Spring Break Mania: Day 2

So, I didn’t end up being as productive last night after work as I had wanted to be. I was SO MOTIVATED! And then shit just ended up taking too long. Grocery shopping always always always takes forever, and this time took extra long because we got a crapload of (GOOD) food and spent too much money. Oh well, now Kevin will stop complaining about never having enough food in the house. I also ended up making some delicious homemade guacamole, which took an hour for some reason. And then, instead of cleaning the bathroom like I should have, I ended up editing the photos that K took at the Old Thrasher’s Reunion show last Saturday. I do it to myself, honestly.

Anyway, we’ve got friends coming over tonight! JoAnn and Dawn are coming over to hang, which I’m totally stoked for. Gotta get prepared!

THINGS TO DO TUESDAY

• Clean bathroom
• Sweep kitchen
• Spot vac house
• Make shortcake biscuit things for dessert
• Do the remainder of the laundry
• Grill out
• Chillax by the firepit

Spring Break Mania: Day 1

prawn-kitty

Spring break, woo hoo!

Let me be honest, dear friends: I’m fucking beat. Who knew any kind of school could be this hard/draining/angst-rendering? I didn’t, that’s for sure. Finally, I get a break! Do I get to relax like kitty up there? (That’s her current favorite activity, by the way, and what you can’t really make out under the heft of her body is the heating vent she’s lying atop.) No, I’m a grown-up, which means I get to get back to doing stuff around my house now that I have some free time, stuff that Kevin has really selflessly and graciously picked up while I’ve been eye-glazed with school crap.

I’m much more productive when I make lists for myself, and I currently have probably 5 different lists going. Why not add another?

THINGS TO DO MONDAY

• Grocery shopping
• Clean bathroom
• Laundry
• Dig staples out of stairs in basement Kevin said to forget it, since we’re demo-ing them anyway.
• Deep-clean kitchen
• Vacuum house
• Workout

That’s not too ambitious, is it? I think it’ll still allow me a little bit of relaxation time while being productive during the hours between 5pm and 11pm. We’ll see!

(Okay, I’ll be honest. I’m going to do a little bit of the prawn-kitty thing. But only a little.)

Stairs!

This project is back-burnered somewhat, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think about things now. I’m talking about STAIRS!

We’ve got a one-level pillbox ranch house, so any dreams I had about lovely Newell posts, grand staircases, and whatever else are pretty much out. However! I do have one set to put my mark on, and that’s the stairs going into the basement.

even Saffron is a little creeped out standing on them

Up until very recently, I mostly tried to ignore them. They were rickety things, covered in the same shit-colored carpeting as the rest of the house, and always a little too shallow for my comfort. It was honestly an area of the house that I tried to ignore as much as possible. Vacuuming them never made them look any better/cleaner. They always gave just a little too much whenever you’d walk down them, too, and whenever I’d be carrying laundry down, I’d try to push the story about how Kevin’s mother fell through one of the steps out of my head. I had to work even harder at not thinking about them when Kevin took a good look at the underbelly of the staircase and found that the treads were basically just flimsy boards held in place with nails on either side, and no supporting brackets or boards or whatever you’re supposed to use to keep your stairs from cracking under the pressure of anything that weighs more than a hot dog.

Sigh.

I was at clinicals (the nursing school kind) a few weeks ago, and Kevin sent me a blurry cameraphone shot of something indiscernible, although I thought it looked like carpeting. It was basically a crappy version of this picture:

Gross. And now, we’ve got this:

The improvement is obvious, although the amount that the stairs give when you’re walking down them is ALSO quite obvious now. And scary. Eventually, these stairs will be replaced with sturdy ones that we’ll never have to worry about falling through. Yay! As for design, Anna over at Door Sixteen has done a couple of posts (1, 2) on staircases from which I’m going to draw heavy inspiration. I’ll have to keep my eye on Ferm Living for the next time they’re having a wallpaper sale. Oooh, or Minimoderns (yum).