Row, row, row your boat

Back in college Mr. Crackers was on the University's crew team (rowing team?). He often recalls his time on the team fondly and has shared many memories with me over the years. When I think of rowing teams (crew teams?) my mind has always immediately turned to that classic 1984 film Oxford Blues starring Rob Lowe. And while Mr. Crackers & I did not attend Oxford University in jolly old England, our college was located in the the town of Oxford (Ohio). The movie reference may help explain why, even though Mr. Crackers & I did not know each other yet back in those college days, when I picture him rowing (crewing?) a boat, I always picture him looking just like this:

Mr. Crackers love for boats with oars did not stop when he graduated college. Although he never joined the Atlanta Rowing Club, he often talked about it. So, on one fateful afternoon while driving through the north Georgia mountains, it came as no surprise when Mr. Crackers pulled the car into the parking lot of a canoe and kayak outfitting store. Admittedly though I was a little surprised when we left the store 30 minutes later with our very own (gently used) red canoe strapped to the top of our SUV.

Our friend Karen, who was with us on that fateful afternoon, took this photo when we got home with our new prize. You can see the pride & joy clearly evident on the face of Mr. Crackers can't you? You can tell he was ready for many canoeing (rowing?) adventures in our future.

Thankfully north Georgia was full of lakes and rivers, so Mr. Crackers and I (and our two dogs Max & Sadie) did have many fun times on the canoe. Although I will tell you that I will never again get in a canoe on a lake crowded with jet skis and ski boats on Labor Day weekend. I have never been tossed around so much in my life. I have learned that for me canoeing is best either on placid lake waters or on gently running small rivers.

But once C was born back in 2002, we never got in the canoe again - not even on a placid pond. Thankfully we were smart enough to realize that small active toddlers & canoeing were not a good combination.

So when we moved to Ohio back in 2004, we left the canoe behind in Atlanta with our friend Karen and never gave it a thought again. Or at least that is what I thought, until Mr. Crackers began talking last fall about how fun it would be to go canoeing as a family now that the kids were older. I kind of nodded my head and said uh-huh until I realized how serious he was. He wanted to plan a trip down to Atlanta to retrieve our old canoe from our friend Karen who was ready to finally get it out of her garage after 7 years.

While making our plans to get the canoe my biggest recurring question was always, "Where are we going to store it?" If my memory served me correctly, I remembered that the canoe was pretty large and I knew that our garage has got to be one of the smallest 2 car garages in America. I mean the thing just barely fits our 2 cars inside. In fact I can't even get into Mr. Crackers car if it's parked inside the garage. He has to pull it out in order for me to climb inside the vehicle.

In answer to my question, Mr. Crackers would just smile at me and say, "Don't worry, I've got it all planned out." Since Mr. Crackers is an idea man (as evidenced by his many past projects) I figured he had some plan up his sleeve, so I took his advice & didn't worry about it... for awhile. Until the next time I tried to figure out where the thing would go and I'd ask him the question all over again.

We headed down to Atlanta last week and the trip was really fun. We saw some good friends, had a blast showing the kids around the city we called home for almost a dozen years and after our trip was over, we strapped that canoe back on the car & headed home. After 7 years, we were once again the proud owners of a (gently used) canoe.

Once we got back to Ohio, Mr. Crackers began executing the plan he had hatched in his mind all those months ago. It involved hanging the canoe from the ceiling of the garage. It also involved many, many trips to Home Depot as he revised and then re-revised the plan a few times.

Pulleys, moving straps, heavy ropes, giant hooks, and a big red tarp were just some of the items he used trying to bring his plan into fruition. I tried to cheer him on during the day, reminding him of all his past project successes - but after spending one entire day trying to get his system to work, he shook his head, looked at me & said, "I don't think I'm going to get this to work after all."

Honestly, I was a bit relieved by this news. The longer he worked at it, the more I could picture the canoe breaking free of it's restraints and crashing down on our cars... or even worse on our kids. While I felt bad that he had tried so hard & hadn't gotten his plan to work, I felt like maybe we had dodged a bullet.

We talked briefly about some other options, including storing the canoe on some kind of stand outside the house. Little did I know that the next morning he decided to have another go at the whole garage ceiling system again. After another 2-3 hours of work he called me out the garage again. I thought it was to review a new plan he had, but instead it was to try to help him raise the canoe to the ceiling again. It was at that moment that I decided to air my concerns to Mr. Crackers. You know, the concerns I had about the canoe coming crashing down on our cars....or children.

To Mr. Crackers extreme credit he remained calm as he stared at me somewhat incredulously. "This might have been something that you should have shared with me a little sooner. You know, before I just spent 2 days working on this." he very calmly replied.

He was right. I should have spoken up sooner, but I really wasn't sure what the storage system would involve until he had spent quite a bit of time on it. I was trying to be supportive, cheering him on while all the time worrying about potential canoe disasters (as Mr. Crackers would tell you, I'm somewhat an expert at inventing things to worry about.) And honestly, he had spent so much time on it that I felt really bad telling him the whole thing was giving me some seriously bad juju.

