Casa Geo - for all your vegging needs...

Here at Casa Geo, we strive to give that comfortable, relaxed feel of home. We strive to be the place to lounge about and drink champagne and nibble caviar, er, I mean sip beer and coffee and eat muffins, and feel as though it is our place to call home...

We've been up to a lot as of late...with a strange interlude, and I was going to wait for my reno update until all was back in place. I'm now coming to realize that knowing us and our insane lives it will probably be a while until it is all together...so I decided to give you a little pictoral report on the updating of Casa Geo.

First...the summer project of over a week of solid painting (and an unfortunate injury to a blind saleswoman) that turned this into this:
Spiffed up living room/front entrance
Again...ze living room...
And dining area...with a new light fixture. I'm almost more excited about it than anything else about that room reno :)
Here's a close up. Why? It rocks! Here at Casa Geo we will never speak of the old ugly brass glass thing that hung there ever again...

Not too bad eh? The painting turned out well, and the blinds are great...they match the beam perfectly. And then, thanks to my amazing Dad...there are some new friends in the house:
The Dishpig:

And The Twins:


Yes...Geo saw it, and it was good. So, to try and earn my above rewards, today I have done laundry, taken in the recycling, gotten a sexy new haircut, and am now waiting for J to be done work (boo saturday sports mobiles). I've made some experimental cookies (not bad actually), and tonight I am making some homemade pizza with some tasty sauce sent to be by none other than the lovely Baglady. Yes...I opened my front door the other day to find a parcel from Her Bagness (I do mean that in the kindest possible way :) ) In it were some tasty looking home canned goodies. A little gift box of goodies, all for guessing her photo quiz. Lucky me :)
Thanks a million! (Note to all - if you answer a trivia contest for the Baglady, she is DEFINITELY good for it !)

So there you have it.
What I've been up to when sanity allows.
I'm off for some pizza and coffee...bye! :)

Blinds and falling down.

Well...it's been a good day...except for nearly maiming and crippling the interior designer.

To order wood blinds they have someone come by your house, show you all the woody bits and then measure and give you a quote. And with them being half off right now we can actually afford them...only just...but I've always wanted wood blinds. And they'll even put them up for us (which is good as I have no idea how to). They're just so freaking expensive I never thought we could afford them for a long long time. But we noticed the deal in the paper...so we thought we'd at least have them come by and give us a quote. There's a lot of wood in the house, with the doors, trim and a big wood beam across the main room so we've picked a nice warm teaky shaded wood that matches everything as best we could. We picked hte warmer richer shade over the slightly more dull and boring shade that also kind of matched...I am very excited. I love having real wood all about the place, and this is just so cool. They're lifetime warrantied, so we'll have them working forever. Yay. Income tax rebates are awesome. :)

It all went well with the appointment and such, except for when the decorator left to go home with her things and then at the sidewalk, after our yard (which can be a bit tricky with the stairs and railway ties) she somehow rolled her ankle and fell in front of her car. Rather spectaculartly it would seem...samples falling about on the walk. I ran down to help her up and a nice doctor who was out walking his dog checked here and said she should be OK...but should have it Xrayed just in case.
Eep. It wasn't our fault but I feel bad. If we *hadn't* bought blinds I'd feel like a huge tool :).
We helped her up and she drove herself off so she'll be OK...I imagine she felt as silly as I did. Hope she is alright.

Wood blinds. I'm very excited.

Meep.

Brrrrr

Meh.
It's suddenly winter here again - blizzards and -15 with snow.
It's very heard to train for a 10K run when you can't go outside :). Ah well..it has to melt eventually I suppose. I'm sure by the run in June it will have melted...knock on wood. SO far I"m up to about 6K or so, with 7 minute stretches of running. Not too shabby.
I did my taxes last night...what a thrill. We're getting abit back, which is nice, but we have a crappy little calculator, so it was a team job, with me reading off numbers and J adding them and doing each calculation 2-3 times to be sure the calculator wasn't screwing up. At least it's done now...any $$ we get back can help with repainting the living room this summer. I'd like to get some new blinds too, so we'll see how it all comes together. I may regret it once I'm halfway through it all...but it is the last room left in the house to redo, so I'm forced to deal with it. We'll have to rent scaffolding for the one wall and to do the ceilings, but in the end it will be nice. The whole house was the same shade of brain melting beige when we moved in...we've been filling it with colour room by room. It will be nice to be "done" the painting soon. We're sort of tactfully ignoring all the nail holes a the moment. The previous owners had a thing for covering the walls with stuff, so I'm sure it'll take me a whole day just to fill holes...but in the end - spiffy.
Must go...my lunch is over and I have much to do. Bye.

