Goblet of Fire: a brief review

taken from jkrowling.com

Another Harry Potter book down for this girl! Which means that I'm one book closer to being part of the worldwide clique that is Harry Potter fans. One book closer to knowing the facts and plot points that everyone else already knows. And one book closer to finishing my 2015 reading goals. (37% through them, guys. And it's not even March. Self-high five.)

Harry's fourth year at Hogwarts brings a surprise: an Olympic-type competition where students from other magic schools in other countries come to Hogwarts and try to win the Triwizard Tournament Cup. Despite the fact that Harry is not old enough to compete, his name is entered and he is doesn't have a choice but to compete. Meanwhile, Ron gets jealous of all the attention Harry receives, Hermione is obsessed with freeing the house elves at Hogwarts, Sirius keeps in touch with Harry from a hiding place in the mountains, and a truth-stretching gossip columnist keeps reporting on private information she has no way of knowing.

I really liked this one. Maybe it was because of the audiobook format, but I didn't mind the Triwizard Tournament scenes at all, and didn't have a hard time keeping up with the details like I sometimes do in heavy action scenes. I enjoyed the progression of characterization a lot in this book; I developed a new level of interest and appreciation for characters who had always been around, like Fred and George Weasley, because of how Rowling bulked up their story lines, dialogue, and personalities this time. And, WHOA SURPRISE ENDING. Didn't see that whole Mad Eye Moody thing happening at all. (That's not technically a spoiler. I didn't give any details. Also, I'm sure not too many people are worried about me spoiling anything.) One more thing to discuss...listening to the scene where Crouch's son is screaming about not wanting to go to Azkaban was horrifying. Bone chilling, and horrifying.

Order of the Phoenix, you're next.

Easy Laundry Room Fix

Do you have a room in your house that has that one thing that really bugs you and you wish you could change? I feel like we all do. Mine has been my laundry room, and the one thing that has really bugged me is this stupid hanging rack.

I think every laundry room needs a place to hang things (clothes that can't go in the dryer, your infants huge, cloth bathtub insert...) and the fact that we had this old clothes rack was convenient. I think I bought it when I was living in my apartment before meeting JT, and we used it to store out of season jackets and such in our basement at our old house. When we moved to Berryville and I didn't have a great place to hang things (the closest bathroom is on the other side of the house), this little rack seemed like a great solution. The thing is, though, that it takes up so much space in that room that I very quickly realized that I needed it gone. For such a simple piece of furniture, it really just can't get out of the way. It is on wheels, which has been very helpful when I need to move it, but there aren't really any good places to move it to. The rest of the mudroom is full of dog bowls and the backdoor and the basement steps (which we actually use all day long because of the wood stove now). The only really good place for it is where it sits in the picture - which is where is it 95% of the time - but it sits way out into the room because of the wide footprint and the baseboard that sits proud of the wall by another handful of inches.

I can't remember when I started plotting for a laundry room overhaul, but I know it was a while ago. The only problem with the laundry room is this rack, and I had elaborate plans to fix it. I wanted cabinets above the washer and dryer counter top for more storage, with a hanging bar spanning between the cabinets to hang things on so I could get rid of the rack. But then when I brought up my plans to JT, he mentioned that the hanging bar would be too far away for me to reach since the washer and dryer have to sit several feet off the back wall; the cabinets would also look strange because of the huge pass-through hole in the wall.

So the simple plan became much more complicated, and we talked about filling in that hole to make a solid wall, then hanging the cabinets and hanging bar. It was pushed way into the future because it had become too big to tackle anytime soon, and I figured I was stuck with the rack for a long time. But then it occurred to me one day that maybe there was a simpler solution. After a quick search for hanging drying racks, I discovered that WalMart sells a white one for a mere $13. Thirteen dollars, guys. I bought it, JT hung it, and fifteen minutes later the coat rack was hanging coats in the basement and my laundry room had doubled the available floor space.

Don't mind JT's face in the mirror, or Charlotte's sunflower bathtub. Look at that drying rack! And most importantly, look at all the open floor!

I walk through this room so many times a day, whether it's to do laundry or to fill the dog bowls at the sink, and I am completely honest when I say that the lack of the coat rack is life changing. I feel like I have a whole new laundry room, and it didn't require a single cabinet, sheet of drywall, or step stool to reach the hanging bar that's out of my reach. All it took was a $13 drying rack and all my problems were solved. WalMart for the win, folks.