In the end (after I am sure he silently cursed me for about 2-3 hours) he came up with plan B. A plan that seemed much less likely to smash our cars or kill our children if it had some kind of catastrophic failure. To his continued credit he called me out the garage to review the plans with me & make sure I had no lingering doubts about any potenial disasters before he put his plan into action (seriously the man has limitless patience with me sometimes).

And so, without further ado I present to you Mr. Crackers latest brainstorm...the side-of-the-house-canoe-holder (I probably need to come up with a catchier name, but that one works for now):

Here's another view of his handiwork.

Ta-da! Not only does it keep the canoe out the of the way, but it has the added benefit of providing our recycling container with a little shelter from the elements.

Thank you Mr. Crackers for your perseverance and your tolerance for your worst-case-scenario-imagining-wife. I love the new "system". And I'm also very happy the canoe is back in our hands again. With all of the non-stop rain and flooding that have been plaguing our part of the country for the past 3 weeks, we'll be getting more use out of that canoe than we ever imagined.

Updates around the house

So, I think I posted back in January that we were going to finally re-do the kids bathroom. Since it's one of the smallest rooms in the house, you'd be right in thinking we could have done it all in a single weekend. But why get it done so quickly when we could stretch it out and have everything in total disarray for weeks?

It honestly didn't take us three whole months to complete. The wallpaper border was a little challenging and took a bit more time to remove than I had planned. But once I repaired all the walls (Someone needs to explain to me why the previous owners felt the need to use over 20 drywall anchors in the walls of such a small room. Once I removed all of them, the bathroom walls resembled a piece of lacy swiss. A delicious bit of cheese to be sure, but not anything you'd want your drywall to look like. Needless to say, I went through about half a container of spackle to fill all the holes and make the walls smooth once again) the painting only took a couple of days.

Mr. Crackers helped out a lot by installing the new light fixture, towel bar and new faucets. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. At some point I hope to put a wood frame around the mirror, but for now I'm calling it done.

For those of you who can't remember, here is what the bathroom used to look like:

It was a fish theme that had started to get on my nerves. The wallpaper border, the worn out rugs, the "Hollywood dressing room" light bar all needed to go.

Not to mention that the brass fixtures in the room had all started to corrode a bit.

So, I found this cute shower curtain at Target & we (eventually) proceeded to update the room to it's new look:

Voila!

I don't know about you, but I like it much better. The paint and accessories are bright and fun without being too juvenile. And I really like all of the new bronze fixtures in the room. I seem to have a thing for bronze, so now this bathroom matches the powder room downstairs. It's almost like we've got a design point of view for the house.

And I just fell in love with these little owl pictures I found on Etsy. They are so cute & just happened to match the colors in the shower curtain perfectly.

Since this room serves as our guest bathroom when we have overnight guests, I'm happy that we finally got the room done. Our first guest arrives in less than a week. Nothing like cutting it a little close.

We (and by we I mean Mr. Crackers) also managed to hang new shelves in the pantry and in the laundry room to make the room usable again after the "cabinet incident" back in February. All of these projects have had the nice side effect of getting us to organize and clean out a lot of the spaces where we had let junk accumulate. I ended up selling a lot of stuff on Craig's List and made a nice amount of cash from the sale of all of our old stuff.

So now that all that Spring cleaning is done, we're ready to spend a little time outside...if it ever stops raining. It seems like it has rained non-stop for the past four weeks. Hopefully all of these April showers will bring us some gorgeous May flowers.

Blue, Green or Yellow?

So I finally decided yesterday that it was time to join the party and get going with some New Year's resolutions. I suppose one of my resolutions should be to get a little more on top of things in a timely manner, but meh...I'll save my energy for other resolutions instead.

I won't bore you with the whole list (I can see the relief written all over your face), but I will tell you that one of my resolutions is to try and blog with a little more frequency than I have of late. While this resolution may go by the wayside as so many do, I'll at least make an attempt to get into the spirit (two weeks late) today.



In the almost seven years we've lived in our house, we've made a concerted effort to repaint and redesign the rooms to better fit our family "style". I'm not sure I could actually define what our style is, but I can tell you that it is very different than the people who lived in the house before us. The previous owners were really big fans of sponge painting and wallpaper borders. Not that there's anything wrong with that...I'm not here to judge. It's just that personally I don't happen to be fan of those two particular design tools. I'm more a fan of traditional paint jobs with an accent wall thrown in here and there to inject a bit of color.

Within the first two years we lived here we got most of the rooms repainted and removed almost all the wallpaper borders in the main living areas and bedrooms. It was a relief to put our own stamp on the place, but as life got more busy we slowed down and then finally stalled out completely with two rooms left unchanged.

This past fall we finally tackled one of those rooms - the office. Not only did the room have seafoam green carpeting, but it had a sports themed wallpaper border, a chair rail, and a maroon and tan sponge painting job. It was honestly a lot to take in, especially considering the office is the smallest room in the house.

