My Workshop

 Some people have garages.  We are some of those people. (Hey in DC you can't always be sure of that when you buy a house.  Some people just have car ports.)

Maybe I should say we USED to be some of those people.  I've "ahem" taken over the garage . . .

It has become my work space, my furniture refinishing workshop, and it could be my woodworking shop if I HAD RECEIVED THE ELECTRIC MITER SAW THAT I'VE BEEN ASKING FOR FOR EVERY BIRTHDAY AND CHRISTMAS FOR THE PAST 2.5 YEARS!!!!  Sigh.  Oh well, I have more than enough to do now.  Building furniture can wait.

But yes this is now the place where I paint and stain all the really yucky furniture in the basement.  It's always nice to receive furniture especially when you've just moved across country and gave all your furniture to a friend who knew a family in her home town who had gone through a divorce and needed everything including hangers and lamps . . . it's a sad world.  Everything that they didn't need went to the Jardine vultures.  WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT TAKE FURNITURE FROM THE DUMPSTER IN JARDINE!  (Jardine is my old apartment complex btw).  Taking my particle board tv cabinet is fine but I've seen people grab couches and vacuums and even mattresses (gag.  omg it's gross).  The problem is that this furniture has been passed around multiple times.  People will use it and when they leave it will sit by the dumpster and be taken to another apartment till they leave etc etc etc.  It's called bed bugs and the old apartments had them.  I lived in a new apartment thank goodness.

ANYWAY, the old furniture I got from my dad's old office mate was appreciated, it just looked awful.  Sooooo I'm refinishing it piece by piece and I'm using the garage as my staging grounds since you can't prime furniture on carpet!  The fumes would probably ignite which is bad. 

The first picture was my painting station.  This picture is my staining station.

This is another painting station.  Omg that chair was ridiculous, and it's still not done!  It had so many twists and turns that you have to prime as much of it as you can reach while contorting your body into odd shapes, then wait for that to dry, turn it over and prime all the parts you couldn't reach, wait for that to dry, lightly sand it, put a coat of paint on, let that dry, turn it over and paint the other half, and guess what you still have to paint and let dry and paint and let dry and then seal!  Ahhhhh!

Can you tell I'm not a very patient person when it comes to watching paint dry?  Needless to say, the car is not going back into the garage any time soon!

And to make sure the car (and the person driving it) didn't forget that I have all my furniture laid out and drive right into it, I stationed the trash cans as sentries at the entrance.  Whatever works.

And this is my brush and paint and primer staging station.  I'm only keeping it here because it's the spring.   If this was the middle of the summer I'd store the paint and primer in the cool basement.  You can never be too careful around flammable liquids.

And last random fact, that cloth that I've set all the furniture on to protect the garage floor?  Those are the old curtains left by the previous owners.  They were so dusty and faded (and who knows what else) they were beyond repair.  I think I get too much of a kick out of spilling paint on them . . . ;)

Mother's Day Cookies

We take a break from our irregularly scheduled basement renovation updates to bring you a reminiscent Mother's Day post!

For Mother's Day I wanted to make some pretty cookies and try out some new techniques and I thought the perfect people to send them to would be my grandmas!  So I made two sets of cookies and shipped them out.  They got there on Monday but I think they arrived intact and still tasty so all was good.

This was the big cookie I made for them.  I'd seen this idea on another blog and I had tiny frosting tips so I wanted to try it.  Essentially it's doing cross stitch with frosting.  You take a tiny tip and draw a grid on the cookie.  I then printed off a cross stitch pattern for a rose and using green and red frosting I made dots where all the crosses would be. 

It's a pretty simple technique it just takes a long time to draw the grid!  The lady whose blog I saw this idea on did portraits of people.  I didn't think my grandmothers would appreciate a cookie portrait of Oprah so I stuck with a rise.

Here's the rose cookie all finished!  (If the pixelation is giving people a headache, just step away from the computer screen and it will all be clear).

Here are both of them finished :)

The rest of the cookies took a whole different direction.  I went with pastel colors and tried other techniques.  For these cookies I did and outline and then filled the outline in with a lot of parallel lines, almost like needlepoint.

I don't know why but this one really reminded me of the rose in Beauty and the Beast which is like one of my favorite movies ever!

Quick trip down memory lane: when I was really little, like 4 or 5, you didn't go to the store to buy movies, you ordered them on the phone and they were delivered to you in the mail.  Well it was close to Christmas and a package had come in so my dad put it on top of the fridge for safe keeping.  Apparently at four years old I hadn't figured out how to scale furniture yet.  Anyway mom and dad got to talking a few weeks later about why it was taking the movie so long to come in the mail and dad was like oh a package came in weeks ago but I thought it was for Christmas so I put it on the fridge.  They then retrieved the package and covertly opened it and surprise it was the movie.  I was standing in the kitchen the whole time this was happening and remember thinking that I knew that wasn't a Christmas present but whatever.  So they both turned to me and were like surprise here's a movie!  Yay! lol anyway I got Beauty and the Beast out of the deal and probably drove them both nuts watching it constantly but hey it was a good movie :)

I also tried some of my lace cookies again.

