King of the Cats

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Opie and I have been remodeling the bathroom and the pets have been less than enthusiastic.

By “remodeling” I, of course, mean completely gutting and starting from scratch:

And by “less than enthusiastic” I mean “ridiculous to the point of insanity.”

Take, for instance, Princeton P Kitty’s attempt to help me paint:

Not helpful, not helpful at all.

And to be fair, since I am the one who decided to decorate without him, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that he wasn't pleased with the outcome.

See, I decided would be cute to decorate with bird cages and Hummingbird art. Then, I thought it would be a cute and kitschy contrast to add this ceramic cat toilet brush holder:

However, I forgot to run my plan past Princeton P Kitty. And he wasn’t one bit interested in adding another cat household – real or stone.

He spent the first few days sniffing it out, trying to determine what kind of cat had invaded our home then yesterday he went ahead and kicked things up a notch.

Which I realized when I walked upstairs and glanced into the bathroom and saw a rather rat-like tail disappearing behind the shower curtain. I couldn't figure out what the heck the ridiculous cat was doing this time…

Until, clearly convinced this new intruder was incredibly dangerous, he flung himself out of the shower and onto the cat.

The other cat,  being ceramic, was relatively unimpressed and didn’t fight back at all.

Thus, emboldened by his obvious success, Prince jumped back in his new exciting bathroom curtain tunnel and smacked the ceramic cat from another angle.

And, in case you are wondering, yes, I did yell at him to stop even as I took pictures. But this is not the face of a repentant kitty:

On the bright side, the bathroom has been converted from this:

to this:

And I'm in love with the new bathroom...but I can't help but wonder if the shower curtain or the ceramic cat will be destroyed first.

Making Your Own Frame Doors

This is not a DIY blog.

Not because I don’t do a lot of DIY projects; I’ve actually remodeled a lot of our house in the last three years. But I usually don’t write about these things because I tend to do them in a circular fashion…I start a project, get bored with it, move on to another project, get bored with that, go back to the original project and so on.

Thus making it a little hard to document.

The other thing that makes it hard to document is the fact that a lot of my DIY projects are interrupted by scenes like this one:

However, not to toot my own horn, but I’m too excited about my latest remodeling venture to keep it to myself. 

It all began when I started to paint the upstairs hall. I painted the walls, started to paint the trim, then decided I really, really hated all of our upstairs doors. They're not awful, they're just these boring, typical wooden doors.

I began looking for nice, painted frame doors—and WOW are they more expensive than I thought. The one I really liked was $315!!! And that doesn’t even include the $125 installation fee—which is PER DOOR.

We have 5 doors upstairs…which means I’d have to spend over $2,200 just to get some aesthetically pleasing doors!

Which I thought was a little pricey, and Opie...well, If you know Opie at all, you know he is very frugal. This is not a complaint--his money management is the reason I can work part time and the reason I've been able to jump between about 18 different jobs since moving here. But it's also the reason I was pretty sure spending over $2000 to replace perfectly functional doors would be enough to make his head pop off.

Seriously, it might actually have killed him.

Which didn't stop me from obsessing over the doors, hating the doors, and imagining ways to change the doors. So I finally decided to create my own faux frame doors.

I bought these wainscot frames at Lowes:

And began figuring out how to place them on the doors.

"Aren't you going to measure so you know they’re even?” Opie asked as I held the frames against the surface.

"It hurts that you know so little about me." I said. "Of course I'm not going to measure it. I'm just going to, you know, eyeball it."

"No!" He said, genuinely horrified. "You need to find the mid point of the door and match that with the midpoint of the frame ." And then he started talking about using a level and using terms like "equidistant" and "perpendicular" and I started to get a headache.

When I told him that this would be impossible because our tape measure tells lies, he decided he should hang the frames for me.

And then began the battle of the wills. Opie was more than willing to hang the frames. 

