plastic (haha grass, grow through that!) I also installed some of that black plastic edging stuff to provide a barrier between the mulch and the grass- mulch in, grass out, no cross contamination. I had to dig a trench so that I could put it in correctly, and I'll be honest and say that I misused the claw of a hammer for this purpose. To make matters worse for myself, I decided to expand the flower bed and make it go across the front of the house under the big windows. I envision pretty flowers blooming there next year. Henry was kind enough to help me with the last little bit of the project when he got home. I even found a purpose for the grass and dirt that I removed from the flower beds. I used them to fill in weird areas of the yard that don't grow grass for whatever reason. Win win! I have a sunburn because even though I bought two new bottles of sunblock, I neglected to use either of them to mist my exposed body parts. I also have a blister on the palm of my hand (yes I wore gloves, but in the end it did not matter) that I'm nursing by holding the margaritta that Henry made me for a job well done. We were going to get some free mulch from a guy on craigslist but he lived too far away, so tomorrow we will just go buy some. We would have spent the money in gas anyway, and had to shovel the mulch twice on top of that. Next week I will go to a friends house, shovel in hand, to collect some of her monkey grass that I will then transplant into my flowerless flower beds. She says she has too much and doesn't really like it so it helps us both out. I view monkey (and mondo) grass like a ponytail, it doesn't really have much of a wow factor, but it at least looks like you tried. In the midst of all this work, I glanced at some of my neighbor's yards. They are perfectly manacured, with pretty flowers beds with little chotchkies sprinkled in them, and their houses are all well cared for and they have nice mailboxes and lawnboys who do most of the work because they are old now. *sigh* Anyway, I thought about my parents' house and how they always seemed to have everything and I who was just starting out, had seemingly nothing. I borrowed their stuff constantly to help me out in my endeavors. Sometimes, I even returned what I borrowed before they had to ask for it back. I used to think about how they had everything, and it seemed like magic. I felt that I had to do something magical so that I could acquire duplicates of what they had really fast. I heard people say "you're just starting out, you'll get there", but it didn't matter because I wanted it all yesterday. Today it really sunk in what they were saying, even though I knew it all along. It took our parents years of hard work and collecting to get what they have. It didn't happen overnight, it just seemed that way because by the time I was old enough to notice, it was already there. I felt relaxed by this ephiphony. Our neighbor's kid was in their front yard with her prom date, our kids were running around in the yard covered in dirt and grass, and I told Henry that by the time our kids were big enough to go to prom, maybe our yard would look nice enough to take cool pictures in. His response was "well if not, at least the house will be paid for". That wasn't really what I had in mind, but the then thought did occur to me that if we didn't have a mortgage payment, we'd have alot of money each month to invest in things like... relandscaping the yard before the kids go to prom. I'm no longer in a hurry to have a great house or yard immediately. Some people buy one that's great, and that's great for them. Personally, we wanted to put our own stamp on things, and that takes time to both earn the money, and then to complete the projects. We have years to fix up what we have and make it our own, and by then we will be old enough to have it and be able to fully appreciate the satisfaction that our hardwork brings.

More Before and Afters- Let's start with the bathrooms

If you read my post "want vs. get" you saw some the things we have done to the house. We have rehabbed other rooms in the house besides the kitchen, and I started with the bathrooms because they were the most offensive to my decorating taste. 

I think the first room that I did after we moved in was the boys' bathroom. It was covered in this awful wallpaper that looked like an 80 year old woman picked it out, and I just couldn't do that to them.

Here's the before on the boys' bathroom

Here are the "Afters"

 I left the brass on the light fixture and the towel holder. It went more with my "nautical" theme.

This is the ceiling. It doesn't seem very impressive until you consider that it started off with "popcorn" texturing. I hate that junk, so it had to come off.

