Here Comes the Sun

 I have been having guilt over never writing on my blog. Why have a blog at all if I never write anything? The trouble was that I've spent the whole summer thinking that nothing was going on, and there was nothing to write about, and everything was blah. But then, a few weeks ago, I realized that actually a lot was going on all summer, and now I had too much to write about! Last week I decided that I should just start with what's going on now and work my way back, making a few posts rather than one, huge "What I did this summer" post.

But I have been soooo busy!

Well, today I finished a project that I started...right after I finished painting the dining room and hanging up my cross-stitch picture, actually. So I'm going to post about that because it makes me so happy every time I see it! :-)

See, I had made up my mind that I had to have live plants in my house...you know, because I am such a green-thumb. But my house gets very little sunlight; we are surrounded by big, beautiful trees that shade the entire yard and attract bugs and leave a giant mess everywhere. No. I like our trees. I would have chosen different trees, but these are mature, and nice-looking, and shade our yard.

Unfortunately, that means we don't get a lot of light in the house either. Which is kind of a problem for a natural-born, but unwitting, plant-killer like me. I decided that what I really needed was a set of shelves with grow-lights built into them, so I got busy designing.

That's the idea. 

And then I got busy building.

I used the think-system to figure out how to build these shelves (instead of looking for instructions on the internet or at the library) and I probably put them together the very hardest way possible. I didn't want to put any screws—any visible screws—in it, so I had to drill a million holes that all had to align with each other. When I put the pieces together they didn't align perfectly so then I had a ton of sanding to do. Who knew that 36-grit sandpaper would ever be my friend?

I started out by building the two end pieces (the narrow pieces). When they were done they looked like two ladders. Then I had to make the front and back cross pieces and the shelves. I cut everything to fit, but couldn't decide on the best way of putting them together. Somehow I had to connect the two end pieces, the cross-bars for the front and back pieces, and put the shelves in place all at the same time. Using wood glue and clamps. And they'd been difficult—although not impossible—to put together when I was dry-fitting them (glue-less).

This is the beginnings of one of the end pieces. I think I have ten clamps on it, holding everything together while the glue dries.

Well, on assemble-the shelves day, I'd apply glue to the...let's say the left end piece, which was lying on the floor...then stick a shelf in, put glue on the long edges of the shelf and on the bottom ends of the front and back cross pieces, and then clamp them all together at the bottom so the shelf wouldn't fall down. Then I hurried to the next shelf to repeat the process—for four shelves. Then I had to wrangle the other end piece onto the top of the whole mess, align the dowel-pins that were sticking out of the cross pieces into the holes on that end piece, pound the whole thing together, and clamp it up tight. Before all the glue got too hard to work with—about 15 minutes. (I don't know what I was thinking! Or why I didn't recruit some helpers...)

Fifteen minutes? That is not what happened.

I was literally running around that shelf, from one side to the other, applying glue, trying to tighten strap-clamps and furniture clamps, and pounding that last end piece down into place for about 40 minutes. Think about this: forty. straight. minutes of frantic, non-stop running, pushing, pulling, and pounding things. And every time I got one part into place, another would pop up, or the alignment would get off, no matter how much I pleaded with that contraption to work, or how much I yelled at it! I had to start over and over and over again, all while my glue was irrevocably setting up.

When I was too worn out to keep running, and had almost given up entirely, I got mad and started whacking it with a rubber mallet (pretty ferociously, actually). That seemed to subdue it. So then I had to run all around again, making sure the clamps were all in the right places and as tight as they needed to be. I was exhausted by the time I finished! 

This looks peaceful enough, but after the Olympic marathon I ran to get it to this point I needed a soak in a cool tub (this was during the heat of July) and maybe a piña colada (non-alcoholic, of course).

I took the clamps off the next day, and it had gone together slightly twisted, as I feared it would. It looked all right from a distance, and I thought it would stand straight enough in the corner I had reserved for it. But I also thought that if you were to look at it too closely, you might go, "Hmmm. Homemade." Ah, well.

