Goodwill got me good (again)

Oh, Goodwill.  Haven’t we been through this already?

First the diaper pail with the used diaper, then the coffee pot full of grounds…is this really what I deserve?

I think we need to see a counselor.

I was back with my other significant other, Goodwill, the other day, enjoying what seemed to be a fun shopping date.  (We even had the blessing of my husband to be together.  No sneaking around.)  He was really coming through for me too – I found this great carpet cleaner for $14.99.  (Even though The House of Goodwill has all hard flooring, there will be lots of rugs.  And carpet cleaners are indispensable if you have children or pets + rugs and carpets.)

There was some other great stuff too – candles and a big mixing bowl for the kitchen.

Anyway, as I was dragging my “new” carpet cleaner out to my car, I distinctly heard a sloshing sound.

I checked and yes, it was what you think – NO ONE HAD EMPTIED THE DIRTY WATER CONTAINER.

Carpet cleaner!  Yay!!!

Carpet cleaner, no!!!

True story.

I don’t even have the heart to ask - really??  I just walked over to a tree in the parking lot and emptied it out.

*sigh*

Maybe some day, Goodwill.  Maybe some day.

And a little more progress...

After my five-day bedroom painting fiasco, before I could set the bed up, I needed to paint the floor molding.

I have never before attempted to paint over dark molding, which is EVERYWHERE in this house.  I was concerned that without sanding it first, the new paint wouldn't stick, and would easily be scratched.

After googling the problem, I found a product called "liquid sandpaper" that you paint on the surface of your project (for woodwork that needs painting where sanding it with paper is impractical or impossible).  After applying, you let it dry about 15 minutes and then start your painting. 

I tested the liquid sandpaper in two different areas.  After a week, on one of the molding strips I painted the paint was completely resistant to my attempts to scratch it, on the other, it scratched off easily.  On the area where it scratched off easily, I don't think I let the liquid sandpaper dry completely.  At least I hope this is what happened.  Otherwise, I have no idea why it didn't work there when it worked on the other molding strip.

My worst nightmare is spending hours and hours of my life painting molding, only to have it scratch off the first time it gets kicked accidentally.

Since I had (and have) no Plan B, I went ahead and painted the rest of the floor molding in the bedroom.  So far, so good.  It looks so much better, so much brighter!  But I don't have the heart to test it by trying to scratch it up.  Now that it's on, I'm going to leave it and hope for the best.

This will easily be the hardest part of painting the house.  And by hard, what I really mean is - very, very tedious and monotonous.  After cleaning the molding, and putting on a layer of the liquid sandpaper, it took four coats of white paint to completely cover the dark molding.  And painting molding is not like paint rolling a wall - you have to be very precise, so each coat takes much longer to put on.

And rimming every floor and ceiling of every room of this house is dark molding.  Not to mention the dark bedroom wall spindles, as well as every dark stained door in the house and all of the bathroom and kitchen cabinets.  (And there are two kitchens!)

I definitely have my work cut out for me.  This is the part where I wish my dogs could babysit the foster kids during the day, so my son could help me paint, but someone told me that was a bad idea.  Oh well.

Anyway, once the floor molding got painted, my son and I set the bed up, and even though there's still more molding to paint, it's starting to feel like a real room.

Here is what the bedroom looked like before:

Here is how it looks now:

Doesn't Shiloh look like she approves?

This is the king size bed  frame my son and I found on the side of the road with a "free" sign attached.  The mattresses and box springs were also free - they came from the 2nd mother lode giveaway house.  We bought an $80 gel foam mattress topper from Wal-Mart that is REALLY comfortable.  Love the bed!

Here you can see the faint lilac color that the walls are painted - I really liked how the color turned out!  It definitely lightened up the room but gives just a hint of color.  

I've still got to paint the window frame, the spindles, the cabinet, the doors (there are two - one is to the closet) and both of the door frames.  *sigh*

Thank you, God, for a great house to paint!

