Yesterday we moved in Fixer-Upper’s newest tenant, my younger brother Cody.

For those of you who knew us back in the day, rest assured there will be no over-the-head wedgie attacks, spit torture, or flying furniture. We’re WAY more grown up than that now. At least we pretend to be.

Like most siblings, my brother and I are very different. I am the overly anal obsessive-compulsive sibling. When I move, my possessions are packed pretty neatly in cardboard boxes. Each box is labeled with the name of the room it should go in and a list of it’s contents. Then it’s taped shut and stacked, ready to go. I am usually completely unpacked within 2 days of moving. It’s a sickness, really.

Cody, on the other hand, has never been great at cleaning or organizing. When we got a call yesterday around 11am asking if we had any boxes, I got the feeling that *maybe* Cody wasn’t quite ready for his move. When we arrived at his apartment at 2pm and saw the state of things, I had a flashback to our “cleaning our room” days back when we were kids. He was panicking, and his friend Kim was stuffing DVDs into garbage bags. The (very few) boxes he had were falling apart at the seams. It was quite the sight.

Luckily, he doesn’t own much stuff so the garbage bags sufficed.

Luckier still, his massive couch and projection tv both fit up the stairs, through the hallway, and into his new living room.

Tada!

and look what he fit through the chimney:

For Christmas this year, Teague and I asked my parents & grandparents to help solve our dirty dish dilemnas, and they definitely delivered. I can’t tell you how excited I am. I hate, hate, hate coming home to a sink full of dirty dishes every night. Even if the whole house is clean and neat, the dirty dishes spoil everything. Plus we waste gallons of hot water the way we’re currently washing them all willy nilly like.

This will be a great addition to our ever-evolving kitchen once Teague gets a chance to run new plumbing ;)

in which we dress the dogs in costumes and humiliate them so thoroughly, they stop peeing in the house for two whole days.

Bruiser is NOT A FAN of costumes, as you can tell…

Nero is just upset because velvet makes him look fat.

I know, you’re all just DYING to see the plethora of quick fixes we’ve been pushing through before Cody moves in upstairs (in less than a week!).

I apologize for taking so long to post these, but we’ve been crazy busy these last few weeks. You know, holidays and all. But now, for your viewing pleasure, I give you a Flash slideshow of our upstairs apartment progress:

View the slideshow

It should be noted that we did some things to our walls/floors/ceilings that I NEVER thought I would do. Things that fixer-uppers will shudder at. In the name of fast and cheap, we commited some house sins which we’ll probably pay for later. But……. it couldn’t get any worse. And it had to get better. And there was A LOT of ground to cover up there. So I don’t feel too guilty about, errm, slapping paint over wallpaper and only partially sanding patched walls. Really, I’m fine with it. I swear.

So it seems that many of us have dreamt about finding and exploring new closets, rooms, or entire sections of our house. I myself have a reoccuring dream in which I find about 3 new rooms I was previously unaware of. In the dream I am always very excited about my find, and amazed that I could have ignored them for so long. In reality our house is plenty big enough, and if I *did* find new rooms in our house I’d just be worrying about higher heat bills!

So what’s it all mean? My closet dream I understood – we need closets. Teague and I are moving downstairs so that my brother can move in upstairs, and our living room has become our master bedroom. Of course, it has no closets. No hidden meaning to that one.

But what about all these “secret/hidden room” themed dreams we’re having? Here’s what an online dream dictionary had to say:

To dream that you find or discover new rooms, suggests that you are developing new strengths and taking on new roles. You may be growing emotionally.

And another interesting item:

Carl Jung talked about recurring dreams he had in which he would discover parts of his house that he didn’t know existed. In that dream the house represented his personality and the new things he discovered in the house related to new developments in his work.

Houses in dreams usually represent parts of ourselves. It is important that you think about what the symbols in this dream represent to you. I will give you one interpretation but I caution you, this does not mean that it is correct because only you know what these symbols really mean.

This seems to be true for most of us – we’re in a state of flux, taking on new responsibilities and learning new skills daily to keep up with our house needs. Makes sense!

I had a great dream last night. In it, I found a closet in our house that we had somehow forgotten about. I was happier than a kid at Christmas!

I think it’s pretty funny that I’m so house obsessed, I fantasize about more closet space instead of, say, Jake Gyllenhaal….

Lest anyone think we’re off our rockers for trying to do a quick fix on the upstairs bathroom before my brother moves in, I wanted to share with you the horror-show we’ve been using for the past year…

Exhibit A:

Twenty-year-old shag carpet that enthusiastically eats up germs and mildew, along with hair and toenail clippings. And horrible seaming, so the rug just pulls up everywhere to reveal a rotted carpet pad beneath.

Exhibit B:

The tub, with a terribly rotted abitibi surround which we “quick-fixed” a year ago with Great Stuff because there’s not enough caulk in the world to fill the seams.