Finally Mr. Crackers had had enough (Since I spent more time in that room than anyone else in the family I had become immune the room's wild decorative elements) and so we decided it was time for a change. Mr. Crackers took down the chair rail, made me a new desk and put a new closet system in place so that I could organize all of our accumulated junk important stuff. Once all the hard work was done, I repainted the room a light tan with a burnt orange accent wall (I wasn't kidding about that accent wall thing - I'm a huge fan). I'd post a picture of the completed office here, but I can't seem to locate them on my hard drive & honestly I'm just too lazy to re-take pictures to show you right now. But trust me, it looks great!

That left just 1 room untouched. The kids bathroom. Thankfully this room had been spared the sponge painting found in so many of the other rooms in the house, but it did have a wallpaper border - a school of brightly patterned fish. We didn't love the border, but the walls were a satisfactory shade of light blue and since the fish theme was an easy one to work with, we ran with it.




And seven years later we still haven't done anything to update the room. To be honest, I am really starting to hate the fish. I didn't like them that much seven years ago and they really haven't grown on me since that time. So since the walls need a fresh coat of paint anyway... you guessed it. It's time for a re-do.

I found a really cute shower at Target that fulfilled all of my needs:
1. It was cheap inexpensive
2. It was colorful, but didn't hurt the eyes
3. It was NOT a fish theme
4. It was whimsical but not too juvenile (I'm hoping to go another 7 years before the next update)

Now comes the hard part...what color should the walls be? Here's a picture of what we're dealing with.

Even though the walls are currently blue and I normally like to make a big change when I paint a wall, I'm still leaning toward repainting the walls a slightly darker shade of blue that is already on them.

I like the green too, but I think since our bedroom was close to that same shade when we moved in & I was so relieved to paint over it that it seems a little weird to reintroduce the color in another room (Of course since this room will NOT be sponge painted the green will probably look a lot better).

I'm really not sure how I feel about a yellow bathroom. Does anyone want to enter a bright yellow bathroom first thing in the morning? It seems like it might have the potential to permanently damage your retinas. It could be a little overpowering in such a small place. Hmm...I just don't know.

I put a ballot up on the wall so everyone can have a vote. We'll see what happens. Do you care to weigh in on the subject? What's your color preference? I'm open to all opinions at the moment, so fire away.

I'm slowly acquiring all of the accessories to go with the shower curtain. Hopefully within the next month or so I'll have the paint and everything else I need to start the job. And even though completing home improvement tasks in a timely manner is not on my newly minted list of resolutions (much to Mr. Crackers chagrin), I'll still try to have the whole thing completed by the time spring break rolls around. Since more regular blogging is on my list, I'll do my best to keep you updated on the status (or lack thereof) of my latest home improvement project.

Weekend update with Mrs. Crackers

Before I get too far, I wanted to give you an update on the status of all the summertime household projects that I mentioned in a previous post. If I had the time on Saturday morning to do a little blogging, I would have told you that I finally finished painting all of the shutters and that I had high hopes that by the time Mr. Crackers returned to work Tuesday morning that I would have the back door completed too.

A few short hours later it became clear that my painting karma had gone terribly awry and I'd end the weekend without a single painting project crossed off my to-do list. The first bit of bad news came as Mr. Crackers was getting ready re-hanging the last two shutters on the house (#3 on his to do list for the weekend, right after re-shingling the playhouse...Mr. Crackers is no slouch when it comes to project completion unlike yours truly).


What I should probably mention here is that when Mr. Crackers was removing the shutters from the house so I could paint them, one broke (I would have probably broken all of them if I had been taking them down...I was very happy that we only lost one in the whole removal process which was very tricky and involved using sharp tools while on an extension ladder). So, I ordered a pair of replacement shutters online (apparently you can't buy just 1 shutter) and painted them just like I painted all of the other shutters.

They all looked really good with the new paint on them. That is, they all looked really good until Mr. Crackers uncovered a problem with the new shutters (thankfully) before he hung them on the house. He had stacked them on top of one another so that he could drill holes to mount them, and as he pulled them apart from one another lots of paint began peeling off the shutters. So much paint was peeling that in about a minute and a half we had peeled half of the paint on one of the shutters using only our hands. Clearly something had gone terribly wrong. As I looked more closely at the new shutters now back to their original unpainted status, I realized that I had forgotten to prime them ....duh!


So, if you happen to drive by the house today (and let's be honest it'll look the same if you drive by the house next week too.) this is what you'll see. A nice house with freshly painted shutters on most of the windows...








Oh well...




I also tried to finish painting the backdoor, with different yet similarly troubled results. I spent a lot of time sanding and priming the door before I began painting it. Between kids and dogs, the door had seen quite a bit of damage done to it over the past 6 years, so I knew it needed a bit of TLC before painting. After a few hours on Saturday afternoon, I got it nice and smooth & took Mr. Crackers up on his offer to take it off it's hinges for the first coat of paint.

