a pfaff for a tropf

In the middle of a recent project (no spoilers, but coming soon!), my sewing machine started jamming. At first I thought it was the bobbin, but I took out all the thread, and it had the same problem. I went to JoAnn and got some sewing machine oil. Using my manual, I opened up and oiled every spot indicated for oiling. It definitely seemed to move better, and I was very optimistic that this had solved my problem. Then I started sewing again. It did better, but it still jammed up some, though I was able to get it going again each time. I sadly admitted that my Kenmore Ultra-Stitch 6 had sewed its last stitch. 

My mom has a friend who is an amazing quilter. She recommended that I get Pfaff sewing machine. It has a feature called Integrated Dual Feed, or IDT (maybe the acronym makes sense in German), which helps the top and bottom fabrics feed evenly and sew smoothly. I looked online and found a dealer in Annapolis (Capital Vac and Sew). A girlfriend and I went over to check it out. 

The lady at the store showed me the Passport 2.0, which is the lowest cost Pfaff with the IDT feature. It has 70 stitch styles, which is about 10 times the number of stitches on my old Kenmore! The fabric fed really smoothly and all the stitches she showed us looked really nice. I fell in love immediately. Sorry for the bad picture; the lighting for photos isn't great there.

If you purchase a sewing machine at Capital Vac and Sew, it includes a lesson on how to use your new machine, so I went back the next weekend. I had an hour of learning how to wind the bobbin, insert the bobbin, thread the needle, use all the buttons to select a stitch and control the stitch length and width, and use all the different feet that come with the machine. I should be all ready to go. Now I just need some projects!

And finally, some advice sent to me by my Mom's friend:

what happens when you pull your car too far into the garage

Back in December, we cleaned the rest of the old furniture out of our garage, so Zach's car could finally live in there. Of course, there's still a lot of stuff in the garage, and it's just barely big enough. The lawnmower lives on Zach's side of the garage, and he pulls right up to it, leaving about 3 inches between then back of his car and the closed garage door. Sometimes, he pulls in a little too far and nudges the lawnmower. Last week, he pulled in a little more too far and nudged the lawnmower into the water spigot, bending the knob attachment. I came home from work the next day to a mini river flowing from the hose out to the driveway because, with that attachment bent, the knob wouldn't fully close anymore.

  After turning off the water to that spigot, I easily took the knob attachment out, just by unscrewing it. I was hoping to only have to replace that part because attempting to unscrew the entire faucet+pipe was not successful. Unfortunately, the plumbing guy at Home Depot (who was extremely nice and helpful and talked to me at just the right level of knowledge) said that wouldn't really work. For starters, you can't just buy that inner piece. Plus, he said that if you just replaced that part, you couldn't really be sure that you got a good seal inside. So besides getting me the faucet+pipe piece I needed, he also recommended a penetrating lubricant (insert dirty joke here) to attempt to get the existing pipe to budge.

Now the fun could begin. In order to reach the oil back to the pipe fitting, I had to rip out some drywall. And it turned out to be super-thick drywall, about an inch thick, so cutting through it was not easy. Between a box-cutter, hacksaw, rubber mallet, and lots of elbow grease, I finally got enough drywall out that I could reach in and find the screw end of my pipe. 

I sprayed it liberally with the penetrating oil, let it sit and penetrate for a few minutes as instructed, hooked on my wrench, and attempted to turn. No luck. More oil, more waiting, more no movement. Eventually I gave up and waited for Zach to get home. I held the wrench while he gripped the faucet with some pliers and attempted to turn. No luck. More oil, still nothing. More oil, still nothing, other than Zach yanking so hard that I lost my grip on the wrench, which then smashed into my finger. At this point, we gave up again to wait until we could enlist help from our wonderful friend, who has helped me many times in the past (with this, and this, plus various other smaller things that haven't made it into this blog). 

The next evening, our friend came over, and between two strong men and two pairs of pliers, they finally got that pipe unscrewed! 

It turned out that the pipe/faucet that the Home Depot guy had picked for me was longer than what we had, so with pipe in hand, I went back to Home Depot and traded it in for a shorter one. It turned out they didn't have one that was actually the same length, but the shorter one wasn't MUCH shorter, and I already knew there was some wiggle room, so I went with that. 

We already had some Teflon tape, which I wrapped around the threaded end of the pipe for sealing help. I screwed it in by hand as tightly as I could, then enlisted Zach's help again to tighten it further with me holding the end still with pliers and Zach screwing the pipe in. We turned the water on and no leaking! Success!

Unfortunately, this project was still not done. As you can see from the above photo, there was still a hole in the wall. Since the drywall was so thick, I figured I could just screw the one side back in and glue the rest of it back together. And since it's in the garage and doesn't need to look nice, I decided to not even mud over it this point. This turned out to be less easy than anticipated, but eventually I got it closed up enough for a garage wall.

my cats are not hellish enough for jackson galaxy

Warning: this is a pretty long post and not about house projects. If you choose to not continue reading, I will not be offended.