Now, if you have ever tried to remove popcorn from the ceiling, you know that it's messy work. Here's my method. First, I lightly sprayed sections of the ceiling with a garden sprayer filled with plain water. The garden sprayer saves you a lot of time and pain from hand cramps that occur from repeatedly squeezing a trigger sprayer. You can pump it up and then use the wand to create the mist of your choosing since the tip is adjustable. By the time I had sprayed my section, it was time to scrape. I contstructed this scraping thing to aid me in my efforts. I think there is actually a commercially made thing like this, but I didn't know that at the time. Besides, this was free and I already had everything I needed to make it.  The knife is taped to the bowl at an angle that allows you to scrape without scrubbing the ceiling. The bowl catches about 95% of the stuff you scrape from the ceiling. I had a trash can near by, and I scraped a time or two and then dumped the bowl into the trash can. It really did make things alot easier. You should know that after you remove popcorn from the ceiling, you will probably have to mud the nail/screw divets and possibly the tape joints. You will also have to lightly sand the ceiling with a drywall screen. After that you are ready to prime, which is very important, and paint.

We have 2 other bathrooms in our house, and the half bath downstairs was the next one to go. Get ready for a laugh when you see the before picture.

Your eyes aren't playing tricks on you, that really is shiny marbled wallpaper. There was also a fruit patterned border at the top of the wall. You should also know that the builders of this house were kind enough to put the wallpaper directly on the unprimed, unpainted drywall. They did this in all 3 bathrooms and the kitchen, and I made the mistake of trying to remove in the boys' bathroom. The result was a huge mess that took 5 times longer to deal with than it could/should have. In the remaining two bathrooms, eventhough it's not a great solution, I applied mud to the joints in the wallpaper and sanded them to make them a little more smooth, then I painted right over the wallpaper. It worked in this application because the wallpaper really adheres to the raw drywall and didn't attempt to peel or bubble. If the wallpaper were not adhered to the drywall in this way, I would have removed it as applying paint to wallpaper adhered to a primed or painted wall frequently results in the wallpaper peeling off the wall as the paint is absorbed into the paper and reactivates the adhesive holding the wallpaper to the wall.

Here is the after of the half bath. The color isn't ideal, but I hated that wallpaper and I was out of money in the budget at the time and had this paint color left over from a previous project. I also painted the vanity with left over paint, and added handles to the doors. I also switched out the faucet and added the frame to the mirror. I constructed the frame from all the chair rail we took down in the kitchen.

 

The completion of that project brings me the last bathroom in our house, the master bath.

Here's the before.

 

And here's the after

This is a little project that I had to do in order to not clash.The tile in the master bath is this weird beige-ish color. It has a hint of pink in it that you don't realize is there until you put a paint swatch next to it. It looked awful with every single swatch I tried. Finally, a friend made the comment that if only the baseboard tile and the bullnose on the shower surround could be replaced (because a complete tile job was NOT in the budget) it could make a huge difference and allow for a divide between the existing tile and the new wall color. I didn't have the money to replace the baseboard tile, but I did have the money for spray paint. I got some epoxy spray paint, cleaned the tile to be painted really well with a degreaser and a scotchbrite pad, put paper over the tile I didn't want to paint, and carefully taped it down with painter's tape in a straight line along the grout line. Tada, a divide between the tile color and the wall color.

Well there ya have it, our bathrooms looking a little less crappy than before. :)