What I didn't think about was that the strong sun and accompanying heat wave that had hit us in the Midwest made painting the door in direct sunlight where we placed it on the patio a really dumb idea...Really. Dumb. Of course, I began thinking about it in earnest as the paint began drying almost as quickly as I was applying it so that I managed to immediately botch the smoothing technique I had completed only hours before...

At that point I put the brush down and just walked away. It seemed the best course of action after such a dissapointing day. Once I could face it again, I came back and finished the first coat of paint on the door (in the shade). Even though it's not as smooth as it could have been if I had been paying a little more attention to my surroundings, I think I still like color. And hopefully no one else will notice that the paint is a bit lumpy in places...(or if they notice maybe they won't mention it to me).







Oh well...



The good news is that the rest of the weekend (the non-project portion) went really well.

We did all of those things that make a Fourth of July weekend typically American. We got to go swimming, attend a cook-out, watch an local Americana parade, and of course get to see some fireworks.


We even went to a local amusement park for an afternoon of fun




We rode our favorite rides





And visited our favorite characters

We even managed to meet up with some friends and cool off a bit on the log flume ride.

Despite all the painting setbacks, I still consider the weekend a success.

Seeing Red

About mid-May I decided that the trim work on the house was in desperate need of a face lift. The shutters and front door had faded to a hue I like to call "the color formally known as red". It was a light red/orange color that spoke volumes about how long it had been since the last time it had been painted.

I turned to Mr. Crackers & declared, "This summer I am painting all of the trim on the house." He smiled and nodded somewhat distractedly since I had already made the declarations, "This summer I am repainting all the patio furniture." and "This summer I am painting the chiminea." about 2 weeks prior to this latest statement. Apparently I had big plans for a lot of outdoor projects this summer. Outdoor projects are usually the specialty of Mr. Crackers, but since I have yet to agree to his latest idea (a basketball court in the side yard that seems to me as if it will violate all sorts of property zoning laws), and we seem to be at a standstill on trying to find the right pickets to repair our fence, I guess the outdoor projects fall to me this year.

So, we chose a color and I got to work the week before Memorial Day. I figured since we had a lot of company coming over for a cook-out it was the perfect motivator to get all my projects done. In hindsight, I may have been crazy a little overly optimistic about my painting capabilities time-wise. The good news is that I did manage to get the front door finished before company came (even if the paint was still a bit tacky to the touch...)

But I can honestly say that none of the rest of my list of projects was completed. Nevertheless, I felt I had some momentum going, so I decided to tackle the patio furniture next. I had gotten most of the set painted (OK, so I still needed to finish a chair and a side table...and alright, if I'm honest the rest of the set really needed a second coat too) when Mr. Crackers took down all the shutters so I could paint those the following week.

So, I took a short break on my patio furniture painting project and switched gears. I got managed to get the first two shutters painted and then....

rain

and more rain

and yes, even more rain

and then vacation managed to slow me down a bit



In fact, the shutters sat for so long that birds did their business and the spiders built their webs on my newly painted shutters...before I even managed to get them re-hung on the house.

For those of you who can't tell, the freshly painted (yet bird stained) shutters are on the left. The faded and not yet painted shutters (also bird stained) are on the right. Trust me, in person the difference in the two colors is a little more dramatic.

So, feeling a bit behind I got back into the swing of things this week & actually managed to paint another couple of shutters...

So now I am officially half way done with the painting of the shutters. Yea!



I celebrated this accomplishment, but making yet another proclamation to Mr. Crackers, "This summer I am going to paint the back door!" Seriously, you can probably already guess the look I got when making this declaration, can't you?! And since I can't seem to have enough projects "in progress" I decided to go ahead and start painting the door too...



I had the red paint, so I figured why not? I'm not really sure how I feel about it yet. I've decided to finish painting it (are you laughing?) and then decide if I like it. If not, I figure I'll just re-paint it dark brown (now I'm sure you're laughing... is that an eye roll too?) so it will match the dark brown paint on the patio furniture (you know, once I actually get done painting the furniture ...).

I better get off the computer and head outside to paint another 2 shutters since Mr. Crackers has "Re-hang all shutters" on his to-do list this weekend. Nothing like a little pressure to get me to finally finish a project.

The dining room dilemma

The dining room is the first room you see when you come to visit us here at the house of Crackers and quite frankly it's pretty uninspiring. The walls are a golden tan color, the floors are a honey stained wood and the dining room set is also a light golden hue. Even the fabric on the dining chairs is a solid color in the tan/gold family.


The only bits of color in the room are an area rug (whose primary colors are...you guessed it gold and brown with some bits of red & green), the curtains (which are red & gold plaid - Mr. Crackers thinks they look like they belong in a Harry Potter movie) and a mirror and hutch which are both painted a barn red.



I had been trying to think of something inexpensive to give the space some color without making it too dark. Usually when faced with this problem my first instinct is to paint, but since I wasn't sure what color to use, I had been mulling over some other options. A couple of months ago, it occurred to me that if I could recover the chairs it would be a really easy (and cheap) way to refresh the whole space.