Basement Stage 1: Completed

We've been picking away at our basement facelift for a couple of months now, and as of Sunday night we have finally reached a good stopping point for a while. Praise. The. Lord. JT's aching body and my grumpy need for husband quality time have both been suffering.

As a reminder, we installed the wood stove down in the very unfinished basement, and then found ourselves in a situation where the things we should do to help the efficiency of the stove turned into a whole bunch of "well while we're doing that we might as well do this too." To keep things somewhat realistic, we've decided on a moderately long term goal of pseudo-finishing the basement within the next couple years, with the bulk of it probably being done over the course of this year. Stage 1 (meaning, the stuff we're going to do right now) is officially done.

This is what we started with. I wish so much that I had better before pictures, but I tend to get excited and jump right into things without capturing the originals very well. I'm trying to work on that though.

This is a tiny little slice of our whole basement, but it does do its job in showing what the walls looked like and what the ceiling looked like. This was our basement for the last year and a half of us living here; it was a little creepy and very dirty and we never went down there. I shared in the initial basement facelift post and the last basement update post that JT had spent a considerable amount of time DRYLOKing the walls and then spraying Kilz on all the walls and ceiling rafters. He also insulated all of the windows and crawl space entrances. Here is what the basement looked like when that was done.

Just to give you your bearings: the entrance to the basement from the rest of the house is the doorway at the left of the picture, and the outdoor entrance is at the far right. The wood stove is on the other side of the brick fireplace you see in the middle of the room.

This is the part of the basement that we spent this weekend working on. You may notice that the ceiling is lower on the right side of the picture, which is because the book room upstairs has a step down into it. The ceiling is too low in that space to legally finish it, so we decided it would be a nice big storage area for all that junk you see piled up in the middle of the room. Our plan was to line the back wall with shelves, which meant buying a whole bunch of wood.

And then transporting them all downstairs with an incredibly advanced system.

Then JT just spent the first half of the day cutting, and the second half of the day forming the frame. We used these plans (with some adjustments, but I couldn't tell you what those adjustments were because it's all JT at that point).

First he built the vertical supports, then he built up the boxes that would be the shelves' supports.

And then it was just a matter of screwing everything together (again, I say this like it was easy peasy and like I was the one doing it. I did help hold some things, but Charlotte refused to be happy Saturday so it was almost entirely JT).

Beautiful, aren't they? That was Saturday night's stopping point, and Sunday we ripped down the plywood and JT installed it all for the shelves' bases. And then we had the pleasant experience of going through that massive pile of stuff to weed out garbage, make a donate pile, and reorganize in a more logical way. Not to mention that all of it (ALL of it) was coated in paint dust from the sprayer, even though it was under a tarp the whole time. But in the end, this is what we have.

Looks good, doesn't it? The white brightens up the whole room so much, and the shelves are a dream. It's so much better than the pile in the middle of the room. (Don't mind that huge puddle of spilled paint in the middle of the floor. It's always good to make sure your spouse hears you when you ask them to tighten the lid on the 5 gallon bucket of paint.)

And you might notice that the red support poles are now white! It took four coats but thankfully it was a super quick process and they look so much better now! The paint on the floor and around the poles isn't an issue because on our list to get done sometime this year is to paint the whole floor. So no worries there.

We're stoked about the changes that have already happened in the basement, and we're excited about the rest of the changes that will take place over the course of the year (and longer). One thing on the list that is pretty awesome is that we will wall in the storage room and line the rest of the walls with more of the same shelves. Can you even imagine? I'm already dreaming of all the stocking up I can do...I may be able to avoid Costco for six months! ;)

Here's our basement to-do list as it looks right now (long term and short term):

• insulate rafters and paint over them
• paint the red support posts white
• build shelves for storage space and organize everything that's under that huge tarp
• paint the floor (later in the year)
• put walls up to conceal the storage area (maybe by the end of the year/next winter sometime)
• install more shelves in the concealed storage area (end of the year/next winter)
• put in a bathroom (long term plans)
• sheet rock ceiling (long term plans)
• sheet rock and insulation on walls (long term plans)
• install outlets throughout the basement (long term plans)
• furnish the rooms (long term plans)

So we do have a long way to go still, but I'm glad we will be picking away at it over time. There are still those handful of things that we would love to get done at some point this year, but nothing really seems to be an emergency any more and we can leisurely cross them off the list. Fingers crossed, but the next big project for our list is, as of right now, my dining room table and various kitchen accessories! My fingers are crossed REAL hard for this, because I. Can't. Wait. for my table. I left the plastic fold-up table out for weeks after Thanksgiving instead of putting it away because I just loved pretending I had my big farmhouse table already. And it's looking very promising that we should be building it in May!

