Growing season

     We now interrupt your regularly scheduled update on the house to give you this update on the garden. This year, I knew that my garden would have to be smaller and less tended than last year; since I'm trying to get most of my home updates done in the first year, there's just not that much time left over. That's sometimes hard for me, because I miss the joy of working in the dirt, and I'll definitely harvest fewer vegetables than last year. Hopefully I can make up for it next year.

     I can't fit the entire garden in one picture, but this about two-thirds of it. That bare patch is where I planted leeks and fennel, twice. Both times I got nothing but dirt. I also planted basil three times, from two different sets of seeds, but nothing came up. This is the first time in my garden career that I've planted viable seeds and just had entire crops fail to even sprout.

     The pole beans are starting to work their way up the teepees. Pole beans are long green beans, and they produce more than the bush green beans than most people grow, so I think they are worth the effort. And standing on a stepladder in the middle of the yard and pounding in eight foot stakes with a rubber mallet above your head is some effort, let me tell you. I dropped the mallet on my head twice, and had the bruise to show for it.

      Some of the gardens I inherited are out of control with years-old weeds. After consulting with my mother, I'm solarizing (a fancy way to say "using the sun to kill everything alive") the beds. I covered the ground with sheets of plastic, and in a few weeks or months, I'll pull it up and try planting again.

Happily, the watermelons are a success again this year. I train them up a trellis, making little hammocks to support the fruits.

House happiness

Tonight I sat outside for a few minutes as it got dark. While Ada kept her post near my chair, the fireflies were flashing all around, and two bats swooped overhead. I feel pretty lucky to have found a place to live that blends city and nature. I live inside the Beltway, and it's only a ten minute walk to the metro. Still, from my yard, I can see birds, bats, and (and every gardener's nemesis) Evil Squirrels.

Then I went inside and moved back into my bedroom. It took me almost two months to complete, but I'm very pleased with the refinished floor. I have a new roommate moving in in two weeks, and it'll be good to be back up on the second floor in my bedroom when she arrives. Sleeping upstairs means that I don't enjoy quite as much air-conditioning, and it's a hike to the only bathroom in the house, but having a bedroom on a separate floor has given me privacy that make house sharing much more manageable.

Planning

I'm still not sleeping in my bedroom, but I'm close. The oil-based polyurethane takes days to cure, and you're supposed to wait up to two weeks before you let a dog walk on it. There didn't seem to be much point to me staying in the bedroom if I had to rig up a barrier to prevent the Ada from coming in. This decision was made easier by the fairly comfy guest bed; if I had been sleeping on the floor you can bet the dog would have been banished to a separate room.

I started to put my bed back together tonight but noticed that the frame was scratched and the metal finish a bit worn. "No point in assembling this if I'm just to going to disassemble and paint it in a few months," I said to myself. "Better to repaint it right now." So tomorrow morning I'll nip out to Home Depot, buy a few cans of paint, and paint the frame in the backyard before reassembling it. This may be interpreted as:

1. Lunacy, because I shouldn't be starting another project when I have to repaint the bathroom and move back into my bedroom before next weekend when my parents arrive.
2. Brilliance, because I have already unpacked my bedroom THREE TIMES in the short time I've lived here, and I don't want to do it a fourth time.

Possible both labels apply.