And I tried only flooding the middle of the cookie and doing lace around the outside edge.  I apologize for jipping people on frosting.  For some reason the blue frosting is looking really alienish to me in this picture.  Hmmm I promise it's not radioactive.

And finally I tried out a swirly pattern thing that I'd seen on another cookie blog (I read so many cookie blogs it's ridiculous.  Never gets old).  It didn't turn out as spectacularly as I wanted so I'll prob skip this one next time.

All the cookies together.  I split these into two sets and sent them out with one big rose cookie so the grandmas would have a little variety (and a lot of cookies).

These were the flowers Dad got Mom for Mother's Day.  She got them a day early because he picked them up on Saturday and put them in the outside fridge to keep fresh but lo and behold Mom made dinner and went to the fridge to get some ingredient and there the flowers were nestled between the eggs and the broccoli.  Surprise!  Lol

Here you can see more of the bouquet but all I really cared about were the roses.  They were orange and gorgeous.

And finally, since I'd made cookies for my grandmothers for Mother's Day it's not like I could forget to make my Mom some cookies, so I made her a piano!  And this is a completely accurate representation of a piano with the right number of keys btw.  The size of the keys is not as accurate but at least it's close.

My mom has played piano off and on for the churches we've gone to since I was in middle school.  She plays all the time at home as well, so I thought it was appropriate :)

I didn't have long, thin rectangle cookie cutters to use so I used a pizza cutter to cut out the rectangles.

I used sugar cookies for the white keys and gingerbread cookies for the black keys.  I'm smarticle like that ;)  

Of course I made her actually play the "piano" too :)  Oh and bonus, there's the piano in the background!  So Happy (belated) Mother's Day to all you moms out there!

New bathroom Fixtures!

I got a new faucet!  I got a new toilet!!!  I am so excited!

Look at how shiny and brushed nickley and pretty and sleek and NEW!

Look at how stately and stable and awesome!  What a lovely toilet.  It's so new it still has a sticker on it!

I'm not kidding, I'm very excited.  If you had seen what was there originally you'd be excited too.  There are a few of my relatives who know my pain.  They've seen it.  They've experienced it.  And surprisingly they haven't been back to visit ahem ahem. 

When people come to visit they stay in the basement because it's essentially it's own little suite.  Bedrooms, bathroom, windows, tv, couch, wet bar, living room, air hockey table.  It's a pretty nice set up, which is why I'm moving down there.  But first, we had to make it livable.

Ok, deep breath.

Here it is.  In all it's glory.

Gag.

Honestly what sort of things happened to this poor faucet?  How do you make a brass faucet black?  Was it corrosive toothpaste?  A gremlin living in the drain that used it for teething purposes?
What we do know is that the basement is where the German nanny lived.  Yes the people who lived here before us had German nannies.  They also had marble busts of their children on the mantle in their pink living room.  They were scary, scary people.  Anyway, we don't know how this atrocity happened, but I didn't want to touch it.  So we got a plumber to replace it.

I didn't get an up close and personal picture of the old toilet.  I apologize.  I just know you're so disappointed about not seeing a picture of the old toilet.  Unfortunately a picture would not be able to show how it wobbled when you sat on it or how the water would drain out of it completely if you didn't use it often enough.  Here it is with me trying to paint behind it.  I tried to be a bit careful but hey it was going into the trash so I didn't try too hard to not get paint on it.  Bye bye old toilet.

And why did I have a plumber come and replace the toilet and the faucet?  Why didn't I do it myself and save hundreds of dollars?  This is actually a question I had at the beginning.  There are a million DIY tutorials about replacing faucets and toilets, I could have done it myself except . . . do you see all that shiny new silver pipe and white PVC pipe?  That's ALL new.  Essentially the plumber replaced everything from the faucet down to the wall.  I was prepared to shut off the water, disconnect the pipes, replaces the faucet, and reconnect the pipes.  I was NOT prepared to weld, tighten, screw, and replace piping.  I don't have the tools and the experience.

Also, that white thing in the side of the picture?  That's the sink.  There was about 5 inches between the sink and the wall which meant no clear view of anything and no room to work.  Have fun mr. plumber!

