house tour: part one and a half

17Dec09

I grew this.

Wow. I’m a bad blogger! Shame on me for not posting in two months.

So this “half” nonsense is because this is just a peek. Its not like you’re in my closet or under the sink or anything.

Ok, so there ARE dirty dishes still out. Whatever.

When my brother, sister-in-law and adorable little niece came to visit for Thanksgiving (all the way from Gross Pointe), I decided the least I could do was tidy up a bit. Truth be told, I hauled ass and cleaned. Moved furniture. Applied cleansing agents. Bathed dogs. Cleeeaned.

Holy hell, sunshine feels good.

So in the calm few minutes before they arrived, when the sun was streaking through the windows making everything look all glowy and pretty, I looked around and for a while and thought, “am I in someone else’s house?”. And then I thought, “Take some pictures, dumbass. For the blog.”.

See them, yes. Smell them, nope.

Because, the reality is, I am a slob. I hate cleaning. I hate doing laundry. I never put things back where they go. But I manage somehow. On the weekends I try to pull it all back together to start each week with a tidy and dog-hair-free home. But by every Tuesday night, it looks like a tornado hit and there’s crap everywhere. Books, mail, shoes, towels, masking tape. Just the way it is.

No really, don't get up.

But anyhow, on that Friday, I felt really happy to just be home and in the moment. I forgot how much work we put into our little house – I mean the big stuff – demolition, moving walls, (a side note: don’t use a heat gun on lead paint -or do- I’m still high) installing new…well…everything.

Miles made all of this with an oak tree he bought, had cut up, and kiln dried. Its really beautiful.

I won’t bore you with all that’s left to do, it’s an awful lot. But in the meantime, I’m happy where things are now. And grateful to not feel like we’re camping inside of our own house.

Plant room, er, I mean guest room. And sometimes ironing room.

Feels nice.

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tamale pie

28Oct09

I guess in life not everything works out like you might think.

I’ve had this idea for a while that I would like tamale pie. I see it in cookbooks all the time, and it has everything I like. Spice. Carbs. Casserole. So tonight I gave it a try. A vegetarian version. In my head it sounded amzaing. I totally winged it because as it turned out, I didn’t have all the ingredients needed, so it made for some even more daring substitutions. Which doesn’t usually shake me up. Makin’ a casserole ain’t my first rodeo. And besides, I’ve read like fifty tamale pie recipes, and they’re pretty predictable.

So, fast forward 2 hours later, and there’s a gooey mess in a pie dish on the stove that I can’t make eye contact with. I’d take a photo, but it means I’d have to go look at it.

There’s a reason people need recipes. Just sayin.

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Tags: fail, recipe

the little red field dog

28Sep09

Its not the camera. This dude just doesn't sit still.

Meet Rocco!

The newest fur-baby member of our family. Lucy’s bratty little brother. Soon-to-be bestie. Toy-stealing attention whore!

We adopted him on Friday from the Iowa Golden Retriever Rescue. They fostered him for about three months, and before that he was in a shelter, and before that a stray. And the rest…who knows. He’s really small for a Goldie and he’s the darkest most brilliant red I’ve seen on one too. Everyone at IGRR calls him the Little Red Field Dog, because he’s likely from a field trial/gun dog blood line. Which is kinda funny, because we’re so not in to that.

He’s guesstimated to be 1-2 years old. I’m gonna say he’s closer to one only because he’s kinda funny looking. Puppyish almost. Big head. Big feet. But otherwise skin and bones. Poor guy has a scabby tail and a rough patchy coat. Even still, he’s obscenely, sickeningly cute. And sweet. I’ve never met a dog who so badly wants to snuggle with you, or be on your lap (astonishingly he thinks he fits), or even just touch your foot if that’s all he can get. He doesn’t get the idea of being in someone’s dance space. But still. He’s a doll. I can’t believe he didn’t find a forever home sooner!

Oh wait…its because he’s a little red-headed maniac. I guess being a puppy and having no discipline would make anyone a little nutso. At least our little terror is potty trained. Cross your fingers that a little Dog Whispering will fix the rest. I have rollerblades, I’m the pack leader dammit.