You've probably heard of Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer. You may or may not have heard of Jackson Galaxy, the cat whisperer. He has a show called "My Cat from Hell." Last year, they had an open casting call across the country, and I submitted our cats. Apparently, they were not bad enough, at least compared to other entries, to make in on the show. I think one of the main reasons is that most of the people who get on the show are saying that, if the cat doesn't get it's behavior problems resolved, they're going to re-home it or put it down. We could never do that; I couldn't even pretend we would do that to try to get on TV. 

So why are our cats hellish? They don't always use the litter box. This has been going on for about three years. I don't talk about it much because it's embarrassing, and I feel that, at least some people will judge Zach and me and think that we should get rid of the cats, that we shouldn't put up with this. Because it's not normal. Zach never had pets before, and I often get the impression that he thinks this is just one of those things we have to put up with if we have cats, like having cat hair all over everything. I grew up with cats, and the only times they ever went outside the litter box was when they were sick, and if it went on for too long, my parents had them put down. Our cats are not sick. We've taken them to the vet. Dodger was sick for awhile, so I forgave his bad behavior then. Now he seems to be doing better. Oliver has never had an excuse. Using the amazing technology of a webcam built into my laptop, we've spied on the cats to see who is being bad, and it seems to go back and forth -- one will be bad for awhile, then the other will start. I'll spare you too many details. Recently, we put a litter box in the middle of the staircase landing, and Dodger has been better, but Oliver continues to misbehave. 

Having the litter box on the staircase landing for probably the second or third time was probably the last straw for me. I feel like we can't have people over to the house when we have litter boxes all over the place, and you have to jump over them to get up the stairs. Also, I've been getting some overtime pay the last couple of weeks. I'd been planning to save up for a new laptop, but I decided to instead spend the money on a cat behaviorist, like Jackson Galaxy, but not on TV and not free. So I did some research, and found a certified pet behaviorist in our area, Mary at Helping Pets Behave. (Note: this is NOT a sponsored post (but if Mary happens to see this and decide to give me a discount on future behavior consultations, I would be OK with that)).

After talking a bit on the phone and scheduling a time for her to come out to the house, Mary sent me some forms to fill out, asking for all sorts of info from medical history of the cats to their favorite activities to the nitty-gritty details of their inappropriate behavior. As part of the details, I had to make a floor plan of our whole house, labeling all the litter boxes and their sizes, locations of inappropriate behavior, and places where the cats like to hang out. It all took a really long time to fill out. I also sent a video of Oliver peeing on the floor. 

Then one afternoon, Mary came to the house. If you've ever seen "My Cat From Hell," it was pretty much just like that. I gave her a tour of the house, especially noting where each cat likes to hang out and where they each go to the bathroom. She also got to meet Oliver, who showed off his tiny-ness and walking swagger. Dodger hid as soon as the doorbell rang and would not be enticed out, even by the offer of treats. We talked for over an hour about the cats and their various behaviors, how they've changed over time, and all the things I have tried over the past three years to solve the litter box problems. In the end, Mary seemed to think that the primary issue is that neither cat really likes the litter. We've used a few different kinds over the years, primarily a corn-based litter called World's Best Cat Litter and a clay litter called Cat Attract. Mary suggested getting two new boxes, one filled with about an inch of potting soil and the other with nothing but a piece of the plastic carpet runner that currently covers the staircase landing where the cats like to go. She also recommended moving all litter boxes and food back into the "cat room," a bedroom we have always designated to house a cat tree, some litter boxes, toys, etc. Since all bed behavior was confined to the cat room before we moved food and litter boxes out of it, the goal is to revert back to that previous state with the addition of the new test litter boxes, which hopefully the cats will prefer to the floor.

UPDATE: So far, that has not happened 100%. The cats continued to go on the stair landing. I tried to clean it, but in the end, we decided to rip up the carpet and replace it with hardwood (more on that in a future post!). We have gone back to confining the cats to the cat room at night, which has helped since that's now several hours when they don't have access to the stairs. They have not used the box with the plastic mat, but they have started using the box with potting soil, after I rearranged the boxes a bit. However, after a bit of web-cam spying, I'm not sure that they like the dirt any better than the litter.

guest room updates

I know I haven't posted for awhile, and this will be a short and sweet post. I've been pretty busy and haven't found much time for projects. I have started something, but it will be quite awhile before I post about it.

Over the past few weeks, I've made some minor updates to our guest room. I added some curtains and a bookshelf. We already had blackout pull-down shades in there, but they weren't very interesting to look at (plain off-white). Plus, they aren't completely flush with the sides of the windows, so some light still gets in around them. In the morning, that side of the house gets the full rising sun, so I wanted to try to make it as much darker as possible. I found these on Overstock, and the colors looked just perfect to go with the dusty purple bedspread and gray walls. I got some curtain rods at Target. I positioned the rods so they'd come out about 2" on either side of the window and be about 4" above the window. All the screws went into studs. And so we went from this:

To this:

I also added some more shelves. I had put up some wall shelves in December, but I decided to replace those with a full bookshelf. I got one on Amazon for 40% off that closely resembled the Ikea Billy bookcase that I already have in there. (I didn't want another Ikea Billy because they don't come in true white, but more of an off-white. I had spray painted the one I had, but didn't want to do that again.)

