Vertigo

This evening I finished stripping the last of the balusters and fillet stops from the railing of the stairs going up to the second floor.

And I'm living dangerously withal. I went ahead and knocked them all loose to work on them down the basement.

Gradually, carefully I've done this . . . The first ten balusters from the top I had to remove: they backed up to a wall and it'd be hell on wheels to redo the bannister or repaint the wall with them there.

That left the eight at the bottom. Remove two, put some weight on the railing, see if it's holding up. Yes. Remove a couple more, push on the railing again. Not deflecting? All right.

Rinse, repeat.

So now the only thing holding up my hand rail is the newel posts at the top and bottom of the stairs.

See the magic levitating stair rail! Thrill to the gravity-defying spectacle of solid oak resting on just about nothing!!

Do not try this at home; at least, not at homes with young children.

Me, every time I look at that gap the floor of my stomach gives way like a trap door. Can't imagine why; the stairs to the basement have no railing at all. But on this staircase, above and below and from any and every angle, the vacancy between shoe and rail give me a persistent case of vertigo.

Which is not to be construed as saying that the demounted posts will be reinstalled any time soon.

More Blog Redecorating

I'm marching onward stripping stair rail parts, which is repetitious and boring and doesn't bear writing about.

The really fun thing I've been doing the past few days is tarting up the houseblog.

As you may have noticed, I got the wide ad running (no, this isn't a shameless inducement for you to click on it). But I've also gone to town on Blogger widgets.

Want to see what I've accomplished on various rooms in the house since 2003? Check out the slide shows! I'm up to early 2008 with adding photos to the related web albums, and when I feel like doing something brainless, I go into Picasa and upload a few more.

Then, get a load of the House Progress calendar. It's not for my To-Do list; goodness, no-- it's for my Got It Done list. If there's a red-orange dot/rectangle on a date, that means I actually accomplished some work on the Sow's Ear that day. Ain't that keen?

What I need some friendly reader to tell me is, can you click on the dates and read what I've recorded there? That would be good. Or does nothing come up at all? That would be not so good. Or . . . can you, O Reader, click and fool around with what I've written on my calendar? That would be very bad indeed. Please. Don't. Do. It!

And I've changed my blogs-I-follow list so I can see when their authors have made new posts (and, I have to say, you guys are slacking off of late. Come on! Give me an excuse to click over!).

These features should make my blog ever so much more attractive and informative and entertaining!

Unless, of course, all these bells and whistles are making the blog take forever to load, so nobody wants to read it any more . . .

Oh, dear. "What your best friends won't tell you." But give it to me straight: Are the new features helpful or not? If they just get in the way, I can always delete them, no problem. After all, redecorating the blog is a lot less work than renovating the house-- not to mention more easily reversible.

Blog Housekeeping

I've finally figured out why the 300x250 ad block on my blog never gets used, even though my Adify account says I've got buyers for it.

It's because the template default size of the right hand sidebar is only 240 pixels wide. I kind of tumbled to that when I put on a new house photo a little bit ago and noticed it was chopped off on the right side.

So I went into the HTML and widened the sidebar to 320 pixels. Now the picture and the ad block have room to breathe, and hopefully pretty soon I'll be rid of that placeholding blank and have an ad above the fold.

However, you'll notice that I wasn't able to move the radiused corners to the new location. In the HTML window it says, "The images which help create rounded corners depend on the following widths and measurements. If you want to change these measurements, the images will also need to change."

Well, I did change "the widths and measurements"; can anyone advise me on how to change the "images" as well? The template is called "Rounders," but I can't find anything on Blogger Help to solve the problem.

Suggestions gratefully received! Meanwhile, we'll see what Adify comes up with now that my ad space is the right size.

It's Here!

Last night I dreamed my William Morris wallpaper had arrived, and some friends came over to help me hang it. And before I could direct procedings, they did-- badly. The joints didn't butt up; they had gaps as big as 1/8" wide. Other places, the strips overlapped a half inch or more. Or strips were cut and put up in weird narrow widths, for no reason at all. I found myself taking great long pieces back down and having to trash them. I worried whether I'd purchased enough extra to come out with a decent job after all.