The Rosie Project: a brief review

taken from amazon.com

This was one of those books that I kept hearing about from all kinds of people, so I put it on my 2015 reading list to make sure I would get to it. And then last month I tricked my book club into reading it for February so I was able to knock it out pretty early into the year.

The Rosie Project is told from the perspective of Don Tillman, a genetics professor with (an undiagnosed case of) Asperger's who has decided it's time to find a wife. In order to properly weed out women who are a waste of time, Don creates a questionnaire that he widely distributes on dating sites, in speed dating circles, and through the help of friends' word of mouth with the hopes of finding the perfect woman. When he meets a woman named Rosie who doesn't even come close to qualifying as the perfect woman according to Don, he realizes that he may have to reevaluate some things.

I really liked this book. Lots of people at book club said that Don reminded them of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory; I couldn't get the image of a grown-up Max Braverman from Parenthood out of my head instead. I realized about three-quarters of the way through that I was reading other characters' responses and actions through Don's eyes, and that I could actually use the emotions and empathy that I possess to understand beyond what Don can see. This was the kind of book where you love some characters and hate others, which I think is a genuinely cool thing to be able to say about a book; the author created real and believable people. I had fun reading it, and when it ended (which, by the way, I loved the ending) I was very interested in reading the sequel so I could know what happens next with these characters.

Just for fun, here's my progress on my 2015 reading goals:

• Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
• Monster, by Walter Dean Myers
• Dash and Lily's Book of Dares, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
• The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion
• Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, by Mindy Kaling
• Yes Please, by Amy Poehler
• A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby
• This is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper
• Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
• Serena, by Ron Rash
• Prisoner of Azkaban, by J.K. Rowling
• Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling
• Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling
• Half Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling
• Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

In case you're unable to total those numbers yourself, that's 5 down, 11 to go. And it's only the end of February. AND I started Dash and Lily's last night on the Kindle and Goblet of Fire today on the audiobook. The way this is looking, I may actually get to read all of these AND some others this year!

Basement Update

Last time I showed you pictures of the basement mini-reno, JT had just finished painting the walls but everything was still a mess down there. Since then, he has spent an incredible amount of time insulating the ends of the rafters, sealing a few more drafts we discovered (seriously...how can there be so many drafts?), painting over all the new insulation, and cleaning everything up. And now the pictures are much more dramatic.

Just as a reminder, here is a (kind of bad) picture of what we started with:

And this is what we had last time:

And this is what we have now:

Looks pretty good, right? JT has killed himself (almost but not quite literally) on this basement so far, and I think we're both pretty stoked the light at the end of the tunnel is getting closer. Just for giggles, here are some close ups of the insulation JT installed to try to help with drafts.

Do you see the space in between each rafter, and how there is now insulation filling each space? It's hard to see because he also painted over each piece to make it less noticeable. Honestly, guys, we have a lot of rafters and that's a lot of spaces to fill. He cut each piece of insulation separately to size, stapled them all in place, and then painted them all. All the way around the whole  basement. He also covered both crawl space holes with fresh insulation and all three mini windows with insulation and painted over all of them as well.

 That's one of the crawl space holes filled in.

It all looks so good and clean! And not even slightly creepy like it was originally. You may notice that there's paint on the floor from when he sprayed the walls, but that's okay because painting the floor is in the middle-long term plan. Next up on the list is building a massive amount of shelves for the storage area and going through/organizing that massive pile of stuff that's sitting in the middle of the room. I'm not necessarily looking forward to that process, but I'm SUPER excited for the finished product.

Here's the basement progress so far:

• insulate rafters and paint over them
• paint the red support posts white (soon)
• build shelves for storage space and organize everything that's under that huge tarp (soon)
• paint the floor (later in the year)
• (maybe) move the treadmill downstairs (later in the year)
• put walls up to conceal the storage area (maybe by the end of the year/next winter sometime)

It still looks like a lot on that list, but they should all be relatively quick and easy (famous. last. words.). Unless this predicted snow gets in the way, wood should be purchased for the shelves this weekend and we will knock those out before JT starts his class in March and becomes, in his words, "useless" for a while. 