So, last week I ventured to a local fabric store with my Mom and the paint swatches for the walls and the red hutch to see what I could do about giving the room a new look. I found a fabric that I really liked that matched my paint colors & ever better, fit into my budget.

Ta da...

I really thought it was pretty. I was bold and looked really good against the light wood and walls. I was really proud of myself - I was going to make a dramatic impact in a room and pull everything together for under $100.00. Wahoo!

Except, that once I started recovering the chairs, I noticed something. You see, while the fabric looked great against the walls and really set off the honey color of the furniture, it did not really match the carpet... at all. It turns out that the red in the carpet was not really the same red that the hutch & the mirror were painted and um... the brown in the background of the fabric is completely different than the brown in the carpet. Ooops!

Not only that, but it seems that the pattern I chose for the chairs doesn't really work well with the pattern in the carpet. In fact, they kind of fight each other for your attention.

Unfortunately, the room which was so boring that it was putting me to sleep is now filled with so many competing patterns that it is starting to give Mr. Crackers a headache (Sorry Mr. Crackers, I had forgotten about the patterned couch in the sitting room, oops.)

This picture doesn't quite illustrate the cacophony of pattern that assaults your eye when you come into the room. But trust me...it's a lot to take in.

So now Mr. Crackers & I are talking about either replacing the carpet (which would be significantly more than my $50.00 budget for re-decorating this room) or replacing the Harry Potter curtains (a far more likely scenario that is not nearly as budget crushing as getting a new rug.)

Oh well, I guess I won't send in my audition tape for HGTV's Design Star this year.

Tales from the utility room...

About 2 years ago, Mr. Crackers & I bought ourselves a new water heater from a store that we'll call Smears. We've bought a lot of appliances from this company over the years (including a water heater that we installed in our previous home) and never had a problem until Mabel came into our lives (I have decided for no particular reason that I am going to refer to our water heater as Mabel for the rest of this post. It's just been one of those kind of days...)

Now Mabel (the water heater) worked really well for the first 2 months after we got her. We had hot water when we needed it & we never gave her a second thought.

Apparently though, Mabel was getting lonely & decided she needed some additional attention. So she decided that she would shut herself down overnight so that Mr. Crackers & I would be faced with an ice cold shower the following morning. This way she could ensure that we no longer took her powers of heating water for granted & would stop down and pay her a visit from time to time.

It didn't take more than a few days of cold showers for Mr. Crackers & I to call up our local Smears repairman to see what was going on. He came out & declared that the problem was that dirt & debris was getting into the water heater Mabel & causing the pilot light to shut off. All we had to do, he said, was get down on our bellies & use a shower brush to clean the screen near the pilot light and then use a vacuum cleaner to suck it all out.

Oh, is that all??

To me this seemed seemed a little strange, since I had lived on my own for almost 20 years & had never had to do this before. When I conveyed this sentiment to the Smears repairman, he said that these new water heaters were extra sensitive & that as long as we regularly cleaned her out that we could expect Mabel to have a long and healthy life.

And so, I got down on my belly every few weeks to clean out Mabel's nether regions with a shower brush (see exhibit A above). And every evening for the next 18 months, I would check the pilot light on the water heater before I went to bed.

But despite the cleanings & my vigilant checking of the pilot light, Mr. Crackers & I spent the next 18 months playing a game of Russian roulette "the shower edition". We'd have weeks go by where hot water was plentiful & we rejoiced in our warm morning shower. Then, randomly we would wake up (even though I checked the pilot light the night before) & we'd be faced with water cold enough to freeze the tenders off a polar bear.

Finally, after the frequency of the cold showers started to wear on us, I called the local Smears repairman again. He came to the house & after a quick check told us "Oh, it's the pilot light assembly. That has gone bad on a lot of these models. All we have to do is just change that out & everything should work again for you."

I told him our story about the ritual cleaning of the water heater & he shot me a look that said "Hey there crazy, do you mind leaving the utility room so I can get to work actually fixing your problem?" So I left him to his repairs feeling a little silly for having spent the past 18 months cleaning a water heater whose actual problem was a malfunctioning pilot light assembly. But, as long as the problem was fixed and we had hot water, I was ready to let bygones be bygones.

After that last visit, all was well again for a couple of months until.... yep, you guessed it, once again we were facing arctic morning showers. Needless to say, Mr. Crackers & I were starting to get more than a little cranky about the whole water heater problem. Mabel was definitely becoming a gigantic thorn in my ever widening backside.

I told the third Smears repairman all of our woes the moment he set foot in our house. I led him downstairs to the utility room explaining what had occurred at all of the previous visits & told him that we were really, really tired of the cold showers. As I turned to leave him to his job, he stopped me & said "Don't move! I can tell what your problem is just by looking at your hot water heater. Come over here."

