Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Thriller dance video follow up

I still haven't gotten the dance video from Saturday night into a format* I can post, but I have another one... This one was taken Halloween morning, on City Hall Plaza, and it's just a short part of the song.  Entertaining nonetheless -- it made me laugh...  My ivy is getting a wee bit bedraggled from all my ghoulish boogie-ing I've been doing...!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXxBH-BHPhU&feature=email


* If you know how to convert a .mov file (Apple proprietary) on a PC, please let me know.  I've tried a couple of different conversion downloads to no avail.  I'm still trying though!

Monday, October 31, 2011

Any Ideas?

UPDATE BELOW

Can you help me troubleshoot? 

Here's my front door (I know, the plants are dead.  This was taken last year....)


Any suggestions as to where I can put something that denotes, "No shoes please"? 

I don't want to affix something to the wood near the stained glass.  The door is already "busy" with the stained glass, and I don't really want to glue on or drill into the door.

I've thought about sticking a little sign in the blue planter on the right...

My best idea thus far, I think, is to set a small sign on the ledge on the left side of the right hand column... but made out of what?  It would be fun to find a little logo like this

on something, but I've never seen one anywhere... have you?

The way I handle this now, is I just verbally ask everyone to remove their shoes.  But sometimes I forget, or sometimes I get distracted trying to corral the dog, and before I realize it, my guest has followed me through the house in their shoes.  As one of my sisters says, "Ohhhh, the dilem-na!"

Please, suggestions in the comments.  Thanks.

UPDATE:

Carolyn commented and inquired about what the entrance inside the door looks like.  Here is a photo of the layout -- it's what the house looked like when I bought it, not today, but hey the doors are in the same places!


And then now, where that plant is in the corner?  I have this:  http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2011/02/cozy-corner.html

I do have a bench not terribly far away from the front door, in the space where you can just barely see a corner of the old white built-in entertainment center.  You can see the bench here (and the cords are hidden now!)  http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2009/09/if-they-dont-sell-it-in-store.html

Does that help you visualize?  Maybe I just need to add a smaller "shoe box" by the bench.  Or, maybe I need to ditch the table and put a tiny stool in that corner instead... I keep dog walking paraphernalia on that table, but it's always sort of cluttered.  Maybe that needs a re-vamp...  Ahhh I see the snow ball coming...

It's the little things

I picked up many attributes from my dad, the most notable of which are a love of reading and a can-do attitude.  I spent hours with him in the barn as a young girl, helping him (well I thought I was helping, I won't ask him about his perspective) with projects.  I have a vivid memories of watching him work the wood lathe.  He made a candlestick for my mother, which is still in their living room at home.  I have always loved it; maybe because I watched my dad bring it to life from a tree limb. 

What I didn't remember was that he also made one a matching one for his sister.  When she passed away, I was fortunate enough to get it:


Isn't it lovely?  So graceful.  It holds such fond memories for me of family, a cozy home in the winter, and being out in the barn with dad, wood chips flying. It's one of my favorite things.

Chipping Away

I continue to chip away at my door frame and door trim project.  Having a motivational deadline of a weekend house guest arriving this Friday, I set about yesterday to re-claim my guest room that has been a staging area for all my construction materials.  Part of the clean out meant finishing the home for the coats that are on the rolling rack.  You may recall that previously they lived behind my bedroom door on a rolling rack, and that my shoes lived stacked on the bottom of the rack. 

The shoes were taken care of already I built shelves (that still need to be painted) but I hadn't installed the hanging clothes rod yet. I really thought I had blogged about the shoe shelves already, but I can't find that entry.  Anyway, here's that part:


And here it is with the new clothes rod installed:


I was initially resistant to drilling a hole in the end of my IKEA closet system, but in the end held my breath and went for it.  Nothing bad happened... if my house alarm is triggered today, I'll just presume the rod fell down and tripped the motion sensor... lol

I may decide to shield the view somehow... since now I've decided I am not replacing the traditional door and am going to use a sliding barn door; the barn door will not hide all this when it is open.  Ah, the snowball effect of projects.  But regardless, the immediate issue is solved, which was getting the coats hung back up where they will live, and out of the guest room, so check!  That's off my list.

