Sean VS the cake

Sunday, Sunday! SUNDAY!

One day only, the battle between SEAN the HOMEMAKER and Duncan Hines DEADLY choco cake! Who will devour whom?! The Homemaker hasn't been in the ring for a year, and Cake is rising to the challenge!


DING


Oh, it looks like it's all over for Cake! For a while, Cake was really cooking out there, but his crumby performance has him whipped and looking beaten.


... Urge to bake .... fading .... Sorry, it's been 15 months since Sean has baked, and he was in serious withdrawal. We've finally unpacked our kitchen!!!

Toilet runneth over

What ghetto penthouse would be complete without a busted toilet?

Some flimsy yet integral bracket jigger (the technical term - Sean looked it up) cracked just before our moving day. Strapped for time, Sean drew inspiration from his father. ( Dad can jury-rig anything. Stories abound of a Mustang with cemented paper plates and a campsite grill. And Sean has witnessed first hand Dad's ability to erect trellises with keychains and fix the minivan with binder clips and twine. )


To flush, simply pull up on the twisted electrical wire, wait for the tank to empty, then smoosh the attached little bar back into the plunger.

Unpacking from the land of giants

There's nothing like seeing Texas-sized stuff in a Manhattan apartment. Our electric can opener could tear open a trash can. And what's with our 15 inch dinner plates from Pottery Barn? We have to store them in the hall closet!

All our possessions have been hidden in boxes for over a year; it's amazing how huge everything looks to us now that we're back in a small home.

(Speaking of our Pottery Barn gifts... why didn't any of our friends tell us we registered for three sets of bowls? Salad, dessert, soup... what were we thinking? Temporary insanity: pre-wedding stress. Or too much fun with the scan gun. What's your excuse?)

Moving day

We moved in yesterday! We've been here for a month (air mattress, one pan, plastic spoons, 3 towels...) but yesterday we finally moved all our stuff. We rented a truck, loaded it on Monday, and drove into the city for unloading Tuesday.

Sean enjoyed taking the full-sized truck through the Lincoln Tunnel (inches to the wall!) and through the streets of AM-rush-hour Midtown Manhattan. We got the perfect spot just around the corner from our building, and met with our friends Pradip and Steve.

Moving, however, was greulling.



We're required to enter through the basement (the building's rules, sigh) which required carrying everything down a flight of stairs on the street, and then zig-zagging through the basement to the elevator. We are also required to finish before 4:30pm. Working non-stop in the July heat, we hand-carried and handtrucked boxes and furniture across the (usually gridlocked) street, down the block, down the stairs, through the basement, into the elevator, then down the hall and into our place. We all sweat through our clothes, and finished JUST in the knick of time. (At about 4:45, actually.) Pradip and Steve, you guys are saints!


We have SO MUCH STUFF, having just moved from a 1600 square foot Texas apartment to a 600 square foot Manhattan apartment. Our place looks like a storage locker.

Lipstick on a pig

After 4 gruelling days of priming and painting, we're finally done. (Well, except the kitchen and bath, that's later.) We had to repaint everything. Previously, all the walls, trim, doors, and the ceiling were a lifeless tan/beige/blah color. Not only did everything all run together, the color darkened the whole place. Worse yet, it was all all glossy.


But now, our home is crisp and lively.

We opted for Benjamin Moore paint over Behr after several rave reviews... We've heard it's got thicker, longer lasting color, and is consistantly consistent.

We used:

Decorator's White (almost pure white, slightly warm) covers our cieling, doors, all our built in cabinets, and trim.

Deep rose (very, very dark red) accents the dining room. It supposedly stimulates appetites and conversation. :) It took FOUR coats, even with a primer. That's a deep red.

Palm coast pale (a very pale, sunny yellow) in the living room. Brightens up the place without gushing you with color. :)

Neon celery (a fresh green) for the bedroom. (To be complemented with dark woods and white linens). So very zendy.

Man, power!

So, did we mention? We bought a place with ...some... electricity. Incorrect wiring, a broken fuse box, fire hazards, you name it -- it was bad. For the past month we had two working lights, and extension cords on the only outlet that worked properly.

My brother is an electrician ... last week he visited with his big bag o tools. After several Home Depot trips and two days of drilling, chopping, pulling, and other noisy fun (and two bags of rubble out the door), every switch, outlet and light now works! He pulled out all the messy code violations, upgraded the box, the lines, outlets, and switches, and even added an outlet in the bathroom. (Can you believe there weren't any?)

And now we can see in the dark!! ... My gosh, our place is becoming normal!!

Restore-a-floor

Lily spent about 5 hours scrubbing the floor with steel wool and Restor-a-finish. What an difference $7 and some elbow grease can make!

Door pulls

Uh, oh. The paint fumes are getting to Sean . . .

Optimus Primed

No more glossy beige walls, glossy beige cieling, glossy beige trim, glossy, hospital pink bedroom ...

The entire apartment has been primed and is ready for paint! Get ready for.... COLOR! (Gasp)


Deciding on colors can be tough, but Lily brings everything to a new level.