So, yes, I wimped out and let them call a plumber, but I know my limitations and I was not prepared for this project and felt just fine calling in the professionals.  And hey, it's not my house either soooo yeah, I'll mess around with DIY renovation when I'm paying the mortgage ;)  I did throw around the idea of staying home and watching the plumber work so I could figure out how to do it next time . . . but I figured that would make him pretty annoyed and the last thing anyone wants is an annoyed maintenance person!  Lol

Oh, and side note, we used the same people that replaced our water heater and they seem very knowledgeable about not only replacing fixtures but they also know how to replace piping and valves and such.  So I recommend them.  Since no one reading this lives here though, it's a moot point lol.

Pretty, new, non-grody sink faucet!

Non-wobbly new porcelain thrown!  P.S. my dad's jealous, maybe for Christmas I'll have them replace the master bathroom one . . .

Anyway, the bathroom is ALMOST completely finished!  Update coming soon!

Wallpaper. It Hates Me.

Hey y'all! It's Sarah again. So... remember my post about taking down the wallpaper in the parental units' bathroom?
How that wallpaper made me go insane?
How it still affects me to this day?
How even Aunt Mary's beloved steamer cannot calm my fears of demon borders and wallpaper backing?

I do.
Vividly.

I used to be somewhat chipper about the whole wallpaper removal process. I would skip to the offending room, steamer in hand, thinking, "I'm gonna get yoooooooou!"

Now I cower in the corner until someone shoves a putty knife in my hand and tells me to pull it together.

I'm bitter.

Oh so very bitter.

So imagine my reaction when out of nowhere one evening, (As I was crazily packing to move back across the country in less than two days after presenting my five panel Master Planning final project at 7:30 AM that morning to my professor and two campus planners for Texas Tech) I receive this video.

 

(Notice the giggling of my older sister. And the stifled laughter of my loving mother who was taking the video.)

You actually don't even have to imagine my reaction because this was it.

 

There may have been some uncontrolled arm waving, hysterical laughter, and and random outbursts of, "ICAN'TBELIEVETHISWHYDOESWALLPAPERHATEMENHGRFSOAFHIJRWAFLONSNV!!!" thrown in there too. (The boyfriend and my best friend Kristin were actually present for this. I'm surprised they still speak to me like a normal human being instead of one that has a one way ticket for the insane asylum.)

But anyway, we used to find it amusing that when Rebecca was at a loss for words, she would break out in song. Well, apparently, I break out in rhyme.

That was on the spot too. 

The bathroom in question is now fully painted and blindingly shiny with new fixtures, all in the time it took me to take down half the wallpaper in the Master Bath.

 

Excuse me while I cry.  

I guess the moral of this story would be to not enter a hostile arena of vicious wallpaper with an inflated sense of confidence. The fall is painful, and the road to recovery, draining.

However, as the projects in the basement continue to move at a decent clip, I am scheduled to take down the beachy themed wallpaper in the former exercise room. I have decided to approach this task with one goal in mind:

Revenge. 

More coming soon! :)

 <3 Medium- Well

How I Ended Up A Red Raider: A Weird, Romantic Comedy

So just how did I end up at Texas Tech University? Wearing red and black, throwing my "Guns Up!", saying "y'all", and becoming an honorary Texan? (That's an official title y'all. When your Texas born friends tell you you're an Honorary Texan, that's as serious as it gets. New citizen status! Do I need another passport?)

This is going to a bit of a story. I say, "Weird, Romantic Comedy," because there's love involved, some parts were kind of funny, and it's odd how life works sometimes. (And that, boys and girls, is how titles for blog posts are made.)

As y'all know, my Mom and Dad both graduated from UT (Dad with his Master's in Urban Planning and Mom with her PhD in Economics) and Uncle Don graduated from Texas A&M. Somehow seeing the vicious friendly rivalry between our families for their respective alma maters made me want to attend school there. (Apparently, I like to decide where to go to school based on knock- down, drag out, "hidden sticker," wars and shameless t- shirt gifting.) After searching and applying for schools that had accredited Landscape Architecture programs, I narrowed down my choices to Kansas State and Texas Tech. 

First, we toured Kansas State. We stayed with Beth (aka crashed her apartment ;) ), toured campus, and visited the Landscape Architecture Department. It was awesome to say the least! Beth was there for another 1.5 years to finished her Master's degree, it's my birth state, the campus was gorgeous, and everyone we talked to was very nice. It seemed like an awesome place to be!

We took over her living room...

...And kitchen ;)

President's House

Rain Gardens! :D

Dinner time! Homemade Lasagna :)

Big, spinning globe in Beth's apartment complex.

Touring campus :)

Then, due to circumstances completely out of my control, knowledge, or future predicting capabilities...
I went and fell in love with Texas Tech.

I know. I'm difficult. :P But hear me out!
When I first started applying for schools, I never really thought that I would have that "feeling." You know, that feeling they say you get when you find the right school? The one in your gut that makes you go, "Oooooooh I get what they were talking about!" and you feel like something just settles into place? The stars align, angels sing, and you get the pony you've always dreamed of owning?? (Um... ignore that last part.)

