The Elephant's Child

My Bedroom.

My bedroom used to look like this. But all of a sudden a few months ago, MM and I realized we were really sick of it. "Why did we choose this color again?" 

I thought of repainting. The ceiling in that room is popcorn'ed and we're going to have to deal with that, I think, before we sell the house. So we could repaint and do the ceiling at the same time. But oh, ugh. The dining room needs painting, too, before we list. There's kitchen woodwork that needs more stripping (it's about half done.) There's an overstuffed basement and a neglected attic that need sorting through. So much stuff, very little money to do it with, and an extremely tough real estate market all mean that I can't leave the kitchen wood work half-stripped in favor of painting a bedroom that was painted just six years ago. The dining room hasn't been painted since (I figure) the 1980s. 

So I decided I'd change the look of the room without repainting. Still some work and a little money to redo the room, sure, but much less mess and disruption than repainting. Do you hear that singing? That's me ignoring the popcorn ceiling for now. I went looking for kelly-green color schemes.  I found some. This one became my guide. 

Now, in progress, it looks more like this. Cleaner, starker, less cute. 


But I need to recover a small pillow which lives on the bed as an accent pillow when the bed is made up. It had been covered in red and white polka dot. (So not me. What was I thinking? It's like I don't even know you, me.) I've fritterfrattered away three early morning sewing sessions messing around with fabric I had already or bought cheap recently trying to find the right thing for an accent pillow on the bed. I've gone through this whole stack out of my stash, and nothing made me excited to start sewing. They all felt like, "Well, ok, I guess, if I have to..."
 

Poor naked pillow. Sidetrack! Sewing tip, if you make your own pillow forms... take a Sharpie and jot the exact dimensions right on the form. Then, when you re-purpose or redecorate down the road, you'll know exactly what size to make the new cover. (This is, by the way, why I recommend taking the time to make a pillow form and a separate cover; you only need to stuff something once. Plus, the cover is then removable for washing.) 


Another sidetrack! This size, about 12" x 20" give or take a bit, and stuffed fairly firmly, is just about the right size to sit on your lap and hold a book open at a comfortable position for reading. I have one in my living room, one in my bedroom, and I'm about to make one out of outdoor fabric for the front porch wicker loveseat.

Back to my story. This morning I finally found what I was looking for for the little naked pillow, while cleaning up random stacks of fabric in my sewing area. It's a remnant I bought for 50% off the sale price, and then my 20% employees discount on top of that when I still worked at JoAnn Fabrics. 


It has yellow in it. The bedroom has no yellow. I don't wear yellow and I don't paint things yellow. I am not a yellow person in anyway. However, I feel like this works. I adore the print, the fabric feels right, and it makes me feel a little excited to do a bit of home decor sewing to get the pillow cover made. (I hate home decor sewing, really. Booooooooooring.) 



The pillow will need some piping or edging. Probably black cording, to give it a "border" against the ticking-stripe pillows, but I'm not sure yet. We'll see. 

 

 

 

August

Managing My Own Pool.

So, yesterday, for the first time since we set up our pool on July 4th, it smelled like chlorine. Odd, since the chlorine had tested within the range of normal, and I had added only enough bleach to bring it up to the high mark of the normal range. I swam anyway, but wondered... later, I realized... 

Hm.... Uh-oh. 

Now, if I hadn't gotten myself as well-educated as I could about cheap, simple pool care, I might not have realized there was a problem. Pools are supposed to smell like chlorine, right? That's how you know they're clean! 

Wrong. A well-balanced pool, I learned, near the end of last summer when it was really too late to make good progress on last year's pool, smells like nothing or smells "clean." A chlorine smell means a possible burgeoning combined chlorine problem. 

This morning, I tested the pool with a simple test kit that only tests total chlorine. (It's all I have right now. Next year I'll get a more comprehensive kit) The total chlorine number had gone up overnight. 

Now, that ain't right. Unless my neighbor was sneaking bleach into my pool in the middle of the night, that's quite suspicious.

It appeared that the total chlorine number was around 5ppm. (These tests aren't super precise.) So this morning at about 11 am, I used an online pool calculator and information about proper shock levels to raise the chlorine levels to around 12ppm. (Again, some guesswork needed because I don't have a kit that tests chlorine levels above 5ppm, although you can get a rough idea.) It was about two cups of 8.25% bleach. 

By 5 pm, the chlorine smell was gone.  A test with my little OTO style test kit at 7:30pm showed chlorine in the "very dark yellow" stage (see the "rough idea" link just above), so between 5-15ppm. Much higher than you'd want to swim in.. but with zero chlorine smell. 

Isn't that crazy? Raise the chlorine to get rid of the chlorine smell! It's like magic! 

Now I will test the water first thing in the morning before the sun hits the pool and starts burning off chlorine, and if I've only lost a little (i.e. no change in the color; I can't test precisely) I'm going to assume I've nipped combined chlorine in the bud and simply keep a close watch on things. If the color changes a lot and has dropped down into the range where my test kit registers, I'll know that there's still too much organic matter decomposing and turning my good chlorine into bad chlorine. 

