Deciding to paint the woodwork in your home is a big step.  Once you start, you can't stop with one door frame, or just do the baseboards.  Oh no, once you start painting woodwork you are committing yourself to painting all doors, door frames, window frames and mullions, baseboards and any other type of molding or trim in the room (such as cove molding or crown molding). You may also be committed to painting the woodwork in adjoining rooms.  You may or may not have to do both sides of doors.

Yet, freshly painted woodwork can really improve and update the look of your home's interior.  Typically, new model homes have white woodwork.  So if your home was built, say, circa 1985, it may have all oak or oak-looking woodwork, and thus it is dated.  A fresh coat of white paint (following a nice coat of primer of course) takes at least 20 years of the look of the house.  

After remodeling a few years ago, we made the choice to go with white woodwork in the newly re-done rooms.  It took a while before we addressed the adjoining areas, including a hallway that leads from the front door to our new dining room.   But the walls were looking worse than dingy (decorated by toddlers with Crayolas and a the dog wiping her face in the wall, don't ask) so when I finally made the leap to paint the walls, I knew it was time to address the woodwork as well. 

Here are some tips for painting ceiling, walls and woodwork:

1. Prime everything that needs priming first, from stains on the walls or a dark/bright paint color, to never-before-painted woodwork.  For priming, you don't have to mask anything that will eventually be painted.
2. When painting ceiling, walls and woodwork in the same room, start with the ceiling.  A flat white ("ceiling white") paint is the best choice. Do two coats.
3. Paint the walls.  You might use a low-tack tape to mask the just-painted ceiling for cutting in the edges, but it is better if you can just be careful.  The trick to painting edges without masking is to load your brush with paint (but not so it's dripping all over the place), place it on the wall 1-2" below the place where the wall and ceiling meet, then holding it at a 45, allow the brush to fan out, so the edge of the fanned-out bristles just brush the joint between walls and ceiling.  The other trick: have a wet rag handy for oopsies.  Do two coats of wall paint.
4. Paint the woodwork.  You did do a coat of primer first, right?  You may have to mask the walls around the edges of door and window frames to protect your new paint job.  Now, start from the inside and work your way out.  If you're painting a window, start with the mullions, and the interior of the window frame.  Also, work top down.  This is to help you catch any drips.   Use a brush well-loaded with paint, hold it at a 45 degree angle, and use long, smooth strokes.  "Paint on, paint off Daniel-son."  Well, paint-on, anyway.  You may need to do three coats of paint for woodwork that was never painted before. 
5. When removing masking tape, use a utility knife to score areas that have a lot of paint on them, and pull the tape of at an angle to the surface to prevent pulling off the new paint with it.
   

Needless to say, this is a time-consuming project, and if you buy good-quality paint which I believe is worth it (we like Sherwin Williams) it can cost $100-$200.  Because you need to let the coats of paint dry between re-coats, you're looking at 2-3 days most likely.  But the end result will be worth it!  Here is a picture of my newly painted hallway.  Believe me, it looks 1000% better than it did before I painted it, ceiling, walls, and woodwork.

 

Posted by Caeli at 02:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

When I started work for a new company back in 2000, they had a wonderful system where we'd get paid on the 15th of the month and on the last day of the month.  2 checks a month, 24 per year.  They were predictable, and we never had to handle the situation with 3 checks in a month.  Scheduling bills, loan payments, charitiable contributions, etc., was simple-- some became "check #1 bills" and the rest were "check #2 bills".  If too many due dates fell in one half of a month, a few calls to the banks and you were able to spread out the payments evenly.

Unfortunately, they changed the system the year I started there and now they, like my current job, and many others, pay biweekly.  That means the pay dates are sliding through the months and twice a year you have three paychecks in a month.  There are at least three ways of handling this--

1)  Don't.  That is, when you get paid, line up the bills with the money and make the call on what to pay and what to defer.  I really, really, don't recommend this because it's constantly a moving target.  You may have two weeks with nothing due and two weeks with more than your salary due.  It's dangerous to just "wing it".