Then I had two wall shelves that I had taken down from the wall where I put the new white bookshelf, so I added them to the wall above where there were already some shelves for my sewing/crafting supplies.

The guest room is still a pretty big disaster, but I'm slowly getting it more organized!

when you can't find what you want, build it yourself

Here's another post that I wrote several weeks ago and am just now finishing up with pictures and posting...

Awhile ago, I decided that I needed a drawer for the bottom of my closet. Zach has a whole bunch in his closet, but they're cedar and, from what he told me, really expensive. Also, he couldn't seem to tell me where he had gotten them, other than "the Internet." I did some Internet searching, but all I could really find were plastic storage drawers that weren't the right size. 

Then one day, while browsing the blogosphere, I realized that people are building things with drawers, and I should be able to just take the relevant information from that to build a single stand-alone drawer for my closet. Then I found Ana White and pretty much fell in love. She has an amazing site filled with instructions for building probably just about anything you could want. And the site has a good search capability to search through all her projects, which I did, searching only for "drawer." That's how I came upon her tutorial for making an entryway bench with drawer and hutch. The bottom part, the drawer bench, is basically what I wanted, with some minor dimensional tweaks. I got so excited, I couldn't wait to get home to measure my space and start drawing up my plans! I almost left work early, but I exerted some self-control and stayed. But as soon as I got home, I got to work, measuring my closet area, drawing some plans on graph paper, and figuring out how much of what size boards I would need. Then I just wished it was the weekend instead of Wednesday, so I could get started.

Ana White's tutorial is wonderful, with great instructions and drawings, so I won't attempt to recreate it here. Instead, I'll just note where I differed from her plans, which is mainly in the dimensions. After measuring my closet floor, I decided to make my drawer 28" wide, 18" deep, and 10" tall. After lots of drawing and thinking and math, I determined that I should get 9' of 1x18, 4' of 1x8, and 6' of 1x2. As some of you may know, you can't get 1x18 boards. When Ana White says to use boards of odd sizes, she means get plywood and cut it to your needs. I did some more math to figure out what sizes to get my boards pre-cut at Home Depot so they would fit in my car and loaded it all up. Occasionally, I wish I had a truck.

I got all my pieces cut and spray-primed them with Kilz. I thought that would be easier/faster than using regular primer, which takes longer both to apply and to dry.

I assembled the outside using 2" nails. In hindsight, I wish I had used pocket holes/screws. It would have looked nicer and probably would have assembled more cleanly too. I don't have a pocket hole jig, but for the drawer, I borrowed one from my awesome friend who often lets me borrow his tools, and it was great. Pocket hole jig is going on my Christmas wish list! 

 
I had some difficulty with the drawer fitting, probably due to things not being perfectly square and possibly from slightly off measurements/cutting. I had to do some last-minute sanding and trimming to get it all to work. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be super pretty, since it's going to sit on the floor of my closet, and probably no one but me will ever really see it. I finished the inside of the drawer off with Modge-podge and wrapping paper to cover up the pocket holes and give it a little nicer feel. I definitely learned a lot from this project, so if I did something similar again, it would probably be better. 

4 little reindeer

This post is a few weeks delayed, and I really have no excuse. I wrote it back then and uploaded the pictures to my laptop, but then just never seemed to get around to inserting the pics and posting. As I said, no excuse. But better late than never, right?

I saw these little cork reindeer on Pretty Handy Girl and thought they were super cute. I wanted to do a little something for our friends who let me use their power tools, and since they're pretty into wine, this seemed perfect.

I started making the antlers the way Pretty Handy Girl did, but although I thought hers looked cute, I thought mine looked like cows. So I tried adding some more antlers to try to make them look more like deer. It helped with the look, but was a lot harder to implement. I found it very difficult to push the wire into the cork, even using pliers, so I resorted to drilling small holes. For the antlers, I drilled a hole big enough for 2 or 3 wires, stuck all the wires in the hole, and put some hot glue around to hole them in place. Then I bent the wires as desired to make them look like antlers. For all the other parts, after drilling the hole, I put a dot of hot glue on the hole, then pushed the wire in.

As usual, this project took much longer then I'd anticipated, but it did speed up once I got the hang of it. I think my little reindeer are pretty cute. Hopefully my friends will think so too.

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas

I know I haven't posted in awhile, and this isn't really a post about projects. I'll be back with some more projects soon. This is a post about getting ready for Christmas, which is probably my favorite time of year.

The weekend after Thanksgiving, we decorated our house for Christmas. We put up our tree in the nook between staircases between the living and dining rooms. Usually we keep the recycle bin there, so it gets relocated to the dining room sitting area. I love decorating the tree. I love pulling out all the ornaments from their boxes, ones that I'd forgotten about and ones that evoke special memories and nostalgia. Dodger liked helping too.

Before                                                                    After

I got out the snowflake tablecloth and the new candles my mom just got us.

I set out the advent "wreath" I made at Bible study last week.

I put up the nativities on the entertainment center, and I hung our stockings on the mantle in the first-floor rec room. We also have a couple of mini trees for other rooms.

Now our house feels festive and happy!