I figured he was some kind of hot water heater whisperer or something. Clearly this man had a gift. I walked over to the water heater & looked where he was excitedly pointing. Apparently the problem as our flue. It was not venting properly. He could tell that by all the SCORCH marks on the top of the poor old Mabel. When I looked, I discovered he was right - Poor Mabel's topside had 4 distinct scorch marks. Yikes!

After receiving this concerning news we called our HVAC guy to look at Mabel's flue & since he was there we asked him to go ahead & do the annual service on our furnace. The furnace was rapidly approaching the 20 year mark & we'd been hoping to extend the life of it a bit by making sure we got serviced and checked every year.

Well, the good news was that the flue was going to be easy to repair, the bad news was that our furnace looked like it was not going to quite make it through the winter.

"How bad is it?" I asked. "Are we right on the edge of needing a new furnace?"

The repairman looked at me kindly (& kid of pityingly) and said. "Well, let me put it this way: your toes are already over the edge and you are starting to lose your balance. Even a slight breeze could push you right over. My recommendation is that you start thinking about a new furnace."

It's a good thing we had a lot of cash lying around the house that we didn't know what to do with. Oh wait... I must have gotten us confused with another family. We didn't have piles of cash, but we did have a problem that needed a serious solution. After the initial panic subsided, we were able to secure a short term interest free loan from the bank of kind-hearted and generous family members (or KHGFM).

After receiving many bids & getting many worried looks from HVAC contractors who left our house after seeing our furnace asking us "You have a working CO monitor right?" We finally got a new furnace (& AC unit since that was also teetering very close to end of it's natural life) installed yesterday.

Here it is....TA DA!

Isn't it beautiful?

OK, I know it's pretty utilitarian looking. Man, you'd think for all the money these things cost they could make them look a little prettier. I mean can we add a little color here? How about red, or even a nice chocolate brown color?


I'm thinking of hanging Christmas lights on it...what do you think? We spent so much money that I feel like we should be doing more with it than just using it to heat our house. I'm considering using it as a backdrop for our annual Christmas Card portrait.

We'll save the new AC unit for the Easter pictures this spring.

Oh and by the way, we had hot water this morning for our shower thanks to Mabel and her brand new flue.

A room with a new view

Those of you who have read this blog in the past know that Mr. Crackers loves a good project. Most of his endeavours have happened outdoors, primarily in the backyard. In the past few years he has built a playhouse, a patio and a play set (I'm sure he's also built things that don't start with the letter p, but the alliteration thing is working for me today...).

Normally, I (kind of) head up the projects inside the house. Mostly because they tend to be smaller & involve wall paper removal or paint -- things that are well within my limited scope of home improvement expertise and don't have to be completed before the first snowfall ( I tend to have a problem letting my projects languish a bit before completion).

Recently though Mr. Crackers decided the time had come for him to put his creative stamp on something inside the house. He had won a small incentive bonus at work for a job well done (go Mr. Crackers!) and decided he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the unexpected influx of cash. He wanted to re-do C's bedroom.

He's been brainstorming ideas for the room for quite some time (I think I've mentioned before that Mr. Crackers is an idea man). I hadn't really ignored his designs but I figured they were far-off, if we win the lottery, type of ideas. (You know what I'm talking about... ideas like re-doing the kitchen, or buying a new car, or going to vacation in Hawaii... Good ideas without funding are really just dreams, and both of us do love to dream!)

But Mr. Crackers was ready to put his (newly earned) money where his mouth was.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I thought I'd show you a picture of C's room before the re-do. There were no issues with C's room as it was. His bed & dresser were the same ones used by Mr. Crackers when he was a boy, but they were in pretty good shape. It was a comfortable room, but one that was dominated by a full size bed that took up a lot of the floor space. Despite this, we've had years of fun playing with Lego's, dress-up clothes and Hot Wheels on the floorspace that was available.




(Please note that these pictures are pretty old & that C has not slept with rails on the side of his bed for a couple of years. I should also point out that the photos were taken in December & that we don't normally keep a Christmas tree in his room year round).


In short it was a good room for a growing boy, but Mr. Crackers thought we could do better.

His vision for the room included a loft bed which would give us more floor space for a desk & room to play. So with these ends in mind, we headed to our local Ikea store.

Low & behold, they had just what we were looking for & last weekend we got the whole thing set up. I have to say, it's pretty awesome.

Once I got over my initial fear that C would fall out of bed in the middle of the night & break all of the bones in his body, I have come to love this room. C loves it too. Not only does he have a lot more room to play, but he's got a big boy desk that's entirely his own. He spends hours at that desk drawing his favorite scenes from the Star Wars movies & looking at his favorite books & magazines.

The real unexpected bonus of the room is that I have stopped nagging C to make his bed since I can't see it anymore (frankly, making the bed when it is 5 feet off the floor & fit tightly into a corner is a near impossible task that I can barely do myself. Mr. Crackers has not only given his son a cool room, he's also manage to eliminate a chore for him!).

