We had been catalog browsing for furniture in the last few months and are in desperate need of furniture for our bedroom having not ever had any "real" furniture. We had found some things we really liked in the Pottery Barn catalog, but we were concerned it might be too big for our new master bedroom.
We have gone from one extreme to the other in terms of bedroom size. In the old house, the bedroom was 16x20 - huge, with a great deal of un-utilized space. In the new place, the bedroom is a mere 13x16 and the big challenge is how to arrange furniture due to the way it is laid out. I don't think builders give any thought to how people might arrange furniture when they build homes. This room has a window one corner of the long wall, a bathroom door in the middle of one wall, a window in the middle of the opposite wall and a whole length of built-in closets on the other wall. There is really only one place to put the bed in this room and there is only room for 2 night stands and a very small vertical dresser. Additionally, we have a bit of concern about clothing storage as we have been spoiled by a huge walk-in closet in our former house that was nearly the size of a small bedroom.
We went to Crate and Barrel to look at a breakfast nook table that Dottie had spotted in their catalog. We could have ordered it and had it delivered, but we wanted to see it first. It is a round pedestal-style table in white with 4 matching chairs. It will look really good in the new kitchen with the cabinets and counters being all white.
This store was huge. There were two floors with housewares and some furniture on the lower level and and upper level that was all furniture. We were talking with a sales person and they informed us that the upper-level was actually a separate business under the same name and that they carry higher quality furniture than some of the stuff downstairs. If you have ever been to C&B or seen their catalog, they have some decent quality, well designed and relatively inexpensive stuff. The furniture on the upper level was significantly more expensive, but you could tell it was nice stuff.
We found a couple of beds we liked, but nothing that really grabbed us, until we saw one that we had passed by and managed to not see. It was a bit more than we wanted to spend, but we have always wanted some nice bedroom furniture and we promised ourselves we would stop buying cheap furniture that wears out in 2 years
This particular line is handmade in Vermont by a small furniture company that has been around for a long time. It is all wood...ALL wood - no MDF, no veneers - just solid cherry. It should last for the rest of my life. If it doesn't I'll have to return it.
We ended up getting the bed and dresser in the picture, plus a couple of nightstands. It isn't all in stock and when it comes in it will be shipped from a remote warehouse. We decided to wait and have it all delivered at once when it comes in, which won't be until the end of September. This is a good thing because we need more time to work on the floor of the master bedroom - we pulled out the carpet yesterday hoping to find a nicely preserved hardwood floor. Instead we found a floor that appears to be unfinished but with paint smears and drops all over it as if the original paint job was done without a drop cloth and then carpeting installed over it. We need to figure out how to get the paint off without sanding (if even possible) and then get some polyurethane on it before the furniture gets here.
My plan for yesterday (Saturday) was to get an early start so I could knock out two rooms. I was a little late getting out of bed, but I needed the sleep desperately. Most every night last week I got 5 or 6 hours at most. I got dressed and headed down to the breakfast room at the hotel around 7:30 and then headed up to get ready to leave. Dottie wanted to do a workout before she headed over to the house, so I took Madison with me to the house. We left at around 8:30 and I decided to take the time to get a quick haircut. I usually cut my own hair with the clippers (I have so much), but they are packed on the truck with the rest of our stuff. There is a Great Clips just down the way from the house, so I stopped there on the way.We arrived about 8:45 to find that they don't open until 9. I decided to wait around until they opened, so Madison and I walked around the strip mall until they opened. Once in the chair it took about 10 minutes and I was as handsome as a mid-40's bald guy can be.
We headed to the house and as we pulled into the neighborhood, it hit me...I am locked out of the house. We had a locksmith out on Friday. They were there for over 4 hours and the final bill was $300. We have eight locks in the house at $15 each, plus the service call charge, plus one new deadbolt. Dottie was at the house while they were there and I was at work, so she took care of it and she had the keys. I neglected to get a key from Dottie before I headed over to the house. I called her and without even saying "hello", she said to me, "I bet I know why you are calling me".She was just finishing her workout and needed to take a shower before she headed over to the house, so I decided to make a run to Sherwin Williams to get more paint. This turned out to be an epic trip. I searched the GPS for "Sherwin Williams" and it came up with a location 2.2 miles away on "Broadway Street". I set the GPS to take me there because even though it is close by, I wasn't sure how to get there from here.
It took me almost 30 minutes and I drove the most convoluted path of nearly 10 miles to get there because the GPS changed my route no less than 4 times while I was en-route to the store. To say I was frustrated was a massive understatement. I mumbled some choice words under my breath, to which Madison responded, "what's wrong daddy? are we lost?" She knows this because when the GPS changes your route, the voice announces "checking route" and makes this loud 3-beep sound. Somewhere in the recent past, I said I was lost and now she correlates the two.Have I mentioned that we live near an amusement park?
http://www.dorneypark.com/
Now, here is the significance of this: our GPS has some "setting" that are user-configurable and one of them is "default route method". Your choices here are:
- Fastest Route
- Shortest route
- Highway Preferred
- Streets Preferred
- Pedestrian
- Traffic Optimized
I am trying to drive to a location 2 miles away and there is a massive amusement park between me and my destination. The GPS has a route plugged in for me, but every five minutes, it "checks the route for traffic" and if it finds any, it changes the route to an alternate one. It's 9 am on a Saturday morning and all roads lead to Dorney Park, so basically the GPS is bouncing me through every conceivable pathway to the paint store only to discover every 5 minutes that the current route has "traffic". At this point, I don't trust that the GPS "knows" what "traffic" is. Does it consider "traffic" to be 1000 cars? 100 cars? 10 cars? Anything greater than 1 car?