Now, that's all not very precise and it would be much better if I had a fancier test kit, but it's the best I can do for now. I figured it's probably better to get the chlorine a little too high and have to wait more days to swim than to let the pool sit cooking combined chlorine and end up having to close down the pool sooner than I want to because it's just gotten gross! 

 

 

PS: So now you know. When you walk into a public pool area or a hotel pool and there's that strong smell of chlorine, that doesn't mean the pool is clean. It means it's dirty enough that the sweat, urea, and organic matter is "eating up" the chlorine and turning it into other compounds that smell like chlorine but don't sanitize like chlorine... Ew, ew, ew. 

 

 

 

 

I Lost the Dahlias.

But after removing three bushels of weeds, I found them again. 

Ironing A Shirt.

A friend asked about ironing shirts faster.  I don't know that my way is the best way, but it does yield an ironed dress shirt in much less than the 15 minutes my friend said it takes him. So here goes!  Some general ironing tips in a note at the end, for any other readers who hate ironing and want it to be less of a chore. 

First I iron the collar, flat on the board. Unbutton the collar, if it's a button down collar. 

Then the two fronts of the shirt. (For the other side of the front, you'd be rotating the shirt clockwise, then, around the tip of the board.) 

Here's the rotation... Don't worry about getting the shoulder tops perfect; you'll hit them again when you do the back of the shirt farther along... 

Then the back of the shirt...

Rotate the shirt again, similar to how you did the fronts, to lay the back yoke flat on the board, and get the tops of the shoulders and top of sleeves. 

I do the sleeves last. Lay them flat as possible, straightening the bottom hem so the crease will be neatly on the top of the arm. 

I used to mess around with carefully ironing the cuff and cuff pleats, but then I saw professionally dry cleaned mens' shirts up close. They're done in a professional flat press, and the pleat is ironed however it lands in the press. So that's how I do it, too.  Just press it flat. 

General ironing tips for people who despise ironing: 

1. For pete's sake, buy a good iron.  Heavier is better. Higher wattage means it will heat quickly. Look for the best quality you can buy with the fewest bells and whistles to break.  No digital do-dads, etc. Just an iron. I know, you don't want to spend money on a chore you despise. Having a good tool will make the job faster and easier. Trust me.  A $15-30 iron will slow you down, not steam well, and generally make you frustrated.

2. Hang stuff up right out of the dryer even if you can't or won't iron it right away. 

3. Iron in front of the TV or with music or a podcast to listen to. 

 

House Tour: The Bathroom.

We replaced the toilet not long after we moved into the house, and splurged on a very nice Kohler Memoirs toilet. 

Although I've gotten compliments on the 1960's era sink and lighted mirror, I think most homebuyers in this area would simply see them as dated and ugly. (This is not a hipsters sort of area.) They also do not have much storage.

The upside, though, is the massive amount of light the two flourescent tubes throw off. 

The true eyesore of the bathroom, though, is the horrible bathtub surround. It wasn't installed straight, and so when we moved in, there was almost no functioning caulk around the bottom of the tub surround. In fact, the bottom edge was completely loose in a couple of places. I had to mega-caulk it with massive amounts of silicone caulk as a stop-gap measure. (Seriously. Like, two tubes of caulk.) 

The surround was glued straight to the plaster walls, and it was glued with construction adhesive, not the colorless adhesive sold for gluing tub surrounds, so the glue shows through the plastic. It's also badly yellowed. 

The faucet, handles and showerhead are the super-cheapest you can possibly buy, too. I am pretty sure any buyer would take one look at this tub and surround and leave the house immediately. I know I would, and I'm even pretty good at overlooking cosmetic flaws in a house. The caulk is a mess because it's spanning a much bigger gap than its designed to bridge, so it's not smooth and it doesn't drain water properly. It's also fully moldy now and impossible to get clean.  Just gross.   

Orange mold grows inside the hot water faucet and green mold grows inside the cold water faucet. Isn't that nice? No way to clean them except to take the faucet handles off. And who wants to do that every week?

One good thing: the tub is high quality enameled cast iron, and it's in fine shape. Other than being, you know, denim blue. 

Sweet Potato Vine

It bloomed!  I love the ghostly pink of the flowers. 

The Zinnias Have Their Own Ideas

... about who owns the sidewalk outside of the garage. 

I Might Have A Problem.

I get bored buying the same thing the time.  A while ago, though, I found a dishsoap I really liked and liked enough that I was ok only ever getting that one kind. (It's hard to find good lemon-scented dishsoap.) 

But I'm almost out of it, and since I have to order it instead of buying it in a store, and I haven't gotten around to doing that, I've been supplementing by reverting to my old habit of buying something different each time. 

Which is why I have three bottles of dishsoap started right now. Because I'm way too impatient to wait until one is finished before trying the new, different one. 

Daylilies.

Nice to see something other than Stella D'Oro planted in muncipal and commerical mass plantings. 

These were in a hospital parking lot's landscaping. I wonder what kind they were.