Catching up

The big reveal: the floor looks great. I dawdled for a couple of weeks, avoiding starting the finish coats because I was nervous I'd mess it up. Finally I decided I was tired of sleeping in the guest bedroom and dressing in the attic, and I put down three coats.
It looks better than I expected, and I love the color that the oil-based polyurethane imparted. The smell and mess of oil-based is awful, but worth it in this case.
However, once again, I will note that I would never hire me. The floor looks great from afar. But if you look close up, you'll see where I have permanently shellacked cat hair and dust into the floor, and it's not an extremely smooth finish. If I had hired me and paid a thousand dollars to have it done, I would be disappointed. I guess I won't quit the day job yet.
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My new town is almost exactly one-third White, one-third Hispanic, and one-third African-American. I really like the people in my neighborhood. Yesterday night, a cool summer Friday evening, I was walking the dog and noticed that it was almost a requirement that at least one family on every block host family and friends and accompany this with loud Latin music. At one house, they had row seating for a hundred and a band, but (if I can trust my limited Spanish skills) that turned out to be a church service/ cookout, and that's not so typical. In the neighborhoods where I grew up, you were supposed to keep your parties rare and quiet, so it's definitely a different vibe.
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My parents and in-laws are in the middle of a two-week trip through Ireland. I am truly pleased that they have remained friends and take trips together. Also, I have been to Ireland, so I imagine I'll be a bit jealous once the pictures start getting posted.
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Work has been a bit stressful lately. Our department was reorganized, although that didn't affect my job much, and almost everyone in the company moved to a new office. I worked a Saturday meeting in June, and there was a big deadline on a proposal. I'm hoping the next month is calmer, so that I can save energy for the big week-long conference in Sacramento in late July. I love seeing all my work friends at said conference, but the 16-hour days are killer.

Choose your own (floor) adventure

I've come to the point where I need to choose what to do with my bedroom floor. My design sense is failing me, and so I've decided to throw out the question to everyone I know. My bedroom is a large garret bedroom* with now-white walls and low ceilings. The floors will soon be well-sanded plywood subfloor - that's the stuff that's usually there to support your carpet or tile, and it's not usually exposed. The correct flooring choice would probably be to install carpet, because the sound of footfalls carries easily downstairs.** Instead, I plan to keep the plywood exposed and lay down a rug. If necessary for resale, I'll install carpet when I'm moving out.
I'll probably end up choosing an oriental rug, because the only other options for used rugs are super modern, and that just doesn't fit into a 70-year-old-house. So, could you all squint at the pictures below, picture a medium-sized oriental rug, and tell me what color the floor should be?

Choices:

1. Painted squares 
2. Stained dark brown (this will never look like real wood flooring. The most I can hope for is that people don't particularly pay attention to the floor.)
3. Unstained, but covered with a clear coat. Think industrial/Chipotle aesthetic. Something like this, but without the stencils.
4. Painted a dark brown

I'll add a caveat about how I know this is not the "right" way to do things. Plywood is soft so it's going to dent easily. I've heard of people having plywood floors for 3-5 years, but nobody keeps them for 20. So this is a "good enough for now" choice for me.

*According to a dictionary, a garret is "a top-floor or attic room, especially a small dismal one (traditionally inhabited by an artist)." I'm trying to avoid the "dismal" part.

**I had planned on new carpeting, until one morning when I was cleaning up dog vomit from my spectacularly ugly existing blue-and-red carpet. I realized that I could not bear to spend hundreds of dollars on new carpet that my animals would most certainly throw up on.

Dust

After my mother (aka the unpaid laborer) left, I discovered that I had wrongly discounted my father's advice. During my mother's long days of scraping my bedroom floor, he suggested buying a belt sander and using that to remove the rubber and glue on the floor. (My father's most treasured DIY motto, "Never do it by hand when you could use a machine," closely followed by, "That took longer that I thought it would.") The sander works better than a scraper, which means my mother did more work than she needed to.

However, the sanding is still pretty intense. I can manage about 30 minutes a day, after which the sander gets too hot and my arms are too tired to continue. Using a belt sander is much more difficult than an oscillating sander; since the belt is moving in only one direction, you are continually fighting against a machine that wants to fly away. It's like trying to continually hold back a toddler who wants to dash out into the street. 

It also generates enormous amounts of dust. Here I am, covered in black rubber dust and brandishing my sander. The picture quality is poor, but that's because there's so much junk in the air that it's hard to see.

At this point, I've moved into the spare bedroom downstairs, and it looks like I'll be there for the next month until this project is complete.

Working Holiday

Here at Styling with Renee Michelle All Inclusive Vacations, we strive to provide our guests with action-packed holidays. Every day is filled strenuous physical activity, destined to make you feel grateful when you finally get to go home and rest.

This is the current state of my bedroom. My mother has spent the last two days pulling up the carpet in my bedroom. It was glued to the plywood subfloor. After much scraping, we can see one-third of the floor. After my mother leaves, the guest room will be open. Which of readers is ready to take her place?