Earlier this month I posed the "what if" question about pulling down the sheetrock on the adjoining wall and leaving the old wood exposed.  You can read about that here:  http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-if.html.  I decided that I did want to do that, so thinking ahead when installed the clothes rod, I wanted to remove the sheetrock behind the clothes rod anchor before installing the rod.  Otherwise, once the sheetrock came down and made the opening a half inch wider, my clothes rod would be too short! 

So, I decided to chip away about a 4 inch square area of the sheetrock, just large enough to affix the clothes rod end.  There I am... on a step stool, bare foot, no drop cloth (but I was wearing safety glasses... I am fairly faithful about those.)  I mean, it's just a small area I'm doing right?  But then... the sheetrock came down so easily, and the wood behind it was so beautiful, that I "may have" gotten carried away.  I just kept prying more and more of the sheetrock away... I did manage to make myself stop long enough to pull plastic trash bags over my bedroom chandeliers -- I hadn't totally lost my mind... but look what it looks like now...


That, my friends, is fabuloso. Look at that beautiful wood!  I'll probably figure something out to fill some of the larger gaps where the planks have split; my first step will be to research the mysteries of chinking.  A quick Google search produced this example of chinking; I believe you can stain it as well -- it doesn't have to remain white.


Here's the rest of the wall that will have sheetrock removed:


What to do with Shoes?

I'm one of those "no shoes in the house" type of girls, which means that there are perpetual heaps of shoes at the front door and on the back steps.  The front door remains unresolved, but the back steps have a temporary resolution.  I say temporary, because they still get wet when it rains if I don't remember to move the pile over a few feet when it rains.

I'd been using a wooden wine crate that I brought home bounty in from Sam's Club.  It worked pretty well, except that the bottom of it got wet when it rained.  I knew it wouldn't last forever like getting wet often.  Also, it was a raw wood so it was a super light color that didn't match the steps.  Last night I gave it a quick up-cycle.  I affixed wooden blocks for feet to lift it up off the ground, sprayed on some mahogany stain to match the steps, and hit it with a light coat of polyeurathane.  I like it!


I was glad that the stain didn't completely hide the box labeling that is sort of burned into the wood.

Here it is where it lives:


Best part?  Box - free.  Everything else -- in the work shop, and it took about 15 minutes to do it all.  When I stop using it for shoes, I'm sure it will have another life serving some other purpose.  Sweet.

Related amusing reading:  http://shoesoffatthedoorplease.blogspot.com/

Happy Halloween 2011

Happy Halloween, everyone!  I hope you had a weekend of ghoulish fun and that it continues this evening!

I went to a masquerade party on Saturday night... it's an annual event that I didn't make it to last year, so I was able to be lazy and wear last year's costume!  I'll call it a success anyway, because I won the trophy for Best Costume Overall in my shrub-wear.  (To be fair, I'll say they were liberal with trophies.)  SO MUCH FUN hanging out along the fence with natural landscaping and then scaring the tar out of other party goers.  Yes, I'm mean.  Really hilarious though. 

If you know me and have spoken with me in the last 2 weeks you know that I have feverishly been learning the dance moves to Michael Jackson's Thriller for the masquerade party.  It was a series of 40 You Tube videos fort he 6.5 minute song.   You can read more about that at http://thrilltheworld.com/.  At any rate, I mostly mastered it (and literally lost weight in the process -- I guess what they say about cardio is true -- who knew?) and we danced as a mob in the street at midnight.  Complete with a fog machine.  It was spectacular.  I'm working to get the video converted into a format I can share, but for now, here's a snapshot of me dancing. 


I hope that party pictures are made available so I can share more.   We'll see.  And I'll keep trying to get that video up.   More fun tonight with trick or treaters, and being shrub-like in a neighborhood haunted yard.  Bwa ha ha ha haaaaaaa!!