But in all seriousness, that feeling hit me almost right away. I still remember turning to my dad and saying,
Me- "Dad, I REALLY like it here."
Dad- "Sarah, you've been on the tour for two minutes."
Me- *Smiles* "I know."

Entrance to campus

The English/ Philosophy Building

Memorial Circle :)

My church! :) St. Elizabeth's

Plant and Soil Science Building. Many of my classes are here!

Now, for any of you who know me well, you know that I have a hard time making decisions. As in, I can't even decide which pair of socks to wear most mornings. (They're all identical and they never see the light of day because I put boots or tennis shoes on and completely cover them up. Yep.) But for some reason, I just KNEW. Of course, there was the traditional decision making mess for a few days:

-A pros and cons list.
-Hours of hashing out all information the tour guides and pamphlets had crammed into our brains.
-Calling Beth for the 50th time to make sure me leaning towards Texas Tech was indeed ok and she wouldn't hate me forever.
- Badgering Dad about feeling bad, not wanting to make a decision, wanting to know what his choice would be etc. on the plane home while he probably just wanted me to zip it so he could sleep.
- Dreams about a Matador and a Wildcat duking it out on a football field. (Kidding)

But it was tough. I cried. I was scared. I had two amazing options and I could only pick one. Not only that, a huge pro for Kansas State was Beth! Because all of us Gorney girls are apparently dead set on going to school anywhere BUT Virginia, I know my parents would've been able to sleep more soundly had I picked the same out- of- state school as her. But more than that, it would've been fun! We could have sibling dinners and sisterly bonding. She knew the campus and could show me the best places to go. We wouldn't have to travel alone and I would know someone as soon as I got there. (After being away for so long now, I know that sometimes you just need family to not feel so lonely.) The campus was beautiful and had a wonderful community feel. The students, staff, and tour guides I had met were extremely nice and welcoming.

But in the end, Texas Tech's Landscape Architecture program was more of what I was looking for. One, it was located in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources as opposed to the College of Architecture. This was (and still is) very important to me, as Landscape Architecture is NOT, "shrubbing up buildings." It is the design and stewardship of the land, well outside the scope of Architecture in many cases. Being in this college brought the program closer to the environmental and horticultural side of the profession so often forgotten under the shadow of the "all powerful" Architecture.

But I digress. (Before I get on my Landscape Architecture soap box ;) )

The other reason I chose TTU was that it just felt right. Those feelings I mentioned earlier, the campus environment, the location, the people I met; I felt like I was where I was supposed to be. They were similar to the feelings I had at Kansas State, but different somehow; stronger. Not just because I was excited to be there, but because I felt I was supposed to be there. Trying to explain that eloquently would probably be the writing equivalent of a face plant, so I'll spare you from reading more in this freakishly long post the unnecessary descriptions. Although I would've been very happy to be a Wildcat, I knew that I was meant to be a Red Raider; and I am so happy I made that decision. :) 

It has been a lot of hard work, plane flights, homesickness, and hours on the phone, but I really am so blessed to have been able to go to TTU. I love it as much as I did that first tour day, and I literally get butterflies every. single. time. I see crop circles outside my plane window when I'm flying back to school! (That means I'm about 15 mins. away from landing in Lubbock :) ).

So for all those people who ask me how I ended up in Red Raider country, I say I fell in love. Which is true! But the messiness, outside factors, and the big decision were also what really lead me to Texas Tech. I can't wait to tell y'all more about my time there, so look for more posts soon! :)

<3
Sarah (Aka, Medium- Well)

P.S. Another funny factor in this story. My junior year in high school, we had to take a, "Career Interest," exam that gave you degree programs based on your hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes. I put things such as, I liked being outdoors, I liked animals, and I like being hands on etc. Well, the NUMBER ONE career choice they gave me was...

Taxidermy.

  

http://bisonworld.org/taxidermy

Yep.

Because, apparently, if I like animals and being outdoors, I must like shooting said animals and stuffing their dead bodies. By golly, this program had me all figured out! (My family still has not stopped laughing about this. It will go down in history.)

Anyway, I already knew I wanted to be a Landscape Architect, so I began looking up schools that had the program. Texas A&M I knew for sure, but UT only had the graduate program. Then, I saw Texas Tech. Interested, I clicked their link, went to their homepage, and thought, Wow, this is gorgeous! I want to find out more! So I kept combing through their website. That day, I went home and said to my dad, "Dad, I want to go to Texas Tech University to study Landscape Architecture." He said, "Ok, Sarah. That's nice." This exchange was promptly forgotten in the coming days, only to hit me two months AFTER I had already moved into my dorm at Texas Tech!

Funny how things work out, isn't it? ;)