Category: The Lisa Chronicles

Throbbing Manor: Exterior (during, staged)


As it is seemingly typical in those who live in all season states, when it’s one season we long for it to be another. I moaned, lamented, whined, whinged, complained and whatever other adjective you could possible use about the lack of snow here in the mitten state at the beginning of winter. That is, of course, until we got teased with snOMGeddon a million times (this is what lake effect weather will do to you) and while we aren’t technically in snowpocalypse, it just hasn’t quit fucking snowing.
With all that being said, Carrie (@librarybug) recently commented that it was only 60 more days until spring!, which cheered me the fuck up. After doom, gloom, dry skin, slush and mush, anything resembling the next season of course makes me happy. That is until I moan, lament, whine, whinge and complain that it is too goddamned hot in the summer and oh boy, can I not wait until fall/winter to arrive. Rinse, lather and repeat.
As part of the staging process of the house, the flipper dropped some cash on having the entire property (front, side and back) landscaped to nearly an inch in its life. This is, I hope, what we have to look forward to as the temperatures warm (with a few minor tweaks by us, of course). I’m now adding these exterior shots to remind me that spring really isn’t that far away.

Throbbing Manor: Master Suite (during, with some furniture)

Master suite with some of the bedroom furniture.

Inspired my by fabulous friend Carrie Anne, I took the que from her when we started shopping for furniture to start looking at thrift/antique stores for pieces. We found a lot of really great pieces at amazing deals and now most of the pieces in our home have a story that goes beyond being mass produced. It gives them character and I love that.
Unintentionally we set out to do the master suite in mid-century modern, which started when I found the period credenza at lamb, who were selling off interior pieces of their store due to an upcoming remodel. The color of the credenza, which is now a dresser/tv stand, matched the family of colors on our sheets. The bed is a king platform bed, in slate, that we got from Overstock and we assembled ourselves. I also found an antique mid-century modern period dresser with the same lines/design at BlueDoor in “harvest apple gold”, also known as THE GREEN of the ’70s. Turns out they were discounting the dresser and coupled with a modest fee to repaint it in a color of our choosing, the final price is essentially the original retail price of the dresser.1
Platform bed from Overstock.

1. Yes, I’m aware I sound like a douche bag but what we paid for both dressers, including the repainting of one and delivery of both is significantly cheaper then buying one dresser even discounted from a mass produced furniture place. So while I may be or sound like a douche bag, I’m a douche bag whose saving benjamins.

Introducing Throbbing Manor

Throbbing Manor

We’ve bought a house. A 3200 sqft, 1924 Arts & Crafts/English cottage-esque house in Heritage Hill, replete with a bootleggers ballroom in the basement, two fireplaces, and sitting rooms in the master and guest suites to name a few of its enticements.
Yes, I’m bragging.
The last two months have been a whirlwind of packing up our Royal Oak apartment, living in a hotel for nearly a month and finally closing and getting into the house. This is not including holidays, family drama/illnesses, job interviews, car related issues and other tchotchke like things that have been thrown in our direction. The night we moved in, we were in bed by 9:30. P.M. WednesdayThePug is beside herself because there is SO MUCH SPACE. In this period, I’ve discovered two things:

  1. A lot of people are into house porn. Beyond House Hunters and House Hunters International, I’ve had near-strangers on the intarwebs ask for images of the house just because they dug the style, look, etc.
  2. My husband is secretly a woman. There is NO (straight) MAN on the planet who will call you up and say, “Let’s talk about dining room chairs!” And mean it in a, “I’m serious, let’s talk about style/fabric/etc of said chairs.” This fully confirms that I missed the shopping gene at some point because if I have to look at another goddamned dining room chair that looks almost identical to the last dozen I’ve recently seen, someone is getting a boot up their ass.

It is these two lessons learned that I decided to start uploading a pic a day of the house, including before, during and after. The house, if you haven’t heard me bang about this in person, is a flip that was completed by a local man/company and took nearly a year to complete. The house was almost literally gutted to the studs but a lot of the original architectural detailings were preserved and added back in. Simply put, the before images will make you cry. The during photos are photos of us moving in, so expect a lot of empty rooms and random pieces of furniture. The after will be the “finished” room. The images will be haphazard but I will also be updating a Flickr set with the images and linking back to said set, which will be in order. The idea is to have regularly posting content (Monday through Friday) about the house that will not take away from regular blogging itself.
I’ve toyed with cutting myself off from various social networks to get back to some projects now that the house stuff is all settled, but that still may be a few weeks and everyone is clamoring for pictures NOW. With that, I introduce you to Throbbing Manor, our home for the next 10-15 years! It also fully confirms that becoming an adult apparently is to have a garage door opener.
x0x0x,
Lisa