After a bunch of wood-filler and lots more sanding (by hand! My electric sander pooped out in the middle of this job), I had to choose a color for the shelf. It goes in the dining room, but I didn't want to make it white or dark brown like the other furniture. Actually, I kept thinking of a sunflower yellow, but I thought I might get tired of it pretty quickly. I brought home a bunch of paint chips, didn't like any of them and finally decided to go with stain.

Surrounded by—and covered in—sawdust from hours and days of sanding. (I think I am actually applying wood-filler in this picture.)

Then I had this great idea to put some excerpts from Alma (Book of Mormon) onto fronts of the  shelves. 

Ha! My shirt and my shelves are about the same color. I am painting on some lettering here; it's not exactly freehand. I printed the lettering backward on my regular, old inkjet printer. Then I taped it to the shelves and soaked the paper with a damp cloth. Rub the lettering on, remove the paper, and most of it had transferred (faintly) to the wood. Then I did the hand-painting over the top of that.

Here is what I painstakingly painted on them:

top shelf (above where the seedlings and tiny plants will be)  

"If ye give place that a seed may be planted in your heart, it will begin to swell...and when you feel those swelling motions then ye must needs say that the seed is good, for behold it sprouteth and begtinneth to grow."

second shelf (above the medium-sized plants)

"And now, behold, if ye noursish it with great care it will get root, and grow up, and bring forth fruit.

third shelf (above the big plants) 

"If ye will nourish the tree as it beginneth to brow, by your faith, diligence, and patience, looking forward to the fruit thereof, it shall take root and behold it shall be a tree springing up unto everlasting life." 

Hopefully that can be true of my plants and my life.

After the stain was done, the lettering was painted on, and the finish was applied (which was also a pain; just sayin') I was... well, mostly pleased with the way it looked. Homemade, you know. ;-) 

Then it just sat in my dining room, naked and lonely, while I searched thrift stores for dishes. I thought that since it's going in the dining area, it would be super cute to put the plants in muffin-tins, cups, and dishes instead of regular pots. I found a lot of cute stuff.

Well, today, about a month after the construction was finished, we finally installed the plant lights (which, I confess, were just sitting in my house waiting for me to pay attention to them). That was pretty cool. Then I added the cute dishes to it. Also cool. Then I put Lindsey's succulent plants in some of the dishes. Utterly fabulous!  I am in love with my plant shelves! (So is Lindsey's little solar flower; she—the flower—has been doing the happy-dance all day.)

There it is, all decked out with dishes, succulent plants, and the lights on. The kitchen lights are on in this pic, too, believe it or not. It really is like having a little sun in my house. Those plant lights are supposed to be full-spectrum, white lights—and they do look more white inside the shelves. But they cast a pinkish glow into the space directly around them.

kitchen lights on; shelf lights off
Eventually I will have big plants (I hope) in the empty dishes and pots on the bottom shelf.

Now all that's left is for me to order some seeds. Imagine fresh basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and maybe even cherry tomatoes growing in my house throughout the year!

Well, that remains to be seen... Wish me luck!

p.s. Look at these pictures:

Bruce says that while the one picture looks nice on top of the shelves (see the last shelf pic), the three are a set and should all hang on the wall together. (They are not on the wall yet; that is the blue carpet in my great room.) I had intended all along to put one on top of the shelves, and hang the other two together on the blue wall to the left of my door.

What do you think? Keep them together as a set? Or break them up?

Maintenance

It has been a trial, for twenty-eight years—well, maybe for twenty-three or twenty-four years, to be fair...
...It has been a trial to keep the house clean pretty much since Michael was old enough to start messing the place up. Now that the kids are older, it doesn't get quite as messy as it used to, although we (even I) still leave things out of place. And the family is pretty good at putting things away when I ask them to. But "uncluttered" and "clean" are not the same thing. I've noticed that a room looks all right if there's not a bunch of stuff out of place, but it looks great if it's been dusted, and it looks AMAZING if the floors are clean (vacuumed, swept, mopped). That real cleaning makes all the difference.

