Spice up your garden with unusual, low-maintenance plants from the San Francisco Succulent and Cactus Society’s annual show and sale next weekend in Golden Gate Park.
We’ve spent so much time weeding since we moved in, a low-maintenance yard sounds like a dream. I’ve actually been thinking about xeriscaping for a while. Low maintenance + low water bills = good. I don’t know that I really want to tear out the existing landscaping, though. Maybe as we make small changes over time we’ll consider more draught-friendly alternatives. In any event, it wouldn’t hurt to learn more about it.
See “Darlings of the dry garden” for more info about the San Francisco Succulent and Cactus Society’s annual show this weekend.
I purchased a bottle of mineral oil at Walgreens to condition the beautiful end grain cutting board we received as a wedding present (thanks Jen & Emory!). I noticed the tell-tale “F” next to the item on my receipt — the item is eligible for reimbursement under my Flexible Spending Account (“FSA”).
I never estimate correctly, and I am always buying tons of FSA-eligible products at the end of the year to spend down my account. If I could buy products I need for around that house, that would be hugely helpful! So I googled mineral oil to see what else I could use it for. Turns out baby oil is just mineral oil with fragrance added, so anything you do with baby oil you can do with mineral oil. It can be used to remove make-up, to treat soapstone countertops, to age clay pots, to remove sticky residue left from price tags or other adhesives, as a solvent for oil painting, and one writer I found even used it to clean and condition his kitchen cabinets.
Then I got to wondering, what other FSA-eligible products might have other household uses? I think I heard hydrogen peroxide can be used to brighten tile grout, so I looked this one up too. Turns out good old H2O2 can whiten your white laundry, sanitize kitchen surfaces, kill bathroom germs, remove pesticides from fruits and veggies, or be used as plant spray. And it seemed like there were many more options.
Any other amazing alternative uses for FSA-eligible products?
**Note that I haven’t tested any of the above ideas for safety or efficacy. This post is just meant as “food for thought.”
Flat surfaces in a house tend to be problematic because they collect stuff. Every day, when we get home from work, a pile of mail, a purse, and messenger bag gets dropped on the kitchen table. Often some shoes end up underneath it as well. We needed a spot for this stuff to keep it from cluttering up the living area. Enter the entryway. We have a pretty large entryway with a big blank wall pretty much equidistant from the front door, where most visitors enter, and the garage door, where we usually come in from the car.
Our blank wall.
We added a shoe rack that I got from Ikea years ago. I’ve never actually used it as a shoe rack before. In fact, it’s been a TV stand for most of it’s life, with baskets in the compartments holding stuff. Ikea also happens to have a matching hat rack, so I picked that up and assembled it, and up on the wall it went. Here’s the finished product:
Our new mud area.
We thought it would be a pretty simple task. My dad (and my mom, and my brother) was even here and he helped us out with it. The pre-drilled holes, however, were not spaced at 16 inch intervals like the studs, so we had to drill some new holes. One that was done, we drilled the holes in the wall and unfortunately were off by about and inch so we didn’t hit the studs. Measure twice, cut/drill once, people! Anyway, after some trial and error, it made it up there.
I bet you are wondering why there are no purses, coats, etc. hanging on it to dress it up. Well, we only had 1.5 inch screws, and as it turns out, that’s not long enough to get into the studs. Oops! So although it’s up and it looks nice, until we can get to HD and get some 2 inch screws, it’s not strong enough to hold anything and it will remain bare. Sigh! Hopefully we will be better prepared next time we tackle a project.
The chairs came! I posted a sweet deal I found on chairs at JCP here, and in record time they arrived on our doorstep via FedEx. We put them together this weekend, and let me tell you, assembling eight chairs and entertaining two mothers over one weekend has left me a bit tired! But, the chairs look great. I think the only way we could’ve found a better match was to order the actual matching chairs from Crate & Barrel. Here they are:
Our fab craigslist table with its new chairs.And now for a close up.
The assembly was not terribly difficult, just time consuming. Unfortunately, I blistered the palm of my hand on the first chair, so assembling the remaining chairs was not terribly comfortable. Note to self: next time you assemble furniture, put on your work gloves from the get-go! I couldn’t be more pleased with the result, though.