2)  Write down your paydays and check amount for each payday of the year.  Then, write down the due dates of the various bills.  This is not much different than #1, but it has the distinct advantage that you are planning for the bi-weekly feasts (no bills) and famines (too many bills). 

3)  Another option is to add up the monthly bills and then figure out how much you'll need to set aside each paycheck.  That is, suppose the monthly bills add up to $1500.  Annually, that's 18 grand, or 692.31 per paycheck if you are paid bi-weekly.  Each payday, transfer that $692.31 to a bill paying account and then pay the bills from that account.  You can even simply transfer this into another bookkeeping account if you use Quicken or other financial software.  There may be some extra money required to set this up, but once you get going, paying your bills can be a predictable, if not enjoyable, experience.

Posted by Caeli at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Small bathrooms don't have to be boring.  Take for instance the bathroom of our suite at the Glacier Canyon Lodge at Wilderness Territory in the Wisconsin Dells.  Each mini-apartment is designed to be a home-away-from-home, and although the bathrooms have ceilings much higher than a typical home, the decor would fit in in any home with a Southwestern theme.

Here is a view of the shower.  It is a basic tub/shower combo as found in the typical "kids bathroom" in many a home, but with an upgraded look.  The slate-tile surround and contrasting shower curtain look rich together:

 

The shower curtain has kind of a "Christmas-y" look to it... I wonder if they switch them out for the seasons.

The ever-popular rain shower head is found in this small bathroom:

 

To be honest I was not entirely impressed with the rain shower head.  It worked all right, but I didn't notice any benefit over a regular shower head.  I prefer the versatility of a hand-held in my own shower at home, and when there's one in a hotel room, I at least can deceive myself that the housekeeping personnel use it to wash the walls of the shower down.  What I really noticed was how hard the water was!  I am spoiled, I've lived with water softeners all my life, and I can really tell when the water is hard.  The soap sticks to my skin, and my hair won't rinse out.  If you look closely at the walls of the shower and the shower head itself in these pictures, you can see the lime scale build-up.  That just does not look clean.  I think that a lodging facility associated with a water park ought to spring for soft water, but then that's me.

Here is a view of the nice granite countertop (or maybe it is quartz like my kitchen countertops) for a dual vanity.  Your typical small bathroom may not have room for a dual vanity (I know ours doesn't) but I strongly believe that it's worth spending money on the vanity countertop in a bathroom.  It's so small that it is not that large of an expense, but it really packs a huge impact.

(I could do without the silk flower arrangement though.)

One of the features of a Southwestern decor for a bathroom or kitchen is painted cabinets. You can see a little of that here, and the pewter drawer-pulls. 

So have fun with your small bathroom.  What is your favorite look?  I might not choose Southwestern, but I wouldn't mind something that looked up-scale.  For such a small bathroom, you can afford to splurge!

 

Posted by Caeli at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In our basement we have an extra refrigerator.  It was the refrigerator that was in this house when we bought it, and it works fine, but when we remodeled the kitchen we went with a stainless-look refrigerator (giving up, I might add, several cubic feet of refrigerator and freezer space in our kitchen to fit it into our design, since we did not want to spring for a sub-zero).

The extra refrigerator comes in handy for storing the organic chickens and turkeys we buy from a fellow homeschooling family.  But when we bring home the birds it is sometimes necessary to let them remain in the refrigerator part for a few days before moving them into the freezer.  That is where the problem starts... they are in plastic bags, but the bags are not leak-proof.  As a result, there was quite a mess on the shelves of the fridge, and in the freezer as well since my husband transferred them directly over without paying attention to the leaky mess. 

I ignored the problem for quite a while, being too busy with many other remodeling, painting and organizing projects.  But I am now all about anti-procrastination.  I asked my husband to unplug the fridge so it could thaw out, and intended to have him clean it shortly thereafter.