The shelving units are so cool. I love how much space he has now to display his books, stuffed animals & of course his many, many Legos...

I really can't believe how great the room looks. I'm really impressed that Mr. Crackers was able to visualize this layout & get it all accomplished for so much less than I thought possible. Mr. Crackers & Ikea seem to be a formidable team.

I'm also really happy that C has done so well in his new higher bed. Thankfully my fears of a fall have not been realized. He's been in the new bed for a week's worth of middle of the night bathroom runs & has never even stumbled down the stairs let alone taken a fall. I think I can relax a bit now.

We'll be putting all the finishing touches on the room this weekend. I found some Star Wars vinyl decals which will go up to replace the pictures from the movie Finding Nemo that have decorated his walls since he was an infant.

Well done once again Mr. Crackers! You are a good Daddy. C will be loving this room for a lot of years to come.

The Playstation (aka Spring Project 2009 update #3)

The weather this past weekend was beautiful - each day was filled with sunshine and temperatures reached into the mid-eighties. This of course meant that Mr. Crackers had the perfect weather for another weekend of work on Spring Project 2009 - the clubhouse.

This weekend the roof went on thanks to a lot of assistance from our friend and neighbor. He is a tall and energetic 13 year old who happens to love outdoor building projects as much as Mr. Crackers. It's nice that Mr. Crackers has someone who loves participating in these endeavors. C is still a little too young to focus on any project for more than about 20 minutes and I am usually running around trying to keep K out of trouble.



It's looking really good isn't it? Mr. Crackers will tell you that the roof isn't quite centered on the house - but from this angle you can't tell. Actually I probably wouldn't have even noticed it at all if he hadn't mentioned it.

I'm glad we found a use for all that old wood from the deck. I hope the kids have a blast playing in it this summer. Now I just have to put on a coat of paint. We've decided to stick with red. It matches the trim on our house & both kids preferred red over any other color that was up for discussion.

On Sunday, Mr. Crackers put some gravel over the dirt in front to serve as a walkway and we bought 4 cheap plastic chairs and a couple of side tables. You'll see those additions in the pictures I'll post once I've gotten the thing painted.


After the roof went on, C named it The Playstation and we Christened it the only way we knew how - a Popsicle party inside our new clubhouse.


It's official - we have a clubhouse. Bring it on summer, we're ready for you now.


Thanks again Mr. Crackers, your boundless energy for projects around the house is both impressive and fearsome!

It's (almost) a clubhouse!

I thought I'd give you an update on our "Spring Project 2009". As most of you have already guessed, Mr. Crackers is using the wood from our former deck (see Spring Project 2008) to build our two hooligans a clubhouse in the back corner of our yard.

This weekend he built the walls (did I mention that our old deck was stained red? We opted to put the painted side on the exterior of the house because we feared that being in such a small space surrounded by bright red walls might have been psychologically damaging to our young children. Mr. Crackers was afraid the kids would start screaming REDRUM in their sleep .)

He worked all day Saturday putting it together. The kids and I helped out when we could, but as usual Mr. Crackers did the lion's share of the work.

What a beautiful railing. Isn't it amazing how level & evenly spaced those rails are ? (yes, that is what I spent my time doing while Mr. Crackers assembled the walls.)

The clubhouse now has a front porch & a window in each of its 4 walls. It's currently missing a roof - according to Mr. Crackers that is on the agenda for next weekend. It looks a little rough now, but after the roof goes on & we slap some paint on it, it should be a really fun place for the kiddos to play in all summer. Now we just have to pick a paint color. Hmm, any ideas?

The kids had a blast playing in the house once the walls started going up. They spent Saturday evening playing fast-food drive up window. C stood inside the house & K would walk up & give him her food order. This went on for at least 30 minutes. I can't wait to see all of the other ways they use the clubhouse this summer.

Did I mention that the front of the house faces to the west? I only tell you this to explain the pained look on the faces of my hooligans. They loved the clubhouse, they didn't however love staring into the sun while their kooky Mom tried to snap a few pictures. "Seriously Mom, can we stop with the photography so we can get back to playing? Geez!"

A well deserved break at the end of the day. Thanks Mr. Crackers, it's looking good.

Spring Project 2009

In yesterday's post I wrote about Mr. Crackers' construction projects of Spring Seasons gone by. I had a little teaser at the end of the post that revealed that he has already begun construction on this year's project. In fact, he's already spent the last two weekends working on it.

Lisa, also known as my friend, neighbor and reader of this blog (I used to have 2 readers, but Mom is still traveling in Ireland this week) wanted a hint about what project Mr. Crackers was working on this Spring.

Here are some pictures of the project in process. See if you can figure out what it is...

Week 1

As I alluded to in yesterday's post, almost all of Mr. Crackers' projects involve bags of Quickcrete. This endeavour is no exception. I'm glad that he is using a level...that has sometimes been a problem for us on past projects.

Hmm...what could it be? I'll give you another hint: he decided he would put all of the wood from the old deck to good use by recycling it for this project. The flooring he is standing on used to be part of the support structure for our old deck.