I'm still looking for nightstands and an armoire...the shopping part's the fun part!

crisis averted: tv installation successful

The first two weeks we were at this house, we were tv-free.  And when we went to Wal-Mart to buy one, we discovered to our great dismay that due to COVID, almost every tv in the store had been sold.

Apparently there was an unfortunate convergence of high demand and an inability by the manufacturers to receive certain necessary tv-building components from China.

Remember the (not) great tv debate I had with my husband?  The one where he insisted on Samsungs only for the house?

Well, that one resolved on its own.

The only tv in stock at the time was a 50" TCL smart tv.  And there was only one.

That was the size we wanted for the upstairs living room, so we bought it, even though it was a brand we were unfamiliar with.  As it turns out, we really liked the tv, so on a future visit to the store, when a few more tvs were in stock, we bought a 65" TCL for the downstairs basement living area.

After another several-day debate about where to place the tvs - the natural spot in both rooms seemed to be above the fireplaces, but we had mixed feelings about covering the beautiful stonework - we finally decided it made the most sense to hang them there, and just have one focal point in each room.

But we really, really didn't want to drill a hole into the stone.

So how to mount them then?

This is where I give a lot of props to the husband, who I had no idea was so handy when I married him.

Upstairs, he drilled a hole through a ceiling beam and attached the tv to a ceiling mount he hung in the attic.  Downstairs, he drilled a hole through the drop ceiling tile and attached a ceiling mount to a beam a foot higher up.  With both tvs he ran the power cords through the mount tubes up into the ceiling, then out a different hole to plug in in another room.  Therefore, no cords are visible at all.

It took him over a week to figure out how to do this, and it was the kind of job you only get to do once, because if you messed it up with a hole in the wrong place, it would have been nearly impossible to fix (especially upstairs, where he drilled the hole in the ceiling beam) - no pressure!

The upstairs tv, with a ceiling mount passing through an overhead beam.

I hated covering up the beautiful stone, but at least we didn't put holes in it.

The "basement" tv - hung by my husband with his #1 helper, our son Tavo.  Now he's got his video game cave set up there.

The hanging tv mount wasn't long enough to connect directly to the wooden beam in the ceiling, so my husband built this wooden connection to put between the metal mount and the beam.

Look at this, no wires!  The tv cord goes up the mount pipe, through the ceiling and down through a hole in the wall of the garage (on the other side of the fireplace) where it plugs in.

Tvs hung; sigh of relief exhaled.  Finally, back to life as normal Americans.

Finally, a little progress!

July 4th weekend was great!  Kayking, swimming, eating, relaxing - and we even managed to get some projects completed around the house.

This week I'll share some photos of our progress.

Today, here is the living room, before and after painting it.  We still haven't moved in the furniture, added the rugs or the wall decor.  But step 1 is complete.  This is probably the whitest wall I have ever painted; I'm still not a fan of white walls, but the color is doing its job at least: the room looks so much lighter and brighter than before.  Less like a cave and more like a lake house.

Goodbye, gray.  Hello light!

Happy 4th of July weekend!

Here is one thing I know for sure about a lake house: if you own one on July 4th weekend, you are there.  (And so are all of your friends!)

The best part of this July 4th weekend?  We finally found kayaks!

For at least a month we searched every store at home, every store in this area, and religiously checked craigslist and resellers trying to find ANYONE with a kayak to sell.  It's interesting the things that COVID has made scarce, but this year, with everyone staying home, anything boat-related at all has been a challenge to procure.

And then on Wednesday, when my husband was making a Wal-Mart run, he just happened to hit the jackpot - a truck had just pulled into the store with 65 kayaks!  After fruitlessly searching EVERYWHERE for over a month, this was a major score.

Pine Lake is 500 acres, and it's the perfect kayaking lake.  There are little coves around every corner, a lot of undeveloped lakeside land, and little sandbar islands where you can stop.

On Friday night, we got to take the kayaks out for the first time, leaving at sunset and paddling back to the house in the moonlight.  It was quiet and beautiful.

I swear, the colors in this photo were not photoshopped!  

They sky was an incredible shade of purple.