Prisoner of Azkaban: a brief review

So you remember when I listened to Unbroken on audiobook and I fell in love? And then I listened to Serena on audiobook and said that I realized not all audiobooks are created equal because that one had been super boring and the reader made me want to either sleep or puke? Well. Let me introduce to you the talents of Mr. Jim Dale, folks. I fell in love with Jim Dale's sweet voice during the brief but wonderful television show Pushing Daisies, which he narrated. I didn't actually realize at the time that he was anyone other than just the Pushing Daisies narrator, so when I popped in Prisoner of Azkaban and heard that sweet voice reading me Harry Potter...needless to say I got excited. (I have since discovered that Jim Dale isn't such a secret treasure and that apparently all Harry Potter fans love him, but as we all know I'm usually the last to get in on just about anything so that fits.)

Harry starts his third year at Hogwarts in this third book of the series; tales of an escaped convict on the loose and searching for Harry haunt him as tries to get back into the swing of things at school. Meanwhile, Hagrid is teaching a class for the first time, the third professor of the Defense Against the Dark Arts class in three years is helping the students break some new ground, Gryffindor may have a real shot to win the Quidditch Cup, and Hermione seems to be taking more classes than is physically possible. As Harry tries to avoid running into the terrifying man who seems to be hunting him down, he discovers some new pieces of information about his past.

I really enjoyed the majority of this book. There was a dry spell (ha...spell) about 75% of the way through where I felt like it was dragging. Some of the descriptions got a little too detailed, and some of the scenes got a little too long winded. But then the end was incredibly awesome and I decided that I didn't really care so much about the earlier scenes. I will also grant Ms. Rowling that the problem may have been that I was making breakfast, washing dishes and feeding Charlotte bananas when I was listening to those scenes. I also need to take a moment (even though some of the characters already said it themselves) to rant about how ridiculous Snape is. I mean...ridiculous, right? You weren't the popular kid in high school. Get over it.

In addition to finishing this book today, I also finished The Rosie Project today. Not to brag, but I am absolutely crushing 2015.

Serena: a brief review

taken from wikipedia.com

So...I have learned a valuable lesson since you last heard from me: not all audiobooks were created equal. Sometimes they're just super duper boring and you don't really even pay any attention to what you're listening to. Which doesn't really work out that great, unless you're like me and just can't wait to be done with the dumb thing so you can cross it off your list. But as of about ten minutes ago, I am done with the dumb thing and am now crossing it off my list!

Pemberton (I'm too lazy to look up his first name, and since the author never bothered to refer to him as anything else, I think I'm okay with that) and his brand new wife Serena return to his successful lumber yard and saw mill in North Carolina during the Great Depression. Serena is the strong, silent type with a fierce ability to get whatever she wants; over time the things that she wants require more violent and ruthless tactics but she is merciless. No one is safe on her journey to riches. (How corny was that sentence? And I wrote it.)

Full disclosure: the end of this book was good. Not really good, and not super amazing, but good. A modest "good." The rest of it was boring and long and so full of unnecessary details I wanted to scream. Also, the reader of the audiobook was awful (in my not so expert opinion, anyway) so maybe that didn't help. But I just found myself wondering when the plot was actually going to start. And I felt that way until disc 7 of 10...but then shortly after I realized I was super bored again all the way until disc 10. That, Mr. Ron Rash, does not a good book make.

I decided to read this book because it was being made into a movie (so yay for crossing things off of personal goal lists as well as New Year's lists), and even though I found it super boring, I still kind of want to see that movie. Does that make me crazy? Probably. But here are my reasons:

1.  It's Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. I love both of them and I love them together. And I think JLaw will be a killer Serena (pun fully intended).
2. All the unnecessary details and boring stuff has GOT to be trimmed for the movie version, right? I mean...that's what they always do when they turn a book into a movie. They trim it way down until it's not even the same story anymore. I'm hoping for that this time.
3. Sometimes the movie is just better than the incredibly boring audiobook (but don't tell my husband I said that, because he will be doing his victory dance for the next ten years). 

So we will see. All in all I obviously didn't enjoy the book but maybe there's still hope for the movie. And if not then, hey, at least I got to cross something off my list. (And I did it with a library audiobook, so at no cost to me. Always a victory there.) 