Edit my painting post - the Grey Fox has landed

I bought paint to match a paint chip from the front of the house to paint the bits I'm fixing, but as I primed the places I fixed yesterday I realised the paint had faded into a myriad shades of gray...so I think I may have to paint all the grey parts of the front of the house so they're all the same.
This is getting to be more complicated than it's worth. I'm kind of hoping the bits I paint won't look absurd and I an leave it until spring, but I'm not holding my breath...I s'pose I should just shut up and do it, huh?

LATER:

OK...so I'm a whiner. I just battled the forces of sunlight after I got home to put the first coat of paint on before sunset. I *just* finished in time, like those fantasy tales. I felt like Marty McFly, slowly fading away, almost running out of time. I barely finished the touschups before the sun set over the horizon.
Whew.
...and, turns out it matches not too badly, after all, and it actually looks really nice. "Grey Fox" it's called, or so says the paint label. It's not too dark, so I'll just do the front trim around the windowy bits I've already redone, and leave the high up laddery parts until J is home...or MAYBE it'll do until spring when we can do more...(*cough*)

Yeah. That's it.

Course I was admiring my handiwork in the dark...

Sticky! sticky! sticky! STICKY!

I'm recaulking our front windows before the winter. They're in rough shape and leak and if we don't do something it'll cost us a lot more than a tube of caulk and some paint. I've left it all summer and now I must do them this weekend before it gets too cold. It's tedious and rough on your hands...but the main issue I have with it is you get caulking on your fingers sealing the gap and then on your HANDS AND ON THE TOOLS AND THEN THE WINDOW AND THEN IT'S STICKY AND YOU DO MORE WORK AND YOU'RE STILL STICKY AND YOU WIPE YOUR HANDS AND THEN THE PAPER TOWEL IS STICKY AND THEN IT IS STUCK TO YOU AND ...well you get the idea. It's a messy job when you have no idea what you're doing.
Normally I can ignore things as a necessary evil, even profoundly sticky ones, but in this case, I actually had to disctract myself by making up and singing a song about how sticky I was so I could finish the work up and not run around gibbering shaking my oh so sticky hands...
Perhaps if I was better at this I wouldn't get so covered in caulking, but I'm glad the sticky part (at least for now) is over and I can paint the window today...but maybe the windows will be warmer this winter...who knows?

Some things just need to be done, regardless of how sticky they are. (how's *that* for an odd piece of advice...)

I'm painting a room in a colourful way, and when my mind is wandering, there I will go...

So I have this room…it’s the one Dad and I fixed up at Christmas in our basement. Being the procrastinator that I am (and to be fair, I was sick for a while) I just finished the drywall this morning. And now comes the prime and paint…the fun stuff FINALLY.

The thing is, I have the paint, I just bought it. It is a nice warm yellow, a medium orange with a very slight beige tone to it (called “madras”) and a nice flat red color (“red menace”). When I was planning giddily months ago I was originally going to have 4 colors and do each wall a color, but then I didn’t know what to do with the ceiling…and 5 colours of paint for a small room was, really, a big waste of paint and $$. So I scaled it down a bit, thinking OK, I must have red in there, and the ceiling will be yellow for sure…but what to do with all the walls? I’m currently bouncing back and forth between doing two walls orange and two walls red (either opposites or adjacents) or doing the ceiling and two walls yellow, with the two remaining walls being orange and the opposite one red. Decisions, decisions…

If anyone has any ideas or thoughts…well I’m here to fish for them.

I love bright warm colours, but the room is pretty small with only a tiny slit window and a dim light fixture -the room is about 11 feet square. So, I couldn’t do it all red as it’d be dark and oppressive, so I brought in the other colours... it will be the room I go to to make things…glass, sew, you name it. I can’t wait to be in it and muck about…so I want to finish it up this week. I have a day or two while I prime it and try not to obsess about my lack of drywalling skills before I get to the paint… but I have to decide soon. J is staying out of the whole process as it’s my room and he wants me do do it how I want and doesn't want to influence my decision…heh heh…I wish I could be concrete what it is that I want. I’m one of those people who I don’t necessarily know what I like…but I know what I DON’T like, so sometimes it’s hard to take an idea and finish up with it.

So…any ideas or thoughts?
Pretty please?