We both forgot about it.  I would only remember it late at night when we couldn't do anything about it. 

But finally late one night this week I remembered before we went to bed, and made an appointment to get up at 6:30 AM the next morning so we could tackle cleaning the fridge together.  It had been unplugged for several days, with the doors shut... a big no-no.  I wanted to take care of it before any more mildew grew.

Here's what I know about cleaning refrigerators.  You shouldn't use strong chemicals.  The ideal is probably hot water and vinegar (maybe 1 gallon to 1 cup ratio).  I threw in a little bit of dish soap too, since some of the mess was kind of stuck-on.  Our hot tap water is very hot indeed, so I felt confident we took care of any chicken messes quite thoroughly.  My husband brought all the shelves, drawers, baskets and bins upstairs and I scrubbed them while he wiped down the interior of the refrigerator and freezer.  

Finally, our early morning collaboration (only took 1-1/2 hours) resulted in this:

 

That blue box is a generic box of baking soda, just in case of any lingering chicken odors.  

Now that I know I have a clean extra refrigerator/freezer, I look forward to the next chicken butchering season, when I will learn how to make our own chicken stock and keep it stored in the freezer.  I know, just what everyone dreams about, right?  And I'm a vegetarian!  Oh but it feels good knowing your family has whole, organic food to eat.  And an extra refrigerator to store it in!

Posted by Caeli at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This article has been moved to the Finance blog Funderbudget

Posted by Caeli at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Creep is a structural engineering term that basically describes a slow slide or change.  Under stress, over time, solid materials tend to slowly deform.  The simplest example is an icicle under the influence of gravity.  It's not a sudden fracture, but rather a slow and steady creep.

There is another term called requirements creep that descibes the tendency of project requirements to also undergo this same slow erosion.  Suppose you are on an engineering team that wants to build a digital clock.  Seems pretty simple, right?  It needs to be large enough to read but small enough to fit on a desk.  But, your team meets and at the first meeting, the idea of adding an alarm sounds good, so that gets added.  At meeting #2, the alarm isn't enough, but it needs to have the option of the buzzer or radio.  Then, CDs and MP3s get added to the alarm options.  Subsequent meetings add battery backups, a hand crank option for emergency use, color options (not everyone like red numbers), automatic detection of daylight savings time, a date, then a calendar, etc., etc., etc..

You get the idea.  Every time you get together, another "good" idea enhances the project, making it more complicated, more costly, and it will take more time to complete.  The solution in engineering firms is a well defined requirements document.  Once proposed, debated, revised, discussed, and finally signed, it becomes harder and harder to change it.  That's because a requirements change, we have learned, is so costly and so risky that it simply isn't done as projects move forward.  There are exceptions, but generally, the idea is to build to the requirements, and nothing more.

The same idea, perhaps without the formal document, is needed when you are planning a home remodeling project, especially if you are doing it yourself.  At some point, you are going to reach a point when you think you know what you want to accomplish.  The best advice I can give is to review what you want to do, and then do it again.  Turn it over from every angle-- will removing that wall impact anything upstairs?  If we use laminate flooring, what about the stairs?  How important is it to really have that corian countertop with the integrated sink?  Where is the stopping line?

Once you decide the requirements are in place and you start moving forward, be very, very cautious about taking anything else on.  Yes, it may be that it'll be best to extend the flooring in that direction too.  Yes, it's a good idea to also replace the appliances.  Yes, it turns out that running the piping that direction allows for the addition of A, B or C.  But, if you can, don't change the plan at this point.  You run the risk of running into time delays, lack of funds, or both.  Don't do something you hate just because you decided upon it a few weeks ago, but don't change everything either. 

To the degree you can stick with the plan and avoid requirements creep, you'll find yourself on-time, under-budget, and confident you can plan and finance the next project accurately as well.

Posted by Caeli at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)