Having fun leads to time flying.

Hold on.  It's November?!  How did that happen??  The Sandias had their first light dusting of snow a few mornings ago.  Fall is officially over.

I've been lousy at keeping up with my blog.  What can I say... just too much life going on, I guess.  And now it's almost the holidays!  I can't believe this.

Let's see... in the last couple of months we have enjoyed the fall weather, completed a couple of bike races, entertained family visiting from out of town, participated in some classic New Mexico traditions such as Zozobra and the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, worked on small projects around the house, been to concerts, cooked a lot of good food, traveled to Vegas for a weekend, celebrated Halloween for a full week... All of these things could have warranted blog updates, but the truth is that I've been having too much fun to bother sitting down and writing about it.  I've also gotten back into Crossfit pretty heavily, and have spent a lot of my time lately either at the box or at home recovering from my workouts.  More on that later (my thoughts on the matter have evolved quite a bit since my first experience).

This year we are sticking around Albuquerque for the holidays.  I'm pretty excited to enjoy this season in our new home with friends and family.  And hopefully lots of snow!  I'm going to blog more often.  And maybe I'll even post some photos and stories from the last few months that somehow blew by too quickly.

Winter is coming!!

Aravaipa Canyon

This Labor Day weekend Josh and I took a trip down to Tucson to see some friends and to do a little backpacking.  I've been hearing about Aravaipa Canyon from my friend Megan for years now, but somehow I managed to never get there while I was living in Arizona.  She organized a trip to the canyon for the holiday weekend, so we decided to pack up and head down south to join her and some friends.  We got in a couple of days of hiking and camping, and also got to visit with a bunch of our old friends in town.  It was pretty great.

Aravaipa is this amazingly gorgeous, riparian desert canyon about 1.5 hours northeast of Tucson.  It's like a different world than Tucson.  There are huge cottonwood trees and cattails, towering stone walls and beautiful side canyons.  We hiked in for a few hours before finding a decent camping spot, then we dropped our packs and continued up canyon and found a really great swimming hole up one of the side canyons.  The night stars were amazing, the water was cool (even though the temps reached 102 while we were there), and the vegetation was lush and green and beautiful.  The entire canyon is about 12 miles from end-to-end, and I think we saw only about half of that.  It's amazing how much slower you hike when you're trudging through the middle of a river and having to find your footing among the river rocks!  This place is definitely on my list of spots I'd like to return and spend more time in the future.

Look, a new project!

Since acquiring the new house in April, I've had a hard time justifying any time spent on non-house projects.  I have a number of furniture projects up my sleeve, both building and refinishing, but until the past few weeks I've not been able to make the time and/or energy to tackling one off my list.

I have been desperately needing a new dresser to replace the crappy particle-board, dorm-room style dresser I bought when I first moved away from home.  Basically, I trolled Craig's List for about a month, checking daily for new dresser listings and trying to find something just right that was also affordable.  I wanted something decently-sized and something I could fix up and make my own.  It took a lot of waiting, but eventually I scored a great deal.

I purchased this dresser for $100.  (The seller and I had originally agreed on $80, but somebody else offered $100 and I was determined to get it.)  It's way bigger than I had originally thought- about 5 feet wide and more than 4 feet tall.  I can't be sure, but I'm guessing it was built sometime in the early 1900's-- the workmanship is very nice and it's heavy, solid wood with nice dovetail joints and wooden drawer slides.  When I bought it, it had been covered in plastic but sitting outside in a yard so that the top panel was pretty badly warped and I knew that I'd have to replace that.  Otherwise, besides the three different kinds of hardware (who does that?) on the thing and a few layers of dirt, it was in good shape.

Josh helped me remove the top panel from the dresser, and the first thing I did was clean it down really well.  I hadn't made a plan on what color to paint it yet, but a quick browse through all of my extra paint cans revealed a pretty blue color that I had sampled for my kitchen cabinets but ended up not using in the end.  I decided to use this blue and save myself the expense of buying more paint.  I knew I was going to rough up the edges after I'd painted it, so I didn't bother to put on a primer or anything- I kind of prefer the rustic look and don't really mind if paints wears off naturally over time.

Because of the random, different pieces of hardware that had been on this dresser originally, all of the spacing for the screws on the drawers were different.  Some of the handles had 3-inch holes, some had 4-inch holes.  Quite inconvenient.  We patched up all of the non-3in holes and I drilled new ones so that everything would be the same size.  Then I ordered some new hardware.  I painted everything blue, added the hardware, and then roughed up the edges of everything a little bit with a hand sander.  Things were looking good!  Now, for the top...