Dodging the droplets

It's been raining off and on for days. I'm kinda sick of it as it makes the grass grow faster and need mowing which you can't do because it's either too wet or still raining. In addition to that, it makes the house dark and the sound of rain is so lulling that it makes me want to be seriously unproductive. I'm fighting the urge to spend yet another day on the couch in my pajamas watching tv, so I got up this morning, took a shower, and put on real clothes. That's a start, right? I also realized that we were out of food and therefore, a trip to the grocery was in order. I made my list, and when it looked like the morning storms had passed, I grabbed the baby and headed out. The sun was shining when I went into the store. About 3/4 of the way through, I heard this noise... I was seriously hoping that it was the air conditioning kicking on, but alas it was not. I checked out, pondering how I was going to get to the car in the pouring rain. I knew that if I could just make it there, by opening the trunk on my minivan I would be under a canopy of sorts, and could unload the cart in the dry. Luckily, it was only normal raining by the time I headed out to the door. Here are a few issues that I had while at the store, and while leaving the store:
1. Kinsley is teething and she cried in the store. I consoled her by opening a box of vanilla wafers and letting her eat them while I shopped.
2. I forgot to print coupons, and when the cashier told me how much it was I almost passed out. I am SO watching that couponing show on TLC tonight. Maybe I will get motivated?
3. When getting dressed this morning, I put on my cotton cargo pants and ballet slippers. That would have been fine except that the pants are a little long which I thought "no problem, I'll just roll them up a little", and the rolling up wouldn't stay.
4. Since my pants wouldn't stay rolled up, when I ran out to the car I walked all over them making them a soggy mess.
5. While doing said running with a full cart+ my too long and soggy pants that I was stepping on+ my semi slippery bottomed ballet shoes+ the wet pavement with puddles, I almost couldn't stop my cart when I got to my car.
6. While I did have the foresight to park right next to the buggy return, which I try to do so that I don't have to leave my kids in the car while I return the cart, I didn't think (since it was sunny when I got there) about the fact that I had also parked on a slope and that my left front  tire was almost on the huge drainage grate. This made #5 all the more interesting, and when a car came by it caused a wake in the rushing water going to the grate right under my car. Luckily I was able to jump back out of the way and save my shoes from filling with water.
7. I also realized after opening the trunk, that I had the cargo area filled with baseball junk and the boxes that I needed to take to Goodwill. This forced me to fold down the back seat and try to stack the groceries in such a way that they would not spill onto the floor or crush my bread. Tetris anyone?
After my ordeal with loading the car, I slipped my cart into the return and slammed the trunk. I was thankful that we had a van and I could open the side door and jump in with the baby, thereby staying dry as I buckled her in. By the time I got home, the rain had all but stopped and I was able to unload the car in the dry. There you have it, my failed attempt at shopping between the storms. :-P

The battle of the clothing sizes

I was checking out a friend's blog and she had posted about "vanity sizing" in women's clothing, and I have some stuff to report on this clothing phenomenon. First of all, this mis-sizing issue seems to, for the most part, affect only pants (I don't shop for dresses much so I don't know about them) and not shirts. This is odd to me because people have to (or in most cases should) cover their complete torso somehow, so it seems like you'd notice the shift if you wore a 10 in jeans and an XXL in shirts. I have also found that most pants are so low cut  that they cause what I'm titling "mommy crack" which is similar to "plumbers crack" in that when you bend or squat down to pick up Jr. your too low rise jeans show your backside. It seems that when buying jeans, you have the choice of a 2 inch zipper or a 12 inch zipper which is present in "mom jeans" (think about that "Saturday Night Live" skit) that are so high waisted (and frequently without back pockets) that they touch your bra and make your butt look like it's mishapen, flat, and incredibly long and droopy. While nobody wants to show their crack, they also do not want a butt that looks like a bassett hound.
I find it irritating that I have to buy jeans that have a "waist" sized for my hips. I also hate it when I find a pair of jeans that fit great in the length ,hips, and butt, and then have a huge gap in the waist band that is like a skylight for my underwear. I'm not sure who "designers" are making pants for, but it's not for normal women who have given birth at least once and or have curves greater than the speed bump at Sonic. I find it disturbing and hard to believe that I wear a smaller size in pants now than I did in college given the fact that I weigh about 15 pounds more and have had 3 kids. Maybe I should have kept that cool pair of pants I begged my then boyfriend for at Christmas one year. Speaking of being young, I hate the fact that they make "plus size jrs" pants. Really? If your bottom is big enough to need a 16 plus in pants, maybe you should accept the fact that you are probaly old enough to shop in "womens". Now I realize that there are some young girls out there who are heavy, and that they make these sizes in part so that they don't get their self esteem crushed when they shop for pants, but I think it's also so that older girls can boast about being able to shop in the "little girl's/ jr" section of the store. I'm not boasting, but I am admitting that I have shopped in the girls section of Old Navy because that is sadly one of the only places that I can find pants that fit without having the 2 or 12 inch zipper. The zipper on those pants is at least a solid 4 inches, the rise is to the lower waist, and they have an adjustable waist so that I was able to get pants that fit in the non adjustable parts and adjust the rest without looking stupid or wearing a belt.
So enough about women's pants, let's talk about guys pants for a second. Most people assume that the vanity sizing only applies to women's clothing, but that's not true. Henry and I actually saw a show that was talking about this topic and it reported that men's pants that were labeled 36 actually varied by manufacturer by up to 6 inches. SIX inches people. That was an extreme difference, but they said that most were varied by at least 2-4 inches. I think that's an outrage, especially since men's clothing is supposedly sized and labeled by the actual number of inches around the waistband. They confronted one of the "over-sized" manufacturers about the size difference and they replied that the size difference was there because the style of the jeans required them to be worn around the hips and not the waist. It's bad enough that women have that ridiculous sizing thing that no one understands, but now men have to know if the size is for around their hips or waist? I think that's ridiculous and probably leads to alot of returns because we all know men don't try on pants when they buy them. Crap who am I kidding? Men wouldn't return the pants, they would just wear them anyway and accept the fact that they drooped in the butt.  At least maybe some of the men would wear a belt so that their crack didn't show. *shaking my head*