Lisa vs the Laundry Anonymous

For the last several weeks, while we wait to close on the house, we’ve been snuggled up in an extend stay hotel. While this sounds super romantic and before you picture us like Eloise or even, $deity forbid, Suite Life of Zack and Cody, hotel living is not as gorgeous as one may expect or sounds. For example, we have a kitchenette which gives us a full-sized fridge and dishwasher, but no oven and a two burner flat top stove. The only dishware and cutlery we have is a two piece setting with a few extra plates. One pot. One food strainer. The sink is not large enough to do hand washing so we tend to run the dishwasher half-empty. And of course, the one cabinet in entire place holds all the dishware and the one pot. There is no room to house food or added cookery items, even though there is no cabinetry above the kitchen/stove/dishwasher area. Incredibly poor planning.
We were planning on bringing with us our non-perishable foodstuffs and cookery but there is no storage in the kitchen, or really anywhere in the suite. Those items are now in storage! A single, 10 hanger wide armoire and two medium 3-drawer dressers for our clothes and personal effects. Even for two people who donated bags and bags of stuff to Salvation Army before the move and only took enough to last a few weeks, it’s a little beyond tight. There is no additional storage space for personal items, bathing items or even shoes anywhere else in the suite.
I’m still seething with another example of why hotel living sucks with an example from tonight when I had a laundry war going on with Anonymous. This extend stay hotel is frequented by pilots, flight attendants and traveling business people and to make it more attractive, they have laundry facilities on every floor which is awesome. What is NOT so awesome is incidents like tonight when someone in the mistaken guise of being kind, pulled our laundry out of the washer and threw it all in the dryer and turned the dryer on high heat AND took over the washer, when I had a bag dirty laundry still sitting on top of the washer.
Now, I’m irritated as with living in a complex for the last several years, I\’ve gotten in the habit of setting timers to move laundry from washer->dryer (wash is 30 minutes, dryers are 1 hour) every time we did laundry so not to trap all the machines. Since hotel used same washer/dryer brand as the complex, I set my timer on my iPhone for 30 minutes appropriately only to find that at 33 minutes after I had thrown the laundry into the wash, someone had thrown the laundry into the dryer. The irritant comes in because half the load were items that were NOT TO BE TUMBLED DRIED.
I yank open the dryer door, pull out all the not-to-be dried stuff, throw in my fabric sheet and continue with the drying. Once I get back to our hotel room, I set my timer for 45 minutes to see if I can finish the rest of our laundry since Anonymous has taken over the washer. At 40 minutes, I waltz down to the laundry area to discover that someone had pulled our laundry out of the dryer and thrown it on top of the dryer, put their stuff from washer into the dryer and filled up the washer with another load. The load in the dryer was in there for some unspecified time as the dryer was stopped but the clothes were hot to the touch. They probably assumed since our (now few) items left in the dryer were already dry, so what was the big problem with taking a few extra minutes from our load?
I stomp back to our suite, wanting to wage war against the assholes who fuck with my laundry while Justin is rolling his eyes at my melodrama and my angry fist shaking. Reporting it to the management is fine, I GUESS, but it doesn’t really solve the issue because I have NO idea who it was, so I didn’t go running to management with my tales of woe. I was thinking of pulling some bullshit passive aggressive move (such as pulling their laundry from the washer, putting it on top of the washer and letting the washer continue on) but decided that I couldn’t be that much of a dick. 2011 is should not begin with war waging over stupid laundry, but hey, I have a theory that the more shitty NYE/NY day is, the better my year.
Thus, here is why hotel living is not the bee’s knees and why I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here.
So I didn’t plan on turning this entry into some sort of rage against laundry anonymous because this entry was to be more of a short, hey these are my resolutions for the year, as inspired by Kate, and instead I paint a picture of me skulking about hotel hallways waiting to pounce unsuspectingly on Laundry Anonymous. I think of myself more of a “I’ll get you my pretty!” kind of person. With that, my resolutions and continuances will come tomorrow.
x0x0x,
Lisa

1. Drats. The realtor pulled all the interior images of the home and no, we did not buy the house at $115K.2
2. Then I got sucked into updating walkscore.om with information about our new neighborhood that was missing, which in fact raised our walk score. Woo!