We were unable to find a solid piece of wood that was big enough to cover the top of the dresser for a reasonable price, so I decided to make a large panel out of two boards.  I bought two nice boards of high-grade pine, and Josh helped me join them together.  After cutting them to size, I then drilled holes in both boards, inserted and glued pegs, and set everything up with clamps for 24 hours.  I was happy with the way that everything lined up, but the seam in the middle was slightly offset, so we purchased a hand planer and leveled out the surface of the seam (Hand planers are so easy!  How did I not know about this?).  Then, we finally got a chance to use the new router that Santa Claus bought us for Christmas last year!  It took a few trial runs to get it just right, but wow-- what a handy tool!  I will definitely be using the router more in the future.

Once the top panel was completely done, I gave it a good sanding, stained it with a couple of layers of 'Golden Oak' color, and then sealed it with two layers of polyurethane (you can still see the seam between the two boards because some of the wood glue seeped through and did not soak up the stain... oh well!).  I decided to keep the top a natural wood color rather than painting it, and I'm super happy with how it turned out- the stained wood color is really fantastic.  Josh reattached the top panel for me, and there she is!

One of my favorite quirky aspects of this dresser is that is has this funny little corbel on one side.  The matching corbel on the other side was missing when I purchased the dresser and I definitely was not going to find anything to match it without making up my own, so I decided to leave it as it was and just embrace the lopsidedness.  Sometimes symmetry is overrated.

I'm getting pretty good at this Craig's List thing.  And I'm really getting the hang of this furniture re-doing thing too.  Good thing I still have lots of space to fill in my house.

That one time we made a laundry room...

When we were looking at houses last year, one of the things that Josh and I both agreed we really needed to have in a new house was a laundry room.  The first two houses that we put offers on both had huge, awesome laundry/utility rooms (I'm not dwelling on those anymore, I'm just sayin').  This house, the house we ended up buying and now inhabit, did not have a laundry room.  But structurally, the house was well-suited for some renovation that would allow for the construction of a laundry room.  Plus, Josh would get to tear out a wall and use his demolition skills.  So, hey, what the hell.  Let's build us a laundry room!

This is what the "laundry area" of the house looked like originally:

Basically, there was a small, inset section of wall between the kitchen and the bathroom where the tall, upright water heater and a stacked washer/dryer unit lived (the washer/dryer were no longer in existence when we purchased the house).  And like everything else, it was pink.  And carpeted.

I made a schematic so that this upcoming description won't be too confusing:

First of all, we have a massively huge bathroom in the middle of our house.  This room used to be a bedroom, and at some point somebody decided to make themselves a giant bathroom with two entrances and a walk-in closet.  It's cool to have such a large bathroom, but it's a little odd.  And most importantly, we did not need a large walk-in closet in our bathroom.  We decided to remove the wall of the closet that once created the "laundry nook" (it's the purple wall in my handy little drawing) in the hallway between the bathroom and the kitchen, thus creating an open space that we could use as a laundry room.  We also sealed off the closet door into the bathroom (shown with green dots).

I wrote a post a while back about Josh's demolition skills, and this room really put those skills to the test.  First he tore down the wall to create the open space we needed.  After we had removed the old water heater, Josh noticed that there was a little bit of water damage to some of the floor boards underneath, so he had to cut a chunk of the floor out and replace a number of boards.  This actually proved to be convenient, because we also needed to reroute all of the pipes for the water and gas lines to the back of the new room we'd created in order to hook up the washer, dryer, and new water heater.  So, Josh spent many days under the house, climbing in and out of the giant gaping hole in our floor.  And then he patched the floor!  And then we patched the walls!  And then it was starting to look like a real room!

We decided to install a tankless water heater in place of the old, standard one.  This is great because it's way smaller and we were able to hang it on the wall above the washer, and it's really efficient.  The down side to reorganizing this room and installing a new kind of water heater was that Josh needed to cut new vent holes through the roof of the house, which was a bit of an ordeal.  This ultimately resulted in us having to strip and re-seal the entire roof, but that's a story for another day.  The bottom line is that he did in fact cut holes through the roof of the house, and we now have a nicely-vented water heater as well as a light/fan combo to help ventilate the room.

After we had finished patching up the walls and ceiling, we tiled this room the same pattern as the kitchen and the bathroom on either side of it (these three rooms were all tiled at the same time).  I chose to paint this room a bright golden color because there are no windows nearby and I wanted to be sure that it didn't just feel like a dark closet all of the time.  I like the yellow quite a bit, and it looks really nice when you see the blue kitchen cabinets in the background as well.  I found a good deal on a front loader washer/dryer set on Craig's List, and after a fair bit of spillage we finally managed to get everything connected and in proper functional order.  We turned on the newly-rerouted water and gas pipes, and nothing exploded!