A couple of weeks ago the family talked about at least doing an amazing cleaning job on Saturdays, so the house would be nice for Sundays. I think everyone was agreeable. But when Saturday rolled around they put off the housework until I was nearly driven to madness by the procrastination, and then they only did an "all right" job on it. (Kaylie did inform me that she dusted the shelves in the living room. There is that.)

So at the end of last week I decided to take the time myself, and really clean one room each day. I made it through the great room and the bathroom on Thursday and Friday afternoons.

Aahhh! I love the look and feel of a clean room!

Then on Saturday, the day before yesterday, I just got up and finished the amazing job myself. I admit, I felt pretty crabby about it. But the house did look AMAZING when I was finished four hours later. (And then I threatened everyone within an inch of their life if they should leave one single thing out of place. I told you I was crabby that morning.)

OK. Now my kids are tired of reading this. But here's what I wanted to say:

Maintaining a clean house daily

is much easier (and quicker) than

cleaning a dirty house all in one day.

While I spent four hours Saturday morning to get the house looking marvelous, it only took me one hour to get it up to snuff this morning. And that included washing dishes, spot-mopping the kitchen floor, and folding and putting away some laundry.

Before you close the page, rolling your eyes, kids, here's the next thought:

This is true of life, in general, too:

Doing the right things daily—doing little things to maintain or improve your health, taking small steps toward a big goal, reading scriptures daily to increase your faith, taking any small steps to achieve what you want, is much easier than trying to get those things done with one big, single effort.

And, even though a day, or a week, or a month of maintenance might be difficult, it's still easier than seeing a huge task that must be done now. (Yes, these are the words of a major procrastinator here, but that doesn't make them untrue.) And if you keep it up, you can be AMAZING! 

It reminds me of my favoritest quote that I found about a year ago:

"Righteous day-to-day consecrated effort

is better than occasional heroic actions."  ~Quentin L. Cook

And now there's time to relax. Ahh.

That's today's Wisdom from Mom.

p.s. You won't get off the hook so easily this Saturday, kids. ;-)

Framed!

...almost.

In 1984 my mom got me a subscription to Cross Stitch Magazine. (Or was it Cross Stitch and Needle Arts? Something like that.) And three issues had a set of gorgeous pictures that I knew had to be in my kitchen. Not my mom's kitchen, mine.

Of course I wasn't even close to getting married then.

Well, when we were working on closing our house in 2017 I decided it was time to stitch them up. So I did, working on them for a few months after we moved in. And then I set them aside for three more years. But, with the painting of the dining room, it is now time to put them on the wall. I washed my needlework, stretched it, and let it sit for another week or two until I could get a frame.

Now, when I say "get" a frame, I really mean "make" a frame, because it costs a boatload of money to get pictures framed! So I went to the hardware store and looked a decorative mouldings, and finally chose a nice, routed piece of oak. Then that sat around for a few days while I went to choose some mat-boards.

The nice man at the store helped me choose some really lovely colors—a charcoaly color, and one that's like the color of a cardboard gift box tinted slightly olive. He wanted to impress on me that it is difficult to cut mats the right way, without messing them up, and he did have me biting my nails a little bit. But when I weighed $34 for two full-size, 32x40-inch mats against the $96 he'd charge me to cut them to size for me...

I bought the boards and took them home.

Well, last week I built the frame. It was a little bit of a headache, but it turned out all right. And after that cutting the mats should be a piece of cake, right?

Well, it was. Measuring was the trickiest part. Once; twice; three times; four...  At last I was satisfied that I'd make my cut lines in the right places. I cut one mat last night and one this morning. (That is just the life of a mom; I didn't have the time to cut both of them in one sitting.)

This afternoon I mounted the embroidery on a board and set the whole thing into the frame to see how it looked. Lovely!