I was browsing some archives of a blog I recently stumbled upon, and the writer raves about a great deal on a rug from JC Penney. I loved the rug. I have a hard time finding area rugs that I like when I shop. I see them in other people’s homes, but I can’t seem to find them myself. 2 years later they still sell the rug at a great price. I haven’t purchased one because I’m not sure what room I would use it in or what color I would get, but while I was on the site I decided to browse other furniture, just to see if there were other good deals lurking.
I mentioned in this post that, now that we found a great new-to-us dining table, we needed some chairs to go with, and I was torn about the hefty price tag on the matching C&B chairs. As luck would have it, JCP had these chairs on clearance for $99 for a set of two (down from $250!).
Travis Chairs
They are not solid mahogany like the C&B chairs, but they are solid wood with a mahogany stain, and as far as I’m concerned I can live with not mahogany for that price difference. The one review on the chairs is poor at only two stars. But I discount the comments a bit because (1) the complaint partly had to do with chipping paint, and I ordered the stained, not painted, option; and (2) the writer also complained about difficult assembly, which I’ve found to be the case with virtually all chairs that require assembly. Also, I’m just a wiz at putting furniture together. I get it from my dad, I think.
Steve’s mom, “Mrs. B,” is a pretty avid gardener. She has raised beds in the backyard with all kinds of different vegetables, –multiple varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, squash, fennel, I don’t even know what else. She starts them all from seed, and actually ends up giving quite a few away to friends and family, as well as donating some to a local charity to sell. I usually get a few different tomatoes and a cucumber, which I’ve grown in my parents’ garden the past few years. This year, Steve and I have our own yard to plant them in!
The catch: the former owner had some interesting landscaping ideas. Both the front and back yard are filled with rose bushes (with a few other types of flowers scattered here and there), and what is not occupied by roses is covered with decorative gravel. In other words, there is nowhere to plant anything without tearing something else out. Which we fully intend to do . . . when we have some free time. For now, though, one of the tomatoes, an heirloom brandywine, was in pretty serious need of repotting, so we grabbed a “Topsy-Turvey” on impulse at Fry’s and hung the brandywine upside down from the trellis in the backyard.
Our new Topsy-Turvey . . .. . . and the brandywine we planted.
I’m really curious to see how this thing works. The last time I tried a novel gardening gimmick was a complete disaster. It was a raised bed with a special soil mix. Because you start with weed-free soil mix, you were supposed to have no weed problems. Further, the mix was “friable,” so if you over watered it was supposed to flow right through and not hurt your plants. It was supposed to be idiot-proof, but everything died within a couple of weeks. Notably, the items I planted straight into the hard clay soil next to the raised bed flourished.
We still have to figure out what to do with the additional plants Mrs. B gave us, a Burbank slicing tomato, and orange cherry tomato, and a burpless cucumber. They don’t look like they are outgrowing their pots just yet, so we have a little time. She also gave us some strawberries in a strawberry pot, which of course won’t need to be transplanted. I hope we do well with the plants this summer; it would be fun to have some super fresh fruits and veggies straight from our garden.
Two tomato seedlings, a cucumber plant, and a strawberry pot.
We made our first mortgage payment today. We have less money in our account now, but I’m still excited about it because it means we now own 25.1% of The House (as opposed to 25% based on the down payment). Woohoo!
We got our mortgage through ING, and I have to say, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been saving with ING for at least 5 years, and I enjoy that the interest rate tends to be a bit higher than elsewhere and it is easy to set up an automatic savings plan. But the mortgage has been amazingly hassle-free. ING touts its morgages as low cost because its costs are lower: you are required to make automatic electronic payments and they don’t send you statements. Frankly, I try to pay all my bills online anyway, so there is no downside here. Our closing costs were low, and our real estate agent said ING was incredibly easy to work with and got everything on its end done super fast, so we were actually able to close early.
If you haven’t checked out ING, you might consider it. ING will give you $25 if you open an account with a minimum balance of $250 through a referral link (and the referrer will get $10). Here is a referral link, if you are interested:
Last night, our dinner dishes washed themselves while we kicked back and watched “Mythbusters” on DVR. Yup, we actually accomplished a task on our to do list by replacing our dishwasher drain hose. Here’s what we did:
Under the sink, before.