However, he is under the delusion that it would be better to finish one entire project before taking on another.  So he suggested that I finish the trim AND put the finishing touches on the guestroom (that I started redoing about 2 months ago) first.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I can’t think about anything except the doors. They’re driving me crazy.”

Then he seemed to think that if he just waited long enough, I would get tired of waiting and finish one of the other projects first.

Again, it’s like he doesn’t know me at all.

Finally, I had to pull out the big guns.

I waited until a Friday evening and announced “If you don’t put the frames on the door this weekend, I’m just going to do it myself on Monday.”

“You know they won’t be even if you do it,” he countered.

“Yes,” I agreed. “But that also won’t bother me nearly as much as it bothers you.”

He held out until late Sunday then, muttering under his breath, got them on the door and I put primer on both:

Then I painted them to match the trim:

Then I spent most of one afternoon cleaning paint off the cat's paws, the floor, and a portion of one wall (when up on the ladder and thus slightly vulnerable, it is important to make sure the lid is on the paint can and/or the cat is confined...apparently few things are more entertaining than seeing how far you can get the paint to splash).

Then I put new handles on and voila!

     BEFORE                                                                                 And AFTER!

                                              

5 new frame doors--for less than it would cost to replace 1!

Now maybe I can get that last coat of paint on the guestroom closet…..

DIY

It’s Theme Thursday again and this week’s theme is DIY. And I have to admit, since moving to Oklahoma, I’ve actually done a lot of do-it-yourself projects.  You see, Opie lived in this house by himself for a long time before I moved in and it needed a little polish.

It started out simple, little things like getting rid of the trash can.

That's right, the trash can.

You see, this was the trash can in my darling's house:

Some of his buddies from work gave it to him as a joke after he dumped grill ashes in his old one--not realizing they were still hot-and set it in fire.

It's funny!" He insisted.

And it probably was...but it's just as funny in the garage.

My biggest challenge was changing out the paneling in the living room.  I actually wrote an article about it for Yahoo.

The worst part was not filling all the grooves with spackle—thought that did take freaking forever—the worst part was sanding down all the spackling to get it even with the wall. I tried doing it by hand but soon realized that hand sanding would take me approximately 13 years to finish. So we borrowed an electric sander and were told to remember protective gear so I wouldn’t breathe plaster dust and/or get it in my ears, nose, eyes etc.

It may surprise you to hear that I don’t have a lot of protective gear.

So, I improvised. 

 This is as I got started..by the time Opie got home from work, I had on the same outfit but was covered from head to foot in plaster dust.

I looked like I’d been dipped in flour.

Not exactly my hottest moment…But I finished and I love my living room now.

 

   So much so that I decided to go ahead and give the bedroom walls a similar treatment.

My problem was that I decided to do it as a surprise for Opie while he was out of town for a week.

Did I mention that I was also working 2 jobs at the time?

It didn’t exactly leave a lot of time for extensive remodeling.

And every time I tried I turned my back I had all this unsolicited help:

It's interesting to note that he didn't limit himself to climbing up when I was OFF the ladder.  He kept sneaking in while I was ON the ladder and popping up under my feet, in my face, or on my back at random times.  Usually when he wasn't busy seeing if he could get lid off the paint can and the paint in pretty splashes on his paws.

And, yes, of course I considered locking him out of the room while I worked.  But he just took that as a challenge...who would get tired of his crying first?

Bub was the dark horse favorite in that little game.

I shut them both out of the bedroom, Prince sat outside the door and cried at the top of his little lungs for 15 solid minutes.  And then Bubba decide that this was cause for alarm and began running up and down the stairs barking and howling. Then this half-crazy woman began screaming "Shut up!  For the love of heaven SHUT UP OR I WILL MURDER YOU TO DEATH!!!"

The rest of that night is a little bit of a blur but I have a sneaking suspicion that half-crazy woman was ME.

However, this is what I ended up with and I'm happy:

But I think I'm done with projects for awhile!


To read more DIY posts, click the link below: