The Thrifty Living Room

After much shopping for a solid deal, we finally found a way to spend the wedding money from my brother and his family... This AWESOME 9x12 wool cut pile rug was half-off and is warmer, denser, cushier, and better than everything else we looked at.

But what's uber-exciting is that we had money left over to basically purchase our entire living room from three local thrift stores. Now we can feel comfortable in our house, reduce consumerism, fund good causes, and help the environment...



The table is from Uhuru. The couch and beige chair are from Impact. And the Orange patterned arm chair is from New Life. It took a good bit of looking, but we think its pretty swanky. Especially after we rented a steamer this weekend and shined it all up.



And the best part is, it all goes perfectly with the "Buffalo Nickel" which was our first Living Room gift from my Brother... (Coincidentally also from New Life Thrift...) So, Mac and Tine, thanks for the awesome Living Room. We know it doesn't take the place of an actual thank you card; we'll get that in the mail shortly.

Paper Tiger

As previously mentioned, we're going to start tackling the Dining Room this winter/spring. In fact, we were planning on getting started this weekend in order to take advantage of my wife's availability: Classes are just starting up this week and she has MLKJDay off.**

But, we've decided to host one more event for which we'll need the Dining Room on Tuesday...
The GenXers in my extended family clan (and their children) have been getting together for a monthly dinner for the past year. My wife and I have put off hosting for some time, either because we were living downtown, living in someone else's house, or living in squalor.

So, before we do a major disassembly, we'll have an Asian Potluck for 8 adults, 4 kids, and 1 child-in-utero. Not sure what that will entail yet, but I'm desperately hoping there'll be seaweed, rice, and kimchi involved. (As the GenXers all hail from my mother's side of the family who were raised in Korea, we should be golden.)



That said, I'd like to get something started while we've got the time. So, this weekend, I'll do some shopping and organizing and researching. And maybe a little prepwork...

On the prepwork front, the only foreseeable thing I can do without creating hazards for the impending child/toddler/embryo arrival is scoring the walls to begin removing the painted wallpaper. Lots of web sites out there (and there and there and there) seem to have varying opinions on the best means and methods for painted wallpaper removal. We're going to see what we can do with a steamer, vinegar water, and scraper first. (Anyone out there with input, please feel free to add it in the comments section below...)

But one interesting discrepency between sources seems to be the use of "The Paper Tiger." Exciting name, huh? It makes me envision a scenario where my wife and I are working on the Dining Room and I say, "Love, Could you hand me the Paper Tiger?" while simultaneously making one of Ben Stiller's Blue Steel/Magnum/ Le Tigre faces from Zoolander and being really really ridiculously good looking:




















Of course, my wife responds appropriately by rolling her eyes and leaving to go hang out with normal people.

Anyways, the "Paper Tiger" is this circular spokey tool for scoring the painted wall paper so that a glue dissolving solution can work its way back behind the paper and cause it to separate from the wall. However, varying sources indicate that the results range from:
"significant damage to the plaster"
to
"ineffectual waste of time"
to
"created by God for the sole purpose of ending mankind's wallpaper scraping suffering".


Interestingly, the search "Paper Tiger" brought about a Wikipedia hit that summed up the situation quite nicely:

"Paper tiger is a literal English translation of the Chinese phrase zhǐ lǎohǔ (Chinese: 紙老虎), meaning something which seems as threatening as a tiger, but is really harmless."

The phrase is an ancient one in Chinese, but sources differ as to when it entered the English vocabulary. Although some sources may claim it dates back as far as 1850 [1], it seems the Chinese phrase was first translated when it was applied to describe the United States using propaganda tactics. In 1956, Mao Zedong said of the United States:

“

In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of; it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.

”

In Mao Zedong's view, the term could be applied to all allegedly imperialist nations, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union (following the Sino-Soviet split): Mao argued that they appeared to be superficially powerful but would have a tendency to overextend themselves in the international arena, at which point pressure could be brought upon them by other states to cause their sudden collapse. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at some point may have remarked that although the "U.S. is a paper tiger, it has atomic teeth".

We're interested to hear your thoughts/experiences:

1. Is the Paper Tiger Tool a Paper Tiger (ineffective)?

2. Is our Asian Potluck for 13 a Paper Tiger (overblown)?

3. Is the War on Terror an example of American overextension abroad which makes America a Paper Tiger (less secure)?

4. Is Zoolander's "Le Tigre" pose actually a clue that the Male Modeling Farce Movie produced by VH1 is an epic statement about imperialism in which Mugatu represents cold war interests, Derek Zoolander represents citizen naiveté, and Hansel represents Mao Zedong calling out individuals as Paper Tigers (not so good looking)?

Wow. I just blew your mind.




**Footnote: To Hillary and Obama who are both loyal readers of "The-House-Rules", please put your "Who's More Racist/Sexist" debate revolving around your political attempts to align yourselves with African-American Voters aside. Instead, for the good of the American People, come up with an appropriate renaming of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. If its going to be a American National Holiday, it should at least coincide with the prevailing American culture of suburbananity, laziness, and abbreviations. "Martin Luther King Jr. Day" is too hard to type and "MLKJDay" is too hard to say. Whichever one of you wins the primary can submit your top three choices to "The-House-Rules" for consideration.

Architect... With Benefits

There's a few really great things about being an Architect:

1. Billable Time using Trace Paper and Colored Pencils... Very few folks get to charge people for skills you mastered in Grade School

2. Totally cool Party/Bar intro. People love Architects. They just think we're awesome until they get to know us or until they ask us about Stainless Steel. (Then they get bored.)

3. Longstanding History of Superiority Complexes. Objectively, not a good thing, but if you're an Architect, its pretty fun to be Superior. Sure as hell beats the Inferiority Complexes that the rest of the world must have around us.

4. Gently used stuff that you get from a building site because your ridiculously wealthy clients want all new fixtures/appliances/fasteners/etc.

For this post, we'll mainly focus on Item #4. Although to be honest, most of my posts include a healthy dose of #3...

We had a bad kitchen sink faucet from day one in the new house. Some sort of gasket inside the thing had failed and the faucet only had two settings... OFF and STUN. Seriously, when we turned on the faucet, we usually ended up with about a quart of water on the wall behind the sink because the pressure was so high and there was no modulation.

Thankfully, we got a new "American Standard" faucet that perfectly fit the bill from a job site downtown where everything was being replaced. I almost got a new dishwasher out of the deal too but the lousy contractor pinched it before I could get my hands on it. Unethical Bastard.







So, I donned my headlamp and proceeded to remove the old faucet.







And, just to be sure, I kept the old faucet in a safe place until I was finished the installation of the "new-to-us" faucet. Becauce if I needed to scavenge it for any parts or just pose for an inappropriate photo, I would be ready.




And when we finished with absolutely no leaks, swearing, or dimes spent, we had a wonderful fully functional faucet and spray nozzle.














I knew there was SOME benefit to those six years of student loans.

Obsess Much?

So, I'm a little obsessive, its true... In fact, I'd probably say that I'm 95.3% sure that I'm 24.3% over obsessing 85.6% of the time. I value consistency and completeness over all other virtues, including beauty, truth, and freedom.

So a project isn't right unless it exhausts me. A project probably still isn't right then. A project should definitely take in excess of 3 days to have any merit, even if the project is changing a light bulb.

Therefore, it is with great excitement on my part, and great trepidation on my wife's part, that we've decided to completely overhaul the Dining Room this winter/spring. We're stripping all the finishes, doing plaster repair, repainting, replacing light fixtures, possibly grounding some outlets, building window screens, refinishing furniture, and other stuff.

So, in order to make our way through the long prep period that will precede any cool work, we're going to carefully dream about and decide on the finished product. Not jump to any rash decisions, you know?

Here's an initial stab at colors for the room... Saddle Brown for the Dining Room and eventually Smoldering Red for the Kitchen beyond... All trim and ceilings to be White. Thoughts?

And if your comment revolves around the fact that I picked Smoldering Red simply for the name?...

You're totally right.

Also, we at the House Rules only use Benjamin Moore paint for our projects. First because the paint is better, Second because their color selection system is great, and Third because they give me a Designer discount.

That said, we HATE the Glenside Benjamin Moore location. We will only be using the Chestnut Hill location from now on.

Christmas Decorations... (AKA Whitman's Electrical Fire Hazard Sampler)

There's a lot of blogs out there that like to show you "before and after" pictures. SO Boring... I mean, linear timelines and sequential representations have always been the mainstays of the oppressive majority regime.

But if there's one thing we here at The House Rules are all about, it's bucking convention, progressive thought, and liberty from social conformism. (Actually, at the moment, there's a couple things we are all about but they fall under the Leftover Dessert and Serial Television on DVD categories. But excluding those, we're all about the convention bucking.)

So, we bring you our Christmas Decorations... well after the fact. And we successfully staged some photos of the assembly and dissassembly so that you'd have no idea what stage in the process you're looking at.

















"Yeah, Christopher Nolan, director of Memento, you're MY bi-atch now!"

But I digress... As usual, one of the more successful motifs was the front window Christmas Baubles.

Now, in the interest of preserving my manhood while writing about Christmas Decorating "motifs", it should be noted that every night when we came home from work, we'd immediately plug in the front window lights while I made varying references to "My Balls" often with accompanying song lyrics set to the tune of classic Christmas Hymns from the Trinity Hymnal. I guess technically this actually preserved my obnoxious adolescent boyhood rather than my manhood, but either way its still MALE so I'll take what I can get.




Damn It! I digressed again. The point is, my parents gave us my Grandmother's old Christmas lights which had been on the family tree at the farm for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, when my Grandmother got them, it must have been a Depression year and they must not have had copper or Intelligent Electrical Engineers.** Because the bulb sockets don't have any threads. So its a very loose form of friction that holds the bulb in place and the contacts making the circuit complete leave something to be desired. The bulbs are always going out... not burning out, just going out.

So every year, there was a standing rule in the family that every time you passed the tree you had to scan the entire tree and find at least 3 bulbs to push back in so they'd light up. If you do the math, 5 kids X 3 bulbs X 25 trips past the tree per day each = BUTTLOADS of bulb pushing.

So, It really isn't convenient to use these strings but I guess Nostalgia has reared its ugly head and made me ITS bi-atch. (Which by proxy makes Christopher Nolan into NOSTALGIA's bi-atch as well.) I wrapped all the strings of bulbs (plus a few extra from the Home Despot) around a foam ball and made these Christmas Baubles... AKA My Balls.

In conclusion, as this closeup photo shows, there is doubtless a huge fire safety issue in the way these things are wrapped around themselves. Especially when you consider that I had to connect 4 to 5 successive extension cords to power the lights from my ungrounded outlet with no coverplate in the front entry. But now that smell of overheating PVC insulated wiring will forever remind me of Christmas...

Footnote**: True story... Almost all Intelligent Electrical Engineers disappeared around the time of the Depression. I'm pretty sure they're still hiding in Uzbekistan somewhere leaving the building electrical system design industry to their dumbass inbred cousins. True Story.

24 Postings This Week!

Its been almost two months since we've posted, which breaks all the cardinal rules of blogging. You know the recommended blogging rate by the "experts" is like three times a week? Yeesh. So I guess we owe you about 24 postings this week. We'll get right on that...

Let's be frank. The Holidays are busy for everybody. On top of that, there were final papers, travel for work, and project proposals to write. So you'll just have to spread a little Christmas goodwill and forgive us. Besides, we didn't do that many home projects during the last two months anyways. I mean, who can do any good work with power tools while simultaneoulsy being "lit up like a Christmas tree" on my brother's kickass Bloody Marys?

But we did chronicle a few of those illustrious items and we'll be getting them to you in the very near future.

In the meantime, we leave you with this belated Christmas present. A verbal interpretation of a striking image from our imagination:

So, you're lying there on Christmas morning all snuggled up in blankets and pillows when what to your wandering eyes should appear? Your loved one arrives with tray of Christmas breakfast in bed! Now, being a despiser of all things breakfast foodish, in my head, Christmas breakfast involves a Chocolate Eclair. You smile at your baby, grab the Eclair and open your mouth to take a giant bite. Just before you make contact, a baby kitten pops its head forth from the end of the eclair, tilts its Bavarian Cream covered head slightly to the side, glances at you out of the corner of its eye, and quietly emits a quizzical "Mrow?"

That's What Christmas Means to Me...