We actually did not have to replace the entire drain hose, which made this project much easier than anticipated. The only problematic hose was the connection between the “air gap” and the garbage disposal.
For those of you not blessed with an air gap, in some areas, building codes require that a dishwasher not drain directly into the disposal. Rather, the drain connects to a vent in the top of the sink (the “air gap”). A second hose goes from the air gap to the disposal. You can see in this picture the hose connecting the air gap to the disposal is a bit kinked. It’s not entirely closed off, but you can see that it is bent at too far of an angle, narrowing the passage of water. As a result, when the dishwasher drained, excess water that couldn’t make it through the small space leaked out the air gap.
You can see the hose flattens out where it bends, allowing less water through.
It’s pretty simple, really. First, you loosen the bolts on the hose clamps, the little metal strips wrapped around the ends of the tubing that hold it to the connections on the disposal and the air gap.
Here is S trying to get the hose off the disposal connection after loosening the hose clamp.
Once you’ve loosened the clamps and removed the hose, you just reverse the process with the new hose. Remember to check the size of your existing hose before you go to the hardware store to buy a new one. We forgot on our first trip. Our hose has a 7/8 in. internal diameter. Most of what they had at Home Depot was 3/4 or 1 in. , so we had to get some hose specially cut. We purchased about 4 feet of hose, just to be safe.
Place the hose on the connections at the air gap and disposal, and tighten the hose clamps. Viola! You are done. Here’s our new, extra long hose:
Under the sink, after.
It looks funny, but we couldn’t find any other way to connect the air gap and the disposal without creating a kink in the hose, just like we had before.
This post is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and is not intended to be advice. Please consult a professional. Also, before doing any home improvement projects yourself, remember to take all appropriate safety precautions (for example, but not limited to, turning off electricity or water, etc.).
My name is Erin, and I am a craigslist addict. I first experienced the magic in 2004, when I purchased my fabulous metallic red Ford Focus, which I adore to this day. Now that I have an empty house to furnish and an empty wallet, I’m constantly trolling the listings for furniture. It takes time, but eventually you will find a gem. The latest? Our new dining room table. Solid mahogany, seats up to 8, two removable leaves, originally $700 from Crate and Barrel. Our price: $250. Woohoo!
Our gorgeous new table.
We bought it from a couple getting ready to move. Unfortunately, they did not have the matching chairs, which run $180 new at C&B. At that price, eight chairs will cost almost six times as much as the table. Probably not going to happen. It looks like the table will be lonely until we can find a suitable alternative.
When we were in contract on The House, we hired an independent home inspector to check things out and give us a report on its condition. You know, so we wouldn’t end up like Shelly Long and Tom Hanks in “The Money Pit.” For the most part, The House got a clean bill of health, but there were a few minor issues that needed to be dealt with in the short term. They are:
Dishwasher Drain Hose: The existing hose is too short and as a result gets a kink in it where it bends under the sink. As a result, the DW does not drain properly and water runs out the vent in the sink. We need to replace the hose with a longer one. Relatedly, the faucet requires some new caulking around it. We’ve noticed that when water runs out the vent, it leaks through the gap between the faucet and sink and to the cupboard underneath.
Gutter Drain: The drain near the garage door does not reach all the way to the ground. As a result, when it rains, water pouring out the drain can leak into the foundation area. We need to put an extension on the drain so it will flow down the driveway and not into the foundation.
Upstairs Bathtub: On of the upstairs bathtubs requires new caulking, and a tightening up of the faucet. As it is, water could be leaking through underneath the tub.
We hope to tackle the dishwasher hose this evening. We had no dishwasher at our old apartment, and were so looking forward to not doing all the dishes by hand, but because of the drainage problem we are still handwashing everything! So this is a top priority. Stay tuned for the results.
In other news, we previously wrote about packing up for the move, but have yet to finish the story with unloading into the new space. Hopefully we’ll have that post ready soon. Also, we’ll get to a room-by-room as soon as things are unpacked enough that the place is presentable.