On July 4th, I watched my first ever boat parade from the kayak - so fun!  Everyone was grilling, swimming, boating, and relaxing on their docks.

This airbnb will be a BYOB (bring your own boat) - powerboat, that is.  The kayaks will come with the house.

I can't wait to go out again!

FYEO: This one’s for all of us semi-bird nerds

I won’t even apologize today.  This post is off-topic, and I won’t try to claim somehow that it has anything to do with thrifting or goodwill.  This one is for all of us layperson bird nerds.  (Because I assume the REAL bird nerds already know this information.)  I will return to topic tomorrow, I promise.

In my fascinating (yet frustrating) duck vs. goose research yesterday, all I was attempting to do was find a photo of duck and a Canada goose, not create confusion.  But in the process of uncovering the mystery of whether a Canada goose is or is not a duck, I DID solve another mystery.

Remember how I thought it was strange that a Canada goose is called a Canada goose, instead of a Canadian goose, which sounds more correct?  When I googled the why on that one, this time I got a definitive answer.  (I love those!)

Let me share, because the way it was worded actually made me laugh:

So now we know, a “Canadian goose” is ANY goose from Canada.  (Though apparently without formal citizenship 🙂).  A “Canada goose” is a particular sub-species of goose.

But is it a duck?

Let’s not go there again.

I may accidentally kill my husband

This would be a very bad thing.

But I am afraid if I call a Canada goose a duck one more time, I may cause him to have a stroke.

Every time a Canada goose (I always want to say Canadian Goose, but when I googled the term, apparently it’s wrong [!] – doesn’t it sound right to you?) is waddling through the yard down by the water, I tell my husband the ducks are visiting.

And every time I tell him the ducks are visiting, this sends him into an apoplectic fit.  "Canada geese are NOT ducks!  Learn the difference!  How do you not know this?  You grew up on the water!  You like birds!  STOP CALLING THEM DUCKS!"

Why Canada geese and ducks are all ducks to me, I just can’t explain.  It’s weird, because I actually love to watch birds and learn which are who.  I can name many more birds than my husband, who generally looks at any bird and says “brown bird” or “small bird” the same way he looks at my flowers and calls them “pretty red flowers” or “pretty yellow flowers.”

So why is every swimming bird a duck to me?  I just don’t know, but I’ve decided I need to fix this character flaw because my husband is out of town right now, and darn it, I just can’t make the coffee right.  It’s not quite strong enough.  So I better not give him a heart attack just yet.

HOWEVER, it turns out that duck vs. goose is not a simple open-and-shut case.

In my attempt to educate myself on the differences between ducks and Canada geese, my research has muddied up the waters a bit.  Let me show you what I uncovered on Wikipedia:

Ok, this is simple, right?  Here is the Canada goose.

But when I googled “duck” here is a screenshot of what came up:

Note that the first thing I saw on this page is pictures of several different waterfowl, including a white swan.  Now, check out the part I have underlined below:

Duck is the common name for numerous species - including swans and GEESE?  Therefore, a duck IS a goose?  So that means I'm not wrong, right?

But read a bit further now:

Wait a minute, didn't that just say "swans and geese are not considered ducks?"  But I thought the same paragraph just said they were?

And now I remember why I always liked biology, but could never overcome my B average.  Am I the only person this doesn't make sense to?  Clearly, I need someone smarter than me to clear up this mystery.

So the question of the day remains:

Is a Canada goose a duck?  Or not?

Either way, I have decided to stop calling all the swimmers ducks.  A Canada goose will now be a goose when I see one.

I will make this change for the sake of my husband, who is currently at our home/house harvesting my perennials and putting them in vases to bring to me here at The House of Goodwill, so I will not miss seeing them flower this year.  He is a good man.  And I really need to be drinking better coffee than what I can make.

And I apologize to anyone who finds this post boring or off topic.  In an attempt to six-degrees-of Kevin-Bacon this, I'll point out that surely it is in the spirit of goodwill to not kill one's husband.

I'm not wrong, right?