And throughout the dream, the paper that was being hung was the same pattern I just got rid of in my 1st and 2nd floor halls and stairway!

That dream was a relief to awaken from.

It was better than a relief, then, when around 8:30 this morning my dog's frantic barking heralded someone at the door. It was the FedEx man, come to deliver my William Morris wallpaper for real!

The WallpaperDirect people surely did a bang-up job of packing it. I had a dickens of a time even trying to find where the lids to the boxes were! The second carton, I used my knife and bypassed finding the flap altogether.

And the wallpaper?

Ooohh, it's pretty! No, there was no miracle-- the "Savernake" for the dining room didn't magically turn out to be more tan and less green. But the pale green it is, is very, very nice.

But, echoes of my dream, I was alarmed to see that the "Blackthorn" for the 1st and 2nd floor halls and stairway is a half-drop and not a straight match. I wasn't able to use the calculator on the website to figure out how much I needed, given the diagonal going up the stairs. Instead, I drew up AutoCAD elevations and figured out how many repeats were required, adding some on for good measure.

Oh, oh, oh, I hope I figured it right and ordered enough! By the time I'm ready to hang this paper, this particular dye lot will be long gone.

But begone, dull care! My William Morris wallpaper has arrived, and it's simply luverly!

What Lies Below

Late this afternoon I took it into my head to take advantage of the fine weather and go out and mulch up some of the leaves on the vegetable garden beds.

Didn't take long to run the lawn mower over the ones on the quadrant closest to the house. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, and there might be wind, so it made sense to dig them into the soil right away.

Hmm. I do my math and each of those beds is around 50 square feet. Should have taken me forty-five minutes tops to fork the one over. Instead, thanks to opportunistic maple tree roots and other subterranean obstacles, it took more like two hours. Or more.

I suppose it only stands to reason that my biggest garden prep challenge each spring should be dealing with the tree roots fingering their way into the vegetable beds. After all, that's where the food and water are.

All right, fine, O trees. Do what you will during the summer, but if I find you past the cobblestone path when I'm digging the garden in March or April, you're getting your rooty fingers smacked. Or clipped, actually.

I tend to forget the tree roots. Silly of me; I have to deal with them every year. What I shouldn't have had to expect is this:

No, that's not a sunken tombstone. It's half a concrete paver that matches a lot of other concrete pavers I found in this part of the yard when I was first prepping the vegetable garden five years ago. What I don't understand is why I didn't find it before. Hey, haven't I been forking the soil here over every year?

Or maybe not. Maybe the volunteer lettuce last year and the biannual Brussels sprouts a year or two before that kept the fork out of this part of the garden.

Well, the paver's out now, and that has to be an improvement.

And this bed is forked, and some further leaf mulching was completed on the one opposite it.

It'd be jolly to get all four beds done soon. Maybe this year I'll be in time to plant some peas.

Wallpaper Update

I just now received a call from FedEx, to expedite the import of my William Morris wallpaper.

Agent wanted to know what it was made of (paper!), how big each roll was (.53m x 10m or 10.5m), and for me to verify how many rolls the order was for (21!). And whether I had imported anything before. Yes, the drapery fabric from last year, but nobody called me about that before it came. "But that was for my own use. So is this."

"The wallpaper is for personal use?"

"Yes."

Very good, and she gave me the tracking number.

I did not have the courage to ask whether there would be any US Customs charges. Hopefully not, since I'm not going to resell it.

The agent told me the shipment hasn't reached the States yet. But it's on it's way!

And oh, I hope the colors of the current batches are clear and good!

What's Next?

Finished stripping the last of the beige-on-beige damask-pattern wallpaper from my first floor hall today, hooray!

So what do I do next?

Go back to stripping the woodwork on the stairrail parts?

Assay the Big Wally's plaster repair kit I received the other day and put my sagging 2nd floor hall ceiling back where it belongs?

Document the structure of my 1st floor hallway floor, to get an opinion on whether I can safely lay down ceramic tile?

Go out in the yard and clean out more flowerbeds?

So many fun things to do!

I think I'll sleep on it and decide in the morning. It'll be a welcome relief from dreaming about how I really need to scrub the paste residue off a half-stripped teal-blue wall . . .