I finally get to the paint store and when I get there I am so irritated and now even more so because I have driven past this store dozens of times over the past few months of being out here, but I never noticed it.
After I buy my 12 cans of paint and load it up, I turn right two times to get out of the parking lot, drive 1.5 miles down Cetronia road, take a left on Minesite for another .5 miles and then turn into our subdivision. It took about 5 minutes.It was after this that I realized that GPS is sort of like having speed dial on a phone - you never really learn or remember anything.
When Madison and I arrived (at 11 am), Dottie was there already and she sheepishly apologized for not giving me the key. It wasn't her fault. I knew the locks were changed...I didn't ask for a key.I set about to finish the playroom that I had started Thursday night - the night I got started late because I left my painting clothes at the hotel. All I had left to do was to cut-in around the trim and pull the masking tape off. I knocked that out in about 45 minutes and decided to take a lunch break around noon.
We were eating sandwiches in the kitchen and Dottie asked me about the ice maker not working. I checked and the water spout in the fridge door worked just fine, but we had no ice. I pulled the fridge away from the wall and looked in behind it. I squeezed in a bit more and pushed it away from me and suddenly water began coming out of the supply line connection. Dottie quickly grabbed some towels and went about trying to see where it was coming from and getting it stopped.It was coming from the connection itself where it went into the pump. I ran downstairs to the basement in hopes of finding a shut-off. I wasn't able to trace it because the ceiling is finished, so I shut off the main. I took apart the connection and inspected it. I flipped a rubber washer over in one side of the connection and put it back together, making sure it was very snug. I turned that water back on and it seemed to be okay. I went back upstairs and left the fridge pulled out to check on later to see how it was holding up.
An hour or so later, I checked on it and there was moisture on the bottom of the fitting and some evidence of a few drips. At this point I decided to make a trek to the local hardware store and get the stuff to fix it properly. Dottie needed something to do that would help me and it was at this point we decided to pull up the carpet in the master bedroom so that while I was out at the hardware store she could get all the staples and tack strips up. It took longer than I had expected (this statement is a central theme to this entire relocation process), but we got it up in about an hour and I took off around 3:30.I took a short drive down to Emmaus (the next town south of us) and found a little mom and pop store. They didn't have the fitting and the guy said from the description and picture I drew for him that it was a proprietary fitting that I would probably have to order from the manufacturer of an appliance repair company. I then went into amateur engineering mode. I bought some Teflon tape, a new compression washer and a tubing cutter. I should have bought another rubber washer, but I didn't think of that until later.
I got back around 4pm, and I crawled in behind the fridge to disassembled the fitting again. I cut about 6 inches off the copper tube, replaced the compression washer, slapped some Teflon tape on both sides of the connection and tightened the crap out of it. I would have preferred a new connector, but the reality is that when our stuff comes next week, we are putting our fridge in the kitchen and the existing one in the basement, so it's a moot point.It was now 5pm, and our friends Don and Kathy were coming over from Princeton, NJ to meet us for dinner. Kathy is in for the week from Vienna and we haven't seen her since Christmas, so we were looking forward to getting together. We needed to leave by 5:30pm in order to get back to the hotel to clean ourselves up.
So there I was, the end of the day, and the only thing I really accomplished toward my painting goal was 45 minutes of trim work. That's it. I did manage to get that second room painted - Madison's playroom. The reward was not only a feeling of accomplishment, as small as it was on this very trying day, but also the reward of how good it looked. What a transformation it was from the former decor. The old paint was a really dull off-white - almost a pale grey color, and it had some absolutely obnoxious floral wallpaper on one wall. On the floor was some dark blue-green shag carpet. The package, as a whole, was a feast for the eyes. It is now done in a bright yellow called "Friendly Yellow". It's bright, yet subtle and not too bold. I'll post some pictures of the rooms later.We got back to the hotel and got our showers and I had a much deserved beer (well, okay, 2 beers). Don and Kathy arrived around 7 and we set out for my favorite restaurant in Allentown, a place called "The Federal Grill". It's a really cozy and warm place with a huge antique bar. They have great steaks, seafood and make great martini's. We drive down there to find it is closed. The sign in the window says, "closed indefinitely due to fire".
We ended up going to a place called "Pistachio's" not too far from the house. They have good food and a huge menu. It reminds me of LuLu's in Indy. We had a good meal and a good time catching up. We got back to the hotel around 10:30 and we promptly put Madison to bed. I stayed with her for a few minutes after "lights out" - as I usually do - and I fell asleep next to her. I awoke about 30 minutes later and went off to bed.
