October’s Dead Rubber Post

Somehow I missed posting one of these in September.  So, I think that means I can post two this month.  Since I make up the rules, who’s going to stop me?

“Dead Rubber”, by the way, is slang for “boring”.  So, I hope you weren’t thinking this was going to be something else…

The Cap’n and I are in the middle of doing some more Home Improving. Coincidentally, we are also in the middle of debating whether or not we are actually Improving or Worsening.  I will let you be the judge (Keep in mind that these are not Before and After pics.  They are Before and Part of the Way Through pics.  Actually, now that I think about it, since the blue walls were the result of our first Home Improving when we moved in, then they are actually Part of the Way Through pics, too.  So, this series is, “Part of the Way Through and We’re Never Going to Be Finished Because We Keep Changing Our Minds” pics):

The way the walls have looked for 3 years – Photo 1.

 

The way the walls have looked for three years – Photo 2. Except for the drywall patch; that’s where our 70’s looking intercom system used to be.

 

The way the walls look now – Photo 1.

 

The way the walls look now – Photo 2.  (Still working on the drywall patch…)

 

We are still not done.  I’ll try to give you a panoramic view of the kitchen once we finish.  But that may be another 10 years or so…

 

 

 

 

 

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What Part of Our Home is Being Improved?

I would be willing to lay Odds (who is Odds, anyway?) that there have been more marriages toppled by HGTV than by ESPN.

Of course, I have insider information that leads me to this conclusion.

My husband, Cap’n Firepants, is a mild football enthusiast.  He can take it or leave it, most of the time.  In fact, the more interested he is in the outcome of the game, the less probability there is that he will watch it.  He seems to think that his mere presence in front of the screen somehow negatively effects the results for his chosen team.

But he will be more than happy to sit in front of the T.V. for an entire Sunday watching shows about ripping out your kitchen or making your small patio into a mega outdoor living space.

And while I find the Cap’n’s choice of television shows slightly ironic, I have a bigger problem when he gets up from his armchair, inspired by the amazing makeovers he has been witnessing for hours.

This past weekend, we were spending a leisurely morning taking in one of the more ambitious of these DIY shows.  During the commercials we discussed what we hoped to accomplish during the weekend.  The Cap’n mentioned getting the Christmas tree down.  It had been standing forlornly with the lights wrapped around its branches ever since I removed the ornaments over a week ago, so I, of course, wholeheartedly approved this idea.

After the manly, testosterone-laden DIY show that had something do with crashing houses was over, I wandered off to begin my projects.  I heard the garage door open and close a few times indicating that the Cap’n was hard at work.

Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a tree being taken down our house crumbling down around us. I raced out to the living room to find the Cap’n slamming a hammer into the tile in our entryway.

“You are NOT taking down the Christmas tree!” I intelligently observed.

“I’m just exploring,” was his irritated response.

At this point, here is whatimeant2say:  Did I mention you’re a pirate captain, not friggin Marco Polo? And since when do explorers completely decimate every thing they come into contact wi- oops, bad metaphor.

“So, uh, what exactly are you exploring?”

“I’m just seeing how hard it is to remove the tile.”

“So you chose destroying the one piece of actual floor we have left, that visitors to our home who never make it past the storm door might see, over taking down the Christmas tree?”  Actually, I didn’t say that either.

I just said, “Oh.”  I can pack a LOT of power into that little word, believe you me.

To be fair, the rest of our flooring looks worse than this solitary island by our front door.  Wonderbutt, our bulldog (or my bulldog – depending how angry the rest of the family happens to be at him), pretty much destroyed our carpeting and rearranged the padding underneath, and the Cap’n decided staring at a concrete floor with a skin disease was better than the lumpy, partially shredded, giant diaper our carpet had become.  We are waiting on some estimates from people who will transform our concrete foundation into a glorious, polished, bodily fluid repelling work of art that costs less than 1 cent per square foot.

We’ve been waiting for awhile.

Wonderbutt's Idea of Interior Decorating

We were pretty sure the tile was going to be removed when we started the new flooring process.  But, apparently the Cap’n decided he wanted to see how hard it was going to be to eliminate the entire area by himself since he had nothing better to do.

Hard enough, I guess, that he decided not to complete the task.

Before the Exploratory Expedition of Cap'n Firepants

 

After (Shouldn't These Two Pictures Be Reversed?)

I am declaring a moratorium on HGTV until one of the following happens:

1.)  We get enough money to tear this place down and rebuild the house of our dreams

2.)  We get enough money to move to the house of our dreams

3.)  HGTV sends Carter Oosterhouse to build us the house of our dreams

The Man Who Could Save our Marriage

“Wonderbutt’s Whimsy” to be Auctioned

“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”Andy Warhol

Wonderbutt has made our floor his ongoing masterpiece.  Andy Warhol would have approved.

Cap’n Firepants, on the other hand, has no appreciation for modern art, so he has decided that Wonderbutt’s canvas needs to go.  He allowed me to take some pictures before tackling the project.  When I loaded the pictures onto the computer, I realized that they didn’t really do justice to the monumental  contributions Wonderbutt has made in the last year to our carpet.  So, I decided to add a few labels in case you don’t happen to have a magnifying glass near your computer monitor.

This was only one portion of the carpet.  If our family had ever gotten murdered in our beds, it would have taken an entire season of C.S.I. episodes to exclude Wonderbutt’s DNA evidence and isolate the killer’s.  The pup even got blood all over the floor when I once cut a toenail too short.  He was too busy trying to get a treat off the table to realize his hemorrhaging was creating a monochromatic Jackson Pollock painting on the carpet beneath him.

We have been talking about getting rid of the carpet ever since we moved into the house (pre-Wonderbutt), but his arrival has necessitated this happening sooner than later.

The problem is that we don’t have the money to execute the second part of the plan – lovely, polished, stained concrete floors.  Kind of like this.

We had entertained the thought of doing the job ourselves – until we saw the floor awaiting us underneath the carpet.

Mrs. P.I.B. asks Cap'n Firepants if this was part of the plan.

Big improvement, right?

Apparently, the people who built our house over thirty years ago pretty much used the concrete as their own version of a drop cloth, not being able to  conceive of any kind of reason that sane homeowners might want to actually expose a cement floor.

They clearly never met Wonderbutt.

So, this is what our floor looks like now and for the foreseeable future.  Dimples is eager to break out the sidewalk chalk and do some of her own home improving.  I am thinking we can just draw a Christmas tree in the middle of the floor and our holiday decorating will be done.  And I am keeping my fingers, toes, and eyes crossed that Cap’n Firepants doesn’t decide the best improvement would be a chalk outline of Wonderbutt.