Mini Paintypants.

The pink bathroom. It's just... erm... pink.


We've grown to accept the pink tile. It's fine, really. I mean, yeah, OK, it's pink, and that's not our first choice for bathroom colors, but it's fine. The carpet was bad, and that's gone.

What really sucked the most was the ratty, dirty, pinkish paint... complete with bad settlement cracks.



You can see the pinkish hue, and, yeah, those lines are cracks in the plaster. I filled the cracks with spackle, and that made things a little better, but the walls looked crappy and dirty.

So, this weekend, I tried to make it better.

I finally ditched the pink curtains, which made the room look a little bleak, I think, but the clean white paint brightened the place up quite a bit. And we don't have to look at cracks in the walls anymore.

However (there's always a "however," isn't there?), I managed to snap a hunk out of the plexiglass cover that sits in front of the light above the mirror when I was cleaning it. I was so irritated with myself that I didn't take a picture. Having said this, I hate that damn fixture and mirrored medicine cabinet. The whole thing is ancient and ugly, and I want it gone. Avy thinks I broke it on purpose, but I didn't... I didn't mean to break it before we could replace it, though. Now we have to look at a broken hunk of plastic every morning until we can replace it. Ugh.

Painty Pants Rides Again

You may remember our bedroom in The Serpico House.

Yeah. Rose-colored carpet. Chair rail.

And you might remember that we ripped up the carpet. That left us with some pretty nice floors, and it reminded us that we had a HUGE bedroom.


We also removed the chair rail. I still don't know why it was up there in the first place. Isn't chair rail something you mainly want in the dining room?

This is how the bedroom looked when we finally moved our things in...




We both thought it was a nice improvement--hardwoods, no chair rail. Pleasant.

But wow, that's some dismal while paint.

And when I say dismal, I mean it was scratched to hell and full of nail holes. Look at that picture over the bed in the first picture... I think they moved it about seven times to get it to the right height, so this is what it looked like underneath.




All of the lighter areas are places where we had to fill holes with spackle. This was pretty much the case for the entire room.

Xavier was visiting his grandma, so obviously it was time for Ol' Painty Pants to return...

The color?

Glidden Aztec Gold. Satin finish.


Our methodology was simple--Avy would "cut in" (use a paint brush to get the areas of the walls closest to the trim and ceiling) , and I would do the major parts of the walls with a roller.

After one coat, it looked patchy and kind of uninspiring.

You can't see the patchiness too well in this cell phone shot, but it looked kind of... eh. However, the second coat made all the difference. Here's what we had after the second coat went on the walls and we got the furniture back in place.

We're really happy with the way the room looks and feels now... it's very warm, very cozy, very comfortable. The new paint makes the room seem new and clean. Now, the next step will be to mount the TV on the wall and moving that little vanity to the other wall for its intended purpose. We'll also be adding a mirror to the wall above it. That way, Avy will have a spot to sit and apply make-up, etc. It's gonna be cool. Someday.

All Hail the Mighty Goo-Gone

You may remember that our upstairs bathroom was in a state of carpetedness (yes, I invented that word--you can feel free to use it if you wish) when we moved into The Serpico House.

When we removed the carpet, we found nice pink tile. It was in fine shape, except for the adhesive the installers used to make it stick to the floor near the door. Interestingly, that was the only area where they used adhesive or anything other than gravity to hold the carpet down to the floor. I don't know if this represents shoddy workmanship or what, but at least we only had to deal with one cruddy-looking area of the floor.

And, believe it or not, that stuff didn't want to come up with the use of a mere scraper.

It looked like this...



Kinda gross, right? I know. Worse, we left it that way all this time... mainly because it didn't want to come off. This past Sunday morning, I walked past the bathroom and said to myself, "Maybe I'll try something else..." (cue "I Control, I Fly" by Monster Magnet--good song!)

Goo-Gone. That's what I tried. Yes. It worked. Took about 15 minutes total to get this....


There's one more annoyance off the list.

Laziness and Snowblower Abuse.

I think this happens with a lot of folks' home improvement blogs--they have a lot to say and show off at first, but it starts to taper off over time. This is for an obvious reason--there are a lot of big things to do before and right after a move, but once the pressing concerns are handled, there just isn't very much to say. And the blogging gets lazy.

In my case, I find this to be true--we're basically settled in and enjoying life in The Serpico House. Things are cool. But there are still a zillion things to do. We still haven't painted our bedroom, our guest room (I've started calling it "the turtle room" or "Mack's Room") still needs a desk and some other things, we need to replace our dining room's light fixture, the kitchen is awful, etc, etc.

But, for right now, let me tell you how I failed at the technology of living in the suburbs.

I'm guessing most of you are aware that the northeast portion of the U.S. has gotten a smidge of snow in January. Yep, it's true... a couple of minor storms, one big 'un and some icy rain. All told, I think maybe we've gotten about 25 inches of snow or something. I'm not complaining, really. I don't mind snow, and taking some days off due to snow provided us some nice unexpected family time.