Exhibit C:

Rug surrounding the toilet. Need I say more? Oh, and that stupid roll of toilet paper is not anchored into the wall very well, so every time you try to grab a sheet the whole thing falls off. I will not miss that feature one bit.

NO ONE should have to stare at that much mold day in and day out. Even someone who once read my dairy out loud, over the phone, to nine or so of his closest friends.

So, how are we all feeling after a long weekend of house work? I know you housebloggers were all tinkering on something….. admit it. While everyone else was out shopping for Christmas presents at the mall this weekend, you went to check out the deals at Home Depot. Am I right?

I’m feeling like an achey old woman today, thanks to plenty of house progress and Wagner Wood Day 2005. Teague’s parents have an outdoor wood stove, so every year the whole family gets together to stack logs. It’s great exercise, and Geri feeds us afterwards. Next year I think we’ll follow it up at our house with Wagner Rubber Roof Day, or perhaps a Wagner Insulation Fiesta. It’s amazing how quickly things can get done when you have that many hands.

The upstairs soon-to-be-apartment has seen a few upgrades this weekend. Of course, our plans to just “make it look a little nicer” turned into major demolition… but when does it not? I started the job on Friday while Teague was at work. The bathroom tub surround had to be ripped out, which in turn led to the removal of wallpaper and the patching of MANY holes and cracks. The old shag carpet (ewwww – on so many levels) was not a keeper – once that was pulled up I could see that the plywood underneath was rotted, so that got pulled up too. Which was a serious PITA, requiring hours of tedious ripping and pulled and prying.

Once we got down to the original wood floor, we found lots o’ rot and unevenness, so new plywood got laid down. We’re going to put linoleum over that for now because it’s cheap, easy, and will be easy to get rid of when we’re ready to REALLY do the upstairs bathroom.

We put new abitibi board up around the tub, followed by caulk and edging strips. It’s not the prettiest stuff, but it’s very cheap and will last a few years. That’s all we are looking for at this point.

Since we had the radiator out to do the floor, we decided to clean it up and spray paint it. Might as well, right?

We had some (somewhat busy) wallpaper lying around that we bought at Marden’s for $1/roll, so that’s going on the walls. Again – cheap, and better than the ripped and tearing paper that was there. The walls are unfortunately in pretty bad shape, nothing a coat of paint could hide.

When we called it quits last night, the upstairs looked like a garbage dump. I took photos, but Teague stole the camera so you’ll have to wait!

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving ;)

We’re too busy working on upstairs “quick fixes” to worry about our kitchen progress right now, but that doesn’t stop me from daydreaming about my pantry – which is still lacking shelves, so isn’t being used yet.

When we do get around to pimping it out, my top organization requirements are:

1. A place to store and sort recyclables. I’m thinking of using 3 narrow garbage cans – one for paper, one for plastic, and one for cans. Labeled, of course, because I am into the labeling of things.

2. Bins or baskets for potatoes, apples, bananas etc.

3. A few deep shelves for storing all those mini-appliances we never use, like the breadmaker with 1/2″ of dust on it.

4. Slots for keeping cookie sheets, platters, etc organized.

Here’s a graphic I found on Google that has two great features – the slots, and hanging baskets for fruits/veggies:

If you’re looking for some nice organizing toys, try these sites:
Stacks and Stacks
Organize Everything
Lillian Vernon

… it’s another. At least with this house it is. I made a depressing discovery last night. One of the tiles in the upstairs hallway’s ugly drop-ceiling was sagging in a funny way, so I hopped up to tap it back into place. As soon as my fingers hit the tile, it tumbled out of it’s spot, dousing me with dirty brown water. Ewwww. The last thing I wanted to do was go downstairs and tell Teague we had another problem, but it was unavoidable.

Teague thought he had patched the roof well enough after the last big storm, but we’ve sprung a leak. The Wet or Dry isn’t holding onto the rubber very well, it seems.

Nasty, soaked ceiling tile:

We’re planning to redo the entire roof, probably next spring, so he’s up there again today patching again (albeit with a different strategy). It looks as though we’ve had a leak there for a while though, because the tin ceiling panel is showing signs of rust. That sucks, because it’s a really pretty piece of tin and I’d like to keep it up there!

I’ll let you know what Teague’s final patching solution is…. wish him luck….

Lately we’ve been working on a few boring projects in preparation for our new renter, my brother, who is moving into the upstairs in a few weeks. I finished sanding our plethora of drywall patches and painted the upstairs kitchen. Teague fixed the downstairs shower drain, which was rusted onto the tub so required he pull out the whole thing. Big mess, big pain…. but now it’s fixed, so we’ll be able to shower downstairs. Yeehaw.

My “special helper”, looking pretty guilty