Different doesn't necessarily mean better

As you know, I have been spiffing up my den/office/work space. I have most things like I want them, but I have been pondering a better storage solution for my fabric. I looked online to see what other people were doing, and strangely enough, most people are just doing what I have already done. That both impressed me that I had a solution that was normal good enough for other people too, and depressed me because I was looking for something cooler. I wanted some sort of specifically designed thing that was awesome yet simple enough that I could rip it off and create my own. I have a plan for the future, but I'm still working out the details... I should also mention that most of what I saw when I googled "fabric organization" was other people's blogs. Again, disappointing.

So here we have what I had originally on the left, compared to what I found online on the right. Pretty similar really...



Photo on the right courtesty of http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/chicago/flickr-finds/craft-room-fabric-organization-flickr-find-105839

I also found a few pieces online about managing the individual pieces of fabric.

Courtesy of the following website:

http://funnyfarm-maywehelpyou.blogspot.com/2008/10/wfmw-fabric-organization.html

Her article was very good and you should go check it out.

I also found some similar information on this website:

http://featheredfibers.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/fabric-stash-organization-and-tutorial/

and though I did not follow it (but thought really hard about it), the idea has merit. You just have to see the website to appreciate it. I believe that one of them (or both) made mention of using comic book boards whatever those are. I found that cut up cardboard boxes worked well, but I thought about getting a stack of 8x11 chipboard sheets. I used what I had on hand and it was free and I needed to do something with the boxes anyway. Whatever you use just has to be sturdy enough to stand up when wrapped with fabric.

So after visiting those websites, I came up with this:

I found fabric that I didn't remember I had because it was folded neatly in a box that was on the shelf. Needing this shelf also forced me to sort and cull other things that I had hanging around. Think back to what I said about not needing every single scrap... Doh! Anyway, several handfuls of scraps went into the trash, and all those coardboard boxes that I emptied (and there were alot)? Well, they got cut up to make mini bolt boards to roll the fabric on. I was also able to use up some of my excess of straight pins by using them to secure said fabric to the newly created mini bolts. Since I already had all this organization basically going on already, I have to say that I don't really find that I have much more space. This is where different doesn't necessarily mean better. The space that I freed up was due mostly to the culling and reorganization of things other than fabric. I will say that most things are more visible now, and the fabric on the shelf looks better than the diaper and girl scount cookie boxes that lived on the shelf previously. I even got rid of some of the stuff that was living under my craft table and discovered that once Kinsley is using the big car seat that lives on top of my storage cabinet, I will be able to put almost all of the the remaining items under the table on top of the cabinet.

Sometimes the answer to over diversification is farming out your ideas

I admittedly think about too many things at once all the time. I suppose that's why I like for the house to be quiet, because that's one more thought that I don't have to have all at once. It's a curse sometimes to not be able to turn off my mind. It makes me lose sleep and get in over my head. I've had some really great ideas lately, but I've had to face the fact that it is possible for one to over diversify. Just because I can  doesn't mean that I should. It's been a struggle for me what with the creativity and such. So I've come up with the plan that if I farm out the good ideas that I don't have time for to friends, I get to both help them out and reap the satisfaction that I had a good idea. Sometimes I get fringe benefits from those friends, like free products or services since I hatched the idea in the first place. This farming out of ideas has helped me to focus on the things that I am truly interested in and improve upon those things without the thought that I'm wasting other good ideas. This is a ridiculous notion I suppose, but it makes me feel better so I'm going with it.