Week 2

That's our neighbor's son helping Mr. Crackers last weekend. He is the same boy who helped Mr. Crackers build the playset in our backyard 4 years ago. It's nice to have an extra set of hands around, especially when they are attached to the strong arms of a 14 year old boy with limitless energy. C is there in the picture too, but at 6 years old he's really more of a spectator than a real help. Someday though, I'm sure he'll get bitten by the same bug that seems to have affected all of the men in the Cracker family. I can only hope that he finds someone to share his life with who will appreciate his need to build large structures in the backyard.

It looks like they are framing in some walls doesn't it? Is that the beginnings of a railing on the front?

Nope, it's not another shed. It's something more fun than that. Something that will (hopefully) get a lot of use by my two hooligans as well as all of the other kids who come over to visit us here at the House of Crackers.

Got a guess yet?

Spring Projects - a retrospective

I think I've made many references in the past that Mr. Crackers is a "doer". He never sits still, he's always doing something. Every Spring brings with it not only the promise blooming flowers and the greening of grass - it also brings a new project for Mr. Crackers.

These are normally not small projects like planting a couple of flowers or cleaning out the shed. No, Mr. Crackers thinks on a grand scale. His endeavors almost always involve Quickcrete and large amounts of either wood or stone (they have on occasion also necessitated new shocks on the vehicle used to haul these weighty materials). He inherited this penchant for large construction projects from his paternal Grandfather who built his own home. Yes you read that correctly, the man built his 2 story brick home himself (Just as an FYI, he was a firefighter not a home builder by trade). He must have done a good job, because I have seen the house and it is still standing. Mr. Crackers' father also inherited this family trait and put his skills to good use by working in the construction business for more than 35 years.

Mr. Crackers (thankfully) has never felt the need to build our family a home, nor did he choose to enter the construction field like his father. He is a recreational builder. By day he works on web based marketing programs for a large corporation but on Spring and Summer weekends he gives in to his biological imperative to build something. Other than a good game of Lego Star Wars on the Wii, nothing is more fun to Mr. Crackers than planning and building something in our yard.

These large enterprises have been a part of my life ever since I said "I do" almost 12 years ago. Our first projects together started when we moved into our home in suburban Atlanta. We had a sizable lot in a very wooded area that needed some serious TLC. We didn't have kids then so we had the time to get the aging landscape back under control. We spent the 5 Spring seasons we lived in that house taking on jobs like constructing a 6 foot high privacy fence, building 5 retaining walls around the perimeter of the house and putting in a brick patio.

Here are 2 of the 5 retaining walls we built. They happen to be the 2 smallest - yikes!

I'm sure Mr. Crackers had more grand plans for that house, but our son C was born and then 16 months later we moved back to Ohio. So the rest of his ideas for that home were never realized.

We moved in the early summer of 2004 and had a relatively calm year as we settled into our new home & concentrated on painting and making the house truly ours. But then, spring came once again and the urge to build could no longer be contained.

Project 2005 - The playset

Mr. Crackers decided that we needed a playset for C (K was still baking in the oven at that point). No kit would do for Mr. Crackers. Nope, the man had a vision. He knew exactly what he wanted and he built the set entirely from his own design. He even did almost all of the work himself (with a tiny bit of help from a pregnant Mrs. Crackers & from the 10 year old boy who lived next door to us.) He built it right outside the kitchen window so I could keep an eye on the kids while I was cooking & he built it close to the house so I wouldn't have far to go if someone hurt themselves. Cool, huh?

Project 2006 - Baby K

Mr. Crackers is a very intelligent man & knows it's never a good idea to take on a giant construction project with a small baby in the house.

Project 2007 - The Landscaping Job
We replaced most of the landscaping in the front of the house
(no pictures here....you've seen bushes before, right?)

Project 2008 - The Patio

Mr. Crackers decided in January of 2008 that he HATED the red deck that was attached to the house. Not only was it a maintenance issue since the dogs were constantly destroying the painted wood with their nails, but the railings blocked his view of the yard. He told me one night at dinner, "I'm thinking of building a patio. What do you think?" I thought it was a fine idea. If the deck irritated him that much & if he was willing to do the work (which he always is), I was happy with whatever idea he came up with.

It took some time and some of help from both of our Fathers...

and a little help from C.

But mostly it was a lot of muscle and sweat equity from Mr. Crackers himself.

He is a do-it-yourselfer, no doubt about it.


Finally, after a month of weekends (and a month of tired muscles) Mr. Crackers finished it and it was beautiful. I was really proud of him - he did a terrific job. We've lived with our new patio for almost a year & I'm really glad he did it. He was right, it's a big improvement over the big red deck that once stood in its place.

The Cracker Family & patio - Easter 2009

So you might now be thinking to yourself, "Hey Mrs. Crackers it's Spring again. Does Mr. Crackers have a project on tap for this year?"

Yes, my friend, he does and it's already begun....