A Basement Facelift

Some of you that are homeowners are aware of the phenomenon that is the snowball effect: you fix and/or add one thing and decide "well since we're doing this we might as well cross this thing off the list too, and if we're going to do those things we really should get this done first, and then we might as well do this too..." and suddenly you're chin-deep in a project and the only way out is to just get it done (and spend much more money than you ever anticipated for that initial tiny addition). Friends, welcome to our basement.

As far as unfinished basements go, it's quite large. 1,800 square feet, in fact. It's really handy because all the junk we didn't feel like going through and cleaning out when we moved could just be tossed down there and not really dealt with because I wasn't having to find homes for it. We always knew we would build shelves to store all that junk, and we always imagined finishing it in the faaaar off future. It just wasn't a priority because it didn't need to be, and honestly we had more than enough keeping us busy upstairs. But then we installed a wood burning stove in the basement to supplement the heat pump and help offset some cost. When we had the first couple truly frigid days we realized how much air was coming into the basement through various drafts and cracks (and therefore fighting the work of the stove), so we sealed them all up. (Who am I kidding? We didn't do anything. JT did 99% of everything that has been done so far.) When we realized that a ton of moisture was coming in through the bare cinder blocks, though, it was time to do the horrible task of DRYLOKing all those walls. This stuff is super expensive and super thick. It goes on like mud, it must be hand-applied because it's too thick to be sprayed, and the bare cinder block sucks it up like a sponge so good luck doing anything less than two coats. JT spent a lot of time doing this. A LOT. I helped one afternoon when Charlotte actually napped for a significant chunk of time but other than that JT was down there all by himself.

I don't have much in the ways of a "before" picture (typical) but I do have this:

Here you can see the wood stove, the metal rack we've been storing wood on, and most importantly the bare cinder blocks. Here are some shots of the progress with the DRYLOK:

It's not much, I know, but you can see that the walls are white and that it's a pretty dramatic difference. I knew that even though we were doing this for a very practical reason, painting the walls white would also really lighten up the whole basement. I was excited for the dingy, dark, and moderately scary basement to be freshened and cleaned up a little bit. The next part of the snowball effect helped take that whole concept to a new level: JT was looking up at the basement ceiling one day and mentioned that those beams are 40 years old, and have 40 years of who knows what all over them and growing on them. He suggested we borrow a friend's sprayer and paint the ceiling with Kilz to go ahead and just kill whatever funk is on it. Since the cinder blocks had kind of sucked up the second coat of the DRYLOK as well and there was no way we were paying for enough paint for a third coat just so it would look good, we decided to actually spray the walls and ceiling with Kilz to even things out visually as well as just make sure we were cleaning everything up. 

This kind of killed me, I'm not going to lie. I love those rafters and beams; they're cedar, for crying out loud. Who builds houses with cedar? People in the 1970s, I suppose. They were so pretty and cool, but they were also kind of funky and I knew they would look good white too. So, JT once again got back to work and sprayed everything. And here's the current state of our basement:

I know it's still not all that pretty, but it looks great compared to what it did. And we also know what's to come, which means that having it painted is such a great first step (that was like a month in the making). Speaking of what's to come...we originally hadn't planned on even touching this basement for many many years, and then we decided to jump head first into it and just do it all, and we've now settled on kind of a happy medium. Here's what's to come for our basement, with a rough schedule:

• paint the red support posts white (soon)
• build shelves for storage space and organize everything that's under that huge tarp (soon)
• paint the floor (later in the year)
• move the treadmill downstairs (later in the year)
• put walls up to conceal the storage area (maybe by the end of the year/next winter sometime)

So that's the loose plan. We had originally thought we'd just cruise right to area rugs and furniture and a television, making it just a couple of simple steps away from being finished. But since our only child is 4 months old and isn't in desperate need of a teenage hangout just yet, and since the upstairs of our house is 100% more than enough for us to live in, and since there are about a hundred other things we'd rather get started on in the house, we're tabling that thought for now. The shelves and the floor are still big ones, and we plan to do them this year but if not it certainly won't be a big deal. This has been an incredible amount of time and money invested to make it look like this, and even though it might not be too impressive in pictures we're more than pleased with the difference it makes. (And so does our wood stove, who doesn't have to work nearly as hard anymore.)