Finally, I bought these cool shelf brackets online and used some of the old boards we salvaged from the office demolition to make some shelves for the wall.  I'm still debating putting more shelves on the opposite side of the room, but haven't decided yet.

We still have a little bit of cleaning up around the edges to do in here, but overall it's in good shape.  I mean, this room didn't even exist before- we made it!  So, finally, your before and after shots:

Den, Before and After!

Ok, back to the house renovations!

Our den didn't need a ton of work when we bought our house, be we definitely knew that we wanted to give it a serious makeover.  This room is where the TV lives and where we spend a considerable amount of time, so we wanted it to be warm and comfortable and well-suited for entertaining.  The very first step, like with all the rooms in the house, was to remove the carpeting.  Then we also removed the hideous ceiling fan, which was promptly donated to the ReStore.  Obviously somebody thought that fan was a good idea at some point, so hey, maybe some new person will wander into the ReStore sometime soon and just be thrilled to find such an item for their future home upgrades.  Power to 'em.

While I am not at all opposed to the use of yellow on interior walls, it just didn't seem to be the right color for this room.  We get a lot of natural light through the windows during the day time, and the yellow just seemed a bit too much.  Plus, we are using pretty bold colors in much of the house already, so we decided that neutral tone would be nice in the den.  We chose a light shade of brown that is sort of coffee colored, and I love it.  Then we hung a new ceiling fan and some new blinds, and it was starting to look like a new room!

Unlike most of the house, which is subfloor, this room was a later addition and has a concrete slab floor.  We left the concrete floor exposed for quite some time while we worked on other parts of the house, but once the summer came around and we started thinking about planning a house-warming party, we decided it was time to do something about the floors.  Originally, we had thrown around the idea of redoing this floor with brick pavers.  I still think that this would have looked very cool, but in the end we decided to keep up with the Saltillo tile.  We played around with different patterns for a few days, and finally settled on using octagonal tiles.  One paycheck out the window and two trips to the tile store, and we had our tile!  Then came the fun part.

After we got the tiles home, we played around a bit with how to lay the tiles within the space we had in the room.  It's a big room, so we definitely were glad to be using a relatively simple pattern compared to what we did in the kitchen.  Josh had the idea to put a thin border around the room, which would allow us to have accents in the triangular shapes that were created by halving some of the square spacer tiles.  We both agreed that we liked this style of accents better than having random colored tiles throughout the room, so we ran with it.  And I swear we had some serious luck with this room, because after laying out a couple of rows of tiles on the dry floor to figure out our spacing, we realized that we would not have to cut one single octagonal tile in order to fit everything evenly between the borders!  We couldn't have planned that better even if we had tried.

Josh and I figured out our own system of tiling pretty quickly while we were working on the floors in the kitchen/laundry/bathroom (I still need to do a detailed post on the tiling process), and with this room we really dialed this in.  We're like professionals now!  My job is to lay all the tile, including cutting everything to size.  Then after the entire floor is laid out, Josh is in charge of grouting.  I started laying tile in this room on a Saturday afternoon, and by the following weekend we had the whole room grouted and ready for the baseboard tiles and sealant.  I'm pretty proud of us.  And it looks damn good.

So, before and after (!):

Quite the improvement, eh?  It really is amazing how much new flooring can completely change a room.  We've got some pretty rugs and some colorful furniture and this room is now fully functional as a cozy hangout for us and our pups and our guests.  I love it.

On a side note, from the time we very first looked at this house, I had said that I really wanted to install in fireplace in this room.  We looked into a local company that manufactures kiva fireplaces, and we were almost ready to pull the trigger on purchasing a corner kiva fireplace to go opposite the windows in here.  While I still desperately would love to have a kiva fireplace (the house currently has no fireplace at all), we decided that in the scheme of things that we wanted to put money/effort into right now with the house, adding a fireplace was not at the very top of our priority list.  So, it may happen sometime in the next couple of years, or it may not. In the meantime, we have a 60" television that can easily project a nice big (and smoke-free!) fire if I get too nostalgic, and we'll probably be constructing a firepit of some kind in the backyard this fall.

I'm still here.

I'm not dead.  I've just been busy.  And work has been crazy.  And sitting in front of my computer after I get home from work has been the last thing I've been interested in doing.

But!  The house is looking great.  We've done a lot of work in the last couple of months.  We've had a couple of birthdays, we've had time to do some fun things, we've been back in the swing of working out regularly, and we (finally!) had a really fantastic housewarming party with a ton of friends.  Things have been really great.  We still have a lot to do on the house, but we're finally at a comfortable place where we can enjoy living in our home and put off the rest of our list for a while.  I actually have time to work on other fun projects!  I'll post some new furniture projects as I get them completed.  And I'm going to try to get up some new before-and-after photos of the house.  I'm pretty impressed with us.  Our house is looking awesome.  We're pretty awesome.

