Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Did everybody get what they wanted for xmas? I took this picture at a grocery store I found a month ago that really freaked me out because it was so creepy on every level. Usually when you find a creepy grocery store, it’s a little mom and pop that can’t afford to remodel, but this place was massive.
Xmas was pretty fun. We just hung around the house and cooked and sat in front of the fire and watched Nightmare on Elm street for the ten millionth time. But this weird sense of well being came over me that I was just sitting around my living room and cooking and talking and not thinking about remodeling. And I was not scrutinizing every wall or generally looking at the place as I imagine it will look after more remodeling.

It was nice having a mental day off, cause I’ve fallen into this obsessive tunnel vision vortex as the result of the last three months spent remodeling. I’ve seen this behaviour in other people’s journals online, so at least it’s not just me.
The other night when Jeremy and I went out to dinner we talked about our house the whole time, which isn’t that rare or annoying in the least, but I think I’m going to start talking about my remodeling more on this site… driving away the last three readers with boredom. I’m at a loss for just about anything else to talk about.
I’m also working on creating a massive ongoing before/after book with all the work we’ve done. You could divide the interior of this place into thirds or fourths and about a third of it is a few weeks away from being pretty completely remodeled, which is kind of psychotic. But maybe not, since it’s only two bedrooms and a hallway and not something scary and monumental like the kitchen.
The front third of this house is the living room/dining room, which needs a lot of different things, but the most accessible/do-able thing is to strip the woodwork. Jeremy did a whole panel on one of the beams the other night and now this seems like something we could get done sooner rather than later. Evil people painted over all the stained woodwork in the front of the house at some point. And maybe I’m crazy, but it seemed like the paint came off the stained wood easier than it did in the back on the wood that was probably painted from the get go. Little discoveries like this turn out to be a rallying cry, but today was kind of a disaster. The two gallons of paint for the back bedroom walls were severely different shades of green, which shut down a whole day’s worth of work since the store was closed.
Here’s what else went wrong:
The love seat that would have fit in our living room perfectly that we saw last week at a thrift store had been sold.
Fred Meyer’s 50% off xmas decorations had been looted by the time we got there, so we couldn’t add more strings of blue lights to our collection. The six boxes I bought last year barely seemed to cover the porch. I guess next November, I’ll have to spend 100% to get lights to cover the front peak of the house.
And then we drove out to Portland Nursery to make a first stab at landscaping, but they were closed as well. This town is full of great locally owned stores, but they like to close whenever they get the chance.

Despite that, take a second now to sign this petition from the excellent people at Onward Oregon who are trying to organize people to stop the building of a huge Home Depot at the foot of the Burnside Bridge. I used to like HD when I lived in LA and it was open 24 hours a day and you could go down there and buy something at four in the morning. When I was a kid, twenty four hour retail seemed like the height of glamorous big city living and I was so disappointed to find it pretty non-existant when I lived in NYC. But Home Depot sucks on every level. They’re exactly the same as Walmart in their business practices, sell crappy stuff and are eye-sores.

Otherwise, we made contact with the former owner of this house on xmas eve. We got a big package for her from UPS, which was a good excuse to call her up. Jeremy was the one that actually chatted with her and didn’t get much of a chance to speak. If I’d been on the phone, I would have asked what she was thinking when she did all that bad stenciling work in the back of the house.