Now, due to utter procrastination, we've failed to procure a new shovel for dealing with all of this snow. Yeah, we're still using Mrs. Serpico's old shovel. I should really get a picture of it--the thing is pitiful. It's nearly impossible to move snow with this thing. But we've managed to make it work... sort of.

If the condition of a person's driveway could, in some way, be correlated to the lifestyle or functionality of the relationship of the family that lives in the house behind that driveway... erm... well... let's just say our household discussions would look like something out of a John Woo film.

(My film school friends/former video store co-workers are snickering right now)



In short, our driveway is a mess. It's really a good thing that my car is an SUV with All-Wheel Drive. On the morning of the day after we got our last big snow, the view from our front window was this...


Yeah. That was taken around 6am. We got 15 inches of snow that night. This view would normally show our lovely front bushes and porch. After such snowfall, we just had white lumps that merged with the whiteness on our porch. It was kind of crazy.

When the snow finally ceased, I assaulted the snow on the porch and driveway with Mrs. Serpico's shovel, and I was sure I'd be able to clear enough of the mess to get my car out of the driveway. Well, I made a path to the car, and, foolish man that I am, I tried to back out of the situation. Yeah, that didn't work--I wound up getting stuck around mid-way through, where the snow was higher than my vehicle's axles.

Luckily, my wife's aunt (she calls me her nephew, so I should call her my aunt, too, I guess) has frequently offered us the use of her snow-blower. Now, she lives on a small Philly side street, and her house has a fairly diminutive footprint---I have no idea why she owns a snow-blower... other than that she likes gizmos.

My neighbor, Josh, had wisely paid one of the many roving gangs of snow-removal specialists (snow-opportunists? Snoppertunists?) to handle his driveway and sidewalk duties. However, since we were a bit light on cash (those dudes wanted $60 to do the driveway and sidewalk!), I was resolved to do this on my own.

Josh was nice enough to drive me over to my aunt's place, where we dug out her driveway and sidewalk in return for the use of her gas-powered snow-blower.

Now, not being familiar with the use of things like this (my last lawn-mower was an electric one), there was definitely a learning curve involved in making it work. Josh helped a bit, and we managed to get the thing started, and I found the lever that made the "snow-eater" work. I got into pushing the snow-blower into the huge mounds of snow and seeing the resulting spray of chopped-up snow fly off to the side. Pretty awesome. But... well... it was really hard to push the damn thing. I mean really hard to push it. The snow-blower weighs about 100lbs, and the snow itself was very wet and fairly heavy, so I was pushing it up and down my driveway by inches for an hour, dying from the exertion.

People who know how to use a snow-blower are laughing right now.

I almost shat out my spine before I realized that the wheels needed to be engaged with the motor--the engine makes the nubbly wheels turn and help push the machine along through the snow and ice. I didn't know about that. You have to pull on an extra lever to make it happen. In other words, I was shoving 100lbs of machine against that deep, heavy-ass, wet snow with no assistance from the engine. I didn't get hurt or anything, but I surely felt stupid when I realized how much extra work I was making for myself.

Avy offered to help, but I was so annoyed with myself that I just kept working. I know, I know. Typical male, right?

I finally cleared as much snow as I could, dragged the machine into the garage and went inside the house to dry off and warm up. Xavier was taking a nap after a tiring round of snowman building with Avy and a neighbor kid. I changed into soft, warm, dry clothes and took an Advil. I then planted my ass on the couch and went to sleep.

The damn suburbs kicked my ass that day.

Since that day, the snow has been melting fairly steadily, and the driveway has been looking better and better. Nature clears out snow better than I do.

Nothing Post

We've successfully had a few minor gatherings at The Serpico House.

Some family. Some friends. It's worked out well, for the most part. The obvious thing is that we've got a lot more room in the house, so we have space for kids to run around without trampling adults or getting in the way of conversations. Our mostly-empty basement provided a perfect venue for a few rounds of "Duck-Duck-Goose," and nobody got hurt. OK, well... someone got kicked in the mouth, but that's a common D-D-G injury from what I can remember.

I still mostly hate our kitchen for anything more involved than microwaving. The stove is ridiculous. We did manage to bake some frozen pizzas in there, and we've reheated lasagna, but cooking at night is terrible. There are exactly four lights in the kitchen--one hanging monstrosity that creates a shadow on the stove when you stand in front of it, and three in the counter area. Two of those counter-area lights are florescent. I hate florescent lights. I mentioned a temporary fix for this problem in my last post--a clip-on light attached to the exhaust grille above the stove. I plan to take on this project over the weekend.

I also just hate the overall look of the kitchen. The color of the counters is awful--orange/coral.


The cabinets aren't the worst I've ever seen, but the shelves inside are bent, bowed and generally unsatisfactory. We need to simply rip the whole place apart, but that's not economically feasible for us. We're thinking an Ikea kitchen may be possible in the summer... we'll have some money by then.

We'd love to have a white kitchen with stainless-steel appliances. Recessed lighting. Faux tin ceiling. Maybe a gray counter. Perhaps a gray tile floor. Simple, clean, effective. It doesn't need to be fancy--it just needs to be pleasant and functional.

The kitchen is really the only bummer in the house right now. The rest of the place is full of little vignettes that make me happy. Like this one...