Things we've found.

To say that the previous owners of our house made some questionable decor choices would be a major understatement.  However, I'm pretty sure many of those choices were made 30, 40, or more years ago... so I'm inclined to let some of it pass.  For instance, this ceiling fan:

And these cutesy, old-lady bathroom fixtures:

And let's not even talk about the shag carpeting and the pink walls again, ok?

While working on the pipes under the house, Josh pulled out a ton of stuff that had been left behind in the crawlspace-- tires, old bamboo mats, construction materials, and multiple fruit baskets filled with random, old crap.  Here are a few of the more interesting things we've found in and around (and under) the house, left for us by the previous homeowners:

I keep hoping to find a Picasso hiding behind some of the wall plaster, but alas.  I just don't think I'm destined for Antiques Roadshow fame and fortune.

Mission: Kitchen cabinets. Objective: Blue.

I think for about two weeks straight while working on this project, I would show up to work every morning with blue paint on my hands.  And in my belly button.  And in my hair.

Seriously.  Painting kitchen cabinets is no joke.  Though it is not technically difficult, the necessary time investment is ridiculous.  I am SO glad I decided to get this done before we moved in to the new house (I finished the painting part well before we moved in, but was not able to actually re-hang everything in the kitchen until this past weekend).

Technically, there was nothing wrong with our kitchen cabinets.  They're in good shape, and they're not very old at all... they were just... meh.

So, I decided to paint the cabinets.  After looking through millions of photos online of various kitchen color schemes, and once we had decided on definitely using Mexican tiles in the kitchen, the decision was made to paint our cabinets blue.  I tried a couple of different shades of blue, and ended up choosing the one that most closely matches the blue that shows up in most Talavera-style tiles and decor.  That way, no matter what tile colors we end up using for the floor accents of the wall backsplash, it'll all be somewhat coordinated.

Keep in mind that we are doing most of the work on our new house in the evenings after we get off of work, so things are taking longer to get done than they would otherwise.  This whole process took a little more than a week and a half from start to finish, during which time I worked on nothing but this task.  The first night, I took off all of the cabinet doors and drawer fronts, removed all the horrible hardware, and gave all of the cabinets a light sanding.  This seemed to take forever.

It took me a good portion of one night to prime the cabinets in the kitchen, and another night (with assistance from my coworker Lisa) to prime all of the doors.  We have 30+ doors and drawer fronts in our kitchen.  That is fantastic for storage, not so fantastic for painting.  I used KILLZ primer, and it seemed to work pretty well, although I wish it had been a little bit thicker because then maybe my single coat of primer would have looked a bit nicer (yes, maybe I should have just done two coats of primer.. but seriously, this was taking way too long; I'm impatient).  [Josh told me that I "did a crap job" priming everything.  I'm keeping that one in my back pocket for later, folks.]

I went to work on painting the cabinets before I bothered with the doors.  This turned out to be a good plan, because the cabinets themselves required three coats of paint whereas the doors only needed two (the cabinets themselves are a glorified laminate material, but the doors are actually real wood- this made a big difference).  I left the inside of the cabinets alone because I figured it might look a little too dark if everything was the same blue color.  I think it was the right choice.

I used Valspar Signature Paint+Primer, and have no complaints.  I had a little bit of an issue with roller marks staying on the side of the cabinets, but I think that was more a result of using a less-than-awesome roller than the paint itself.  And I love the color!  It's call Deep Sea Diving.

It took me a few days to paint the cabinets and the doors, but with each new coat of paint they just looked better and better.  Once everything was totally dry and done, I gave two good coats of polyurethane to the doors and the ends of the cabinets to keep them protected.  Considering the messes that result when my betrothed cooks, these cabinets are going to be subject to quite a bit of scrubbing in the future, and I'll be damned if I want to go through this whole painting process again any time soon!  The polyurethane took a few days to completely seal, and I did two coats just to be sure.

I finally got to hang everything back in the kitchen this past weekend, and I couldn't be more pleased with how it all turned out.  The color of the cabinets looks fantastic with our newly tiled floors (more on this in a different post).  After moving everything inside from the workshop I noticed a few dinged or rough spots that I'll have to patch up with a little bit more paint, but you can't even see the imperfections unless you are right up next to them so I'm not going to stress about it for now.  I purchased some new cabinet hardware to match our faucet and light switch covers, and that just about sums it up!  Not bad, eh?

Before...

During...

After!

Summary:  Painting cabinets is kind of a bitch.  It's not hard to do, it just takes forever.  But for me, it was completely, totally worth it.  Almost makes me want to go paint the cabinets in our bathroom too...