There it is, on my newly finished table.
(That is me, standing on the chair.)

But, the frame color...

It doesn't look bad—especially sitting on the table, and in a photo. But in real life, and on the blue wall, it looks a little washed out. So of course I had to put it into photoshop to try out frame colors. Here's what I came up with:

1. This is the original, unfinished wood color.

2. I darkened this one just a little
to simulate putting a clear varnish on it.

3. with a light, reddish stain
(or maybe a reddish-tinted varnish)

4. a slightly darker stain

5. whitewash
(or white stain?)

6. more whitewash (stain)
Can you do that? With two coats, maybe?

The differences from one color to its next-door neighbor are subtle, I know. But which color would you choose?

Who Cares?!

Awake at 2:30 a.m., and still unable to sleep at 4:37, I am cruising through facebook. Which is uninspiring. And then I see that someone's posted this "exciting" tidbit:

"Upcoming movies this year 2021!"

And I think, Really? Is this the best they can do?

Apparently so. Most of them are sequels, or sequels of sequels. (And there's one prequel. When did that become a big thing?  >cough, cough<  George Lucas). Most of them are comic book/action-type movies. So, basically, you can see the same plot-lines you've seen for the last ten or more years, with the same fighting and blowing things up that you've seen. Yay.

"Why bother to shoot this film? Why not release the old one
under a new title? You've seen one, you've seen them all."
~Cosmo Brown, Singing in the Rain

Wouldn't it be nice if Hollywood could come up with a movie that makes you think, or makes you feel? (Feel something besides a little adrenaline rush, that is.) Or even just something original?

But, no. It's like they took sixty-four old scripts, had their computers shuffle the lines of each one, and then reprinted them for reuse as new movies. In fact, judging by the looks of ...most of these movies, their computers will be providing most of the action and scenery, too. And we are supposed to be so excited about all of it.

Maybe the movie industry should continue to be on lock-down until they can come up with something better.

In the meantime, has anyone read any good books lately?

The Saga of the Kitchen Table

In April of 2000, when we moved into our house in WVC, we had no kitchen table. We had a few chairs, and a high chair, and five kids, but no table to seat them around.

Within a few days Bruce found a table listed in the classified ads: dining room table, seats ten, $100. Well! That sounded great! We could have a table that would seat our whole family and a few friends! (Little did we know that within four years that table would only seat our family...)

As we needed them, we accumulated more chairs—none of them matching each other or the table, but they did the job. (In 2017 we got twelve chairs for a fabulous price at an auction. They don't really match the table, but they match each other.)

But the table! It was lovely. Two removable leaves, drawers in either end, and a beautiful cherry finish. This would last us our lifetime! Except...

...Except that the legs were wobbly—really wobbly. They wiggled like loose teeth whenever someone leaned on the table, or whenever we had to move it. Whenever they felt too rickety we'd crawl under the table with  wrench, tighten them up, and say, "We need to find a way to fix this!"

The other problem was the finish. After four or five years I noticed that the table always felt a little sticky. Hm. Was I just not getting it clean? Eight little kids, after all...  Then, one day Jason was scratching the finish right off with his fingernails. Oh! The finish was bad. (Helped along by our swamp cooler, I suspect.) Well, one day I would have to refinish it. In the meantime, I kept it covered with a tablecloth All. The. Time. I suppose we could have spent $1000 on a new table. Or $500 for one the same size in the classified ads. But it had been in our family for five ...ten ...twenty years— It's practically an heirloom! ;-)

top: the tablecloth that is only a few years younger than the table
center: The table is covered with that rubber, non-slip stuff that you put under rugs. I did this so that the tablecloth
wouldn't stick to the table. It really was that bad.
bottom: That is what the finish looked like. Some of it was scraped—or scraping—off.  The cloudiness is the old varnish.
And if you can see the little white freckles, they are where tiny
food particles got through the tablecloth weave, and
through the mat, and stuck permanently. 