Having fun with peeling paint

I read I should wash the walls before painting them. It's our home - got to do everything the proper way! A bucket of soapy water and a rag, and we're good to go.

But with every swipe of the rag, big chunks of paint started coming off the walls! I couldn't get it to stop... I finally just stopped washing and OH MY GOSH, the paint just peels off. I've never seen paint do this. Walls, doors, trim... the peeling paint knows no boundaries.

Looks like the original paint was glossy and when the previous owners painted over it, they didn't sand or prime... so their paint just didn't stick. And... does this mean they never washed their walls? EVER?

I'm not too sad since it's this icky peachy pink color. I feel like I've been living in cotton candy land after the cotton candy went bad. The bad news is that we're forced to manually peel the walls in order to repaint it.

10 minute kitchen renovation

Today, "renovation" is a big word that means "$20 for new knobs".

Our kitchen is white white white. Cabinets, floor, walls, appliances, knobs... even the sink and faucet! Everything is old, the layout is weird. But we don't have an enormous pile of cash to update our granny-era kitchen.

The cheapo ugly-ugly white plastic kitchen knobs made me ill. So we sprung $1.49 for slick chrome ones. (Sadly, the white ones are still for sale today... for $1.29. Which is worse: being too cheap to pay twenty cents for chrome, or preferring white plastic??) We also replaced the buzzing flourescents with some nice halogens. The previous owners bought them in 1997 and left them in a closet. Hm.

Net result... a kitchen we can live with for a little while. Amainzg what a change little things make. (Next for the kitchen : the granny wallpaper comes down!)

Lily cleans everything with 409 ...

... even the Chrysler Building. (By the way, we love our view.) :)

Ghetto Penthouse

This weekend, while attempting to turn on the under-cabinet-light that is nailed upright on the living room wall and trailing 9 feet of cords, I tripped on the air mattress and kicked over the candle that sits on the part of the floor we call the "dining table". My friend Pradip witnessed the whole thing and was cracking up, "What is this, Ghetto Penthouse?"

Here are some photos from our recent home improvements...


Strapping-tape doorknobs. Now gone.


Who on earth wires a phone through the dishwasher??


Peeling paint and washing the walls


Paint prep for the nasty built-in


I never liked the kitchen door anyway


Relaxing on the inflatable couchbed

closet poo

So today, I’m cleaning the last of the closets. The floors are completely nasty, as if no one’s cleaned them since they were installed 50 years ago. One was especially bad with some sticky thick brown goo that just wouldn't scrape away. I soon realized that the brown goo covered about 80% of the closet floor, and the thought of trying to scrape away all that goo completed grossed me out. I joked to Sean that we should just strip away the tiles instead of cleaning them. We wanted to do that down the road ("phase 5" of my 9-phase plan) but he replied, "Okay!" Before either of us could change our mind, we'd peeled away the first tile. So much for the list and phases!

Halfway through the peeling, Sean said "eewwww... I got closet poo on my hands." Some other brown goo, maybe the glue they used for the tiles, was still sticky after 50 years and had the surprising consistency of poo. With every poo tile we threw away, we felt more and more relieved. Of course, for the rest of night, we made reference to poo like every 5 minutes: "Sean, you got closet poo on the bathroom faucets!" "Sean, you got closet poo on your pants!"

The battle of the paint brands

Typical evening
Lily: What do you want to do tonight?
Sean: (shrug) I don't know. What do you want to do?
Lily: Oooo... let's walk over to Home Depot! *very giddy*
Sean: Okay!!! *equally as giddy*

We discovered HGTV about a year ago and totally latched onto it (something about being homeless, living vicariously through the tube). Now we finally have our own place to apply all the lessons learned, so is it any wonder that a trip to a home improvement store provokes so much giddiness?!?!?

After many trips (and piles and piles of color chips), heated debates, and zillions of choices, we finally chose our colors, by Behr. Soon after, I saw several people on apartment therapy saying that Behr paints are really poor. Say it ain’t so! Not after all that effort! I browsed the Internet for hours and realized that everyone has their own opinion.

So what to do now?? Does the brand of paint really make that much of a difference?? Should we ditch all the effort and start over? Or continue pressing forward with Behr and keep our fingers crossed??

Ka boom... ka boom from the roof

It's July 4th! This glorious long 4-day holiday weekend was extra special because we welcomed our first overnight guests – Shij and Sabby! We bribed them with all the yummy food that NYC has to offer so that maybe they’ll forgive us for not having electricity in most of the unit, or furniture, or the fact that they had to sleep on pool floats as beds.

A few years ago, Sean and I went to join the throngs of people on FDR to watch Macy's Fireworks – the fireworks was pretty, but the concrete road was painful to sit on and we were packed in like sardines. This year, we decided to skip all that for the comfort of our home and made an awesome discovery - we can catch most of the fireworks from our rooftop! We just find reasons to love our new place more and more – despite the lack of electricity and all :)