But if you hear me Chitch, punch me in the face.

Filed under: golden retriever, rocco   |  2 Comments

august in pictures

31Aug09

To summarize:

Golden hops starting to turn darker

I know the angle is cheating, but it really is super tall.

Lazy Lucy on the front porch this morning.

Crochet koozies cuz I’m craftier with a little booze.

Can’t remember what this is called.

Beefsteak tomatoes

I forgot what I planted…but its climbing!

Mystery plant. I don’t know what this is. I didn’t plant it.

Castor bean plants, and the crazy wild grape vine on the neighbor’s fence

Sunflowers by the hammock

Strawberries actually thriving. Even after all the bunny drama.

Chard, Collards, Beans…2nd and 3rd plantings of the season. Wow!

The first Brussels sprouts I’ve seen growing in my life.

The 3rd crop of beans this season

New Cake Old Cake (New: 8/14/09. Old: 9/6/98.)

Filed under: baking, cooking, crochet, garden, garden win, lucy buttercup, prairie grass, raised beds, vegetable, vines   |  Leave a Comment

4,000 words

25Aug09

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cinnamon grinder and a propane torch

25Aug09

Every time I see these photos, they make me laugh. Kind of an eye-roll laugh smirk, really. I guess depending on my mood, its funny. Or cute, or weird, or annoying, or brilliant. I can’t decide.

So anyway, a cinnamon jar with a built-in grinder was one of the little press-kit freebies I brought home from work one day. Weeks later, when I was in the midst of making cinnamon rolls, I discovered I was out of the ground stuff. So I dug this out of the drawer and gave it a try.

I was immediately homicidal because a spoon’s worth of ground cinnamon wasn’t going to appear in this lifetime. Seriously, I would still be cranking that thing now. Long story short, I hurried out to buy the ground stuff at the nearest grocery.

Upon my arrival back home, this is that I found my husband doing in the kitchen:

He explained how we didn’t have duct tape, so he used painter’s tape. He out-MacGyver’ed MacGyver! Take that, Richard.

But Wait There’s More.

This next one’s from about 6 years ago, when I asked him to light the candles on the table because company was coming over. I walked around the house trying to figure out where the hissing sound was coming from. I went in the dining room, and Ta Da:

So, yeah, this is who I’m married to.

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the tomatoes that i didn’t screw up

08Aug09

DSCN1756, originally uploaded by dianestarkey.

Earlier I posted that my roma tomato plants were overtaken with end rot and some kind of blight. And because of my non-staking epic tomato mistakes, I really wasn’t expecting any successes with the other tomatoes I planted.

But looky what we have here! Beautiful heirloom red zebras and organic beefsteaks. Sure I had to pick them from vines that flung themselves in the middle of my walkways, but whatever.

Confidence restored.

Filed under: garden, garden win, raised beds, vines   |  1 Comment

ode to the big dirty van

07Aug09

DSCN0227, originally uploaded by dianestarkey.

I want to tell a little story about the Big Dirty Van.

When we first started working on our little house, we needed a vehicle that could haul trash, supplies, and any other odd thing we needed to haul. Turns out it was a lot of odd things we needed to haul.

So Miles started looking around locally for a cheap vehicle that *for the time being* could move a lot of stuff. And he found it. A big Chevy van with an extended topper, a sweet boomerang antenna, a CB radio, no back seats and nothing but a remnant piece of dirty carpet. Oh, and the hood didn’t latch because one of the engine parts was incorrectly installed and was in the way. A little wire, and it was fine. Eventually Miles fixed it.

The license plate assigned to us was “578 STD”. Of course. Why wouldn’t it say that. Coincidence? I don’t wanna think about it. It was embarrassing enough driving that thing around anyway. When the driver’s side door wouldn’t open, we had to crawl in through a different one. That’s a really fun thing to do outside of West Glen Super Target.

But honestly, it met our needs and moved a lot of stuff that otherwise couldn’t be moved.