On May 20, 2020, I was in the covid-19 doldrums; nothing sounded fun or interesting. As I was taking the tablecloth away to be washed I thought, Why don't I finally do this table? So I went to the hardware store that evening and got some furniture stripper. (Citristrip, by the way. Less stinky than other strippers, and works marvelously!) By morning I was completely uninterested, but in the afternoon I made myself apply the stripper to the tabletop, and the rest is history.

I had put a dropcloth under the table (lifting it made one of the legs fall off...) and applied the stripper—in the house—in the afternoon. That night I covered the table with another dropcloth and went to bed. I was still pretty unmotivated at this point, but the stripper had to be scraped off within 24 hours of application. Bruce helped me. :-)

We moved it into the garage where we scrubbed off
any residue with mineral spirits. It looks terrible!
See my purple cup on the table?

top: Bruce helped me sand the table. (And, yes, I did work on it
—a lot! It's just that I took all the pictures, too.)
The purple cup is still there, by the way.
bottom: half sanded—the first time over

There I am! And do you see my purple cup?

See my purple cup now? See the working refrigerator?
I was sad that my water got so warm while I worked
in the garage all day long. I did figure it out, eventually.

Look what we found under all of that old varnish!
Lovely.

At first I was going to stain and varnish the whole table. Then I decided to paint the skirt and legs white instead. I'm glad I did.

We flipped the table over so we could reattach the legs, and hopefully make them sturdier. While it was upside-down, we found some interesting things:

How did the gum get there? I'm sure it wasn't the old lady we bought the table from, and my kids weren't allowed to have gum in the house...  Ohh! I see!

But this was, perhaps, the most interesting discovery of all:

I took this picture while Bruce was looking at how to make the table legs more sturdy. Then we went to the store to buy the right size screws. We left the garage door open while we were gone.

When we got back from the store, the table looked like this. 

Did some random child come into our garage and scribble on the bottom of the table? That seemed unlikely, but when we looked at the first picture I'd taken, none of us could see any scribbling. This whole situation tickled my funny bone.

But, when I loaded the pics onto the computer...

The scribbling was there all along.
(I Photoshopped it out of the first pic so that you
could enjoy the mystery just as I did.)

Well, anyway, it was time to repair the legs.

This is how crooked the legs looked like most of the time
when the table was standing up.

This is why: Those bolts are the only things holding that leg in place, and they don't fit tightly into their slot. So if someone moves the table or leans on it, the legs rock from side to side. Eventually the nuts work loose, which makes the legs get even more wiggly, and then the nuts and bolts get looser, etc., etc., etc.

That is the slot I was talking about. There's almost 1/8-inch on either side of the bolts that go through the slot and into the leg. Besides that, the green box is outlining an empty space between the leg and its brace. No wonder the legs moved so much!
We filled the empty space (not the slots) with hardboard.

Bruce puts some screws into the legs...

...lots of screws! (ten per leg)
Of course, this means I will have to fill over the screws and repaint. That's OK. This table is sturdy now!

Well, after all of that, we only had to stand the table back on its legs and finish the top. One more light sanding, a coating of stain, and Bruce sprayed several coats of spar varnish on it. The varnishing took a long time because we had a week of high winds, cold weather (into the low 30s), and rain. So dirt was blowing into the garage, and it was too cold for the varnish to cure anyway. But, at last, it got the final coat of varnish just this past Tuesday, June 23, about a month after I started the whole project.

And here are the "befores" and "afters":

before

after!

You know, when I spend a month working on a project like this I almost forget how bad it was before I started. I know it was bad, but seeing the before and after pics reminds me just how bad. Wow!

before-ish
(This is after we started stripping the top—
I almost never remember to take "before" pics.)

after!

and after!

I am soooo pleased with the way it turned out!

But now...

...the chairs. 

Lovin' my lemon-lime wreath!
But... the chairs...

What do you think? Leave them black? Paint them to match the table? Every color of the rainbow?