Why is this significant? Well here’s what went down…

Before our little house went on the market and before we even knew it existed, it was rented by some shady characters. Shady characters who made crystal meth in a very similar Big Dirty Van parked behind our house. A BDV that looked EXACTLY like ours.

So post-purchase, for several weeks Miles and I arrived at the house driving our BDV to work on it. Evenings, weekends, and other odd hours. As you may expect, our new neighbors showed signs of worry (and PANIC) about who exactly had moved into the hood driving a suspicious looking van. But honestly, when do crappy vans not look suspicious?

After a while, our now dear neighbor, Felice worked up the courage and bravely introduced herself. With in a few short minutes the cat was out of the bag. The full meth lab in a van, and drug dealing history of our little house (and our block) was revealed. SWAT teams. Months of police logs. General panic and fear and random bullets fired on our block. We found one lodged in a roof shingle.

Way to make a first impression in your neighborhood, right? We were stunned. Stunned. Our realtor left those juicy details out. I guess I would too.

But we quickly explained our intentions, and eventually, we all had a good laugh about our BDV. There might have even been hugs, I don’t remember exactly. But word spread.

But what I do remember later, are the warm home-made chocolate chip cookies from other neighbors on the long days that we worked and worked to make our little house a home. In to the night. At ungodly hours. And I cherish the support and kind words from neighbors and passersby – even from folks who live blocks away – who thanked us every time we saw them for our efforts.

I guess to sum it up, I never thought such a POS would be an ice breaker. But it was and I’m grateful for it.

We sold the van once we didnt need it anymore. But if you’re out there, BDV, just wanna say we love you and hope your dirtiness is appreciated, and no one is cooking meth in your rear end.

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house tour: part 1

03Aug09

The main focus of my blog so far has been my garden. But I think I might just open the gates on all the other stuff I like to do. I think its time to share the house project.

We live in a 1910 cottage-y style house in a really old, poor, run-down neighborhood. Our house is plain. It was never fancy, even in 1910. For a long time, Drake University owned it and rented it out. Then other people owned it and rented it. Owned and rented and on and on.

I don’t know why I gravitate toward shitty neighborhoods and falling-down houses. But I do. And I love it. I love it because there’s really no screwing up, when its all royally screwed up anyway. We’re risk takers. And self taught. We’ve done some wild stuff to our little house, like move and rebuild two staircases kind of wild.

Our biggest goal with our house project was to keep the renovation cost down. So we did everything ourselves and thrifted as many of the materials was we possibly could. One example is all of our interior doors were free, we scavenged them from houses being torn down. We did lots of things like that so we could afford pricier things like foam insulation to replace the nothing that was in our walls. We re-roofed. Replaced all the windows with new energy efficient ones. And all new guts too.

I don’t want to say the “g” word. *I’ll go on a raging tangent another time* But our house is really damn green. And cheap. For those two things, I’m proud, because they usually don’t go together.

So I finally got around to collecting all the demolition photos. Its been well over a year since things were that torn up. We’re putting the finishing touches on the place now, and the house has been livable for some time. But holy shit it seems like 10 lifetimes ago that our house was that disassembled.

Here are some of my favorite photos. There’s LOTS more on flickr.

Kept original wood siding and restored it. Trashed the 2 layers on top of it. One, my neighbor affectionately calls Shit Brick.

That butterfly was the only thing the bathroom had going for it. So we kept it on for a while.

This room doesnt look terribly large, but it is now a 600+sqft master suite with a soon to be completed kick ass bathroom.

Here's the kitchen with the walls freshly blown out. We stole from a closet, a side entry and a stairwell to open up the tiny half galley kitchen.

I have no words for this other than that I endured it.

So now I’ve got to take photos of the inside of our little house now that most things are mostly done and we actually live there. Sure it still needs little things here and there. But we’ve come a very long way.

Stay tuned (but here’s a preview).

Filed under: house, recycling, remodel   |  1 Comment

carrots hugging

24Jul09

I picked these last night from the garden. Aren’t they cute!

Filed under: garden, garden win, raised beds, vegetable   |  4 Comments