A Shrimp Boil

Sunday was our First Wedding Anniversary and we decided to throw a shrimp boil for a few  forty of our family, friends and neighbors.  As part of the guestbook at our wedding, we left out cards and small envelopes for our guests to write wishes or advice to open on our one year anniversary.  So, Sunday morning, we made coffee on our new Keurig and opened all of our cards.  Let me just say this, I'm super glad we didn't open them in front of our family because when some of our friends get drunk, they write inappropriate things.

Then we prepped for the party!

A Shrimp Boil, or a low-county boil has potatoes, corn, onions, butter, shrimp and a delicious sausage.  So, we prepped 40 ears of corn, 10 lbs of potatoes, 6 lbs of onions, 25 lbs of shrimp, and 14 lbs of sausage.    Have you ever seen that much corn in your life?  Our super cool friends Kim and Mike made us the Shrimp Shaped Sign for the front yard!

Our other friend Mike (we know a lot of Mikes okay?)  brought us the sausage from a sketchy and dangerous grocery store in Detroit.  It is the most delicious sausage in the world.

After it all boils up, dump the boil on crawfish party paper.  Or newspaper, whatever you prefer. And, then you get to eat it: 

We had so much fun!  Thank you to everyone who came, especially my grandpa from Florida who flew in and worked on my house on Friday and Saturday.  He mowed my lawn, mudded the back bedroom, and painted the stairs.  It sure does help to have talented family members! 

 

Of course, we had to get lots of pictures in front of the sign!  Oh, and my dress had seahorses on it, but that's basically close enough.  

A special thanks to my best friends, Natalee and Elizabeth who are the greatest helpers in the world and decorated my tables beautifully, made LEGIT sweet tea and shucked all of my corn.  I appreciate it so much! 

And, to my mother for getting us this cake:  The same carrot cake we had at our wedding 1 year ago!  

Mom:  Draw a brown house on the cake with some stick figures, call me if you have questions. 

It was a fabulous way to kick off the summer and it was so great to give everyone a tour of our new digs.  Thanks everyone!  We had a blast! 

A Real Life Miracle

People!  People!  A miracle happened today.

Jon and I agreed on something.  Without compromise and without a discussion.   It was a huge decision about:

LAMPSHADES!! 

That's right.  Miracles. The one thing we agree on in this house renovation project are the lampshades for our bedroom.  And, if I'm being totally honest with myself, I already told Jon that I liked these and wanted needed them, so he was probably just being nice.  

But, these Target Threshold Lampshades are going to be perfect in our new grey and yellow bedroom.   Stay tuned for the final photos of the complete master bedroom - hopefully tomorrow! 

Stairway to the Upstairs

On Sunday, my dad came over to help us build new stairs.  We are going to lay hardwood flooring across them, but the base stairs that came with the house were very crappy and needed to be replaced.

I knew my dad was smart, but until Sunday, I didn't realize that he was a genius.  Building stairs is hard work people.  The math involved in incredibly difficult and the angles (although just right angles) are super complicated. 

Here are some photos of our progress: 

 

Uh oh!  What's that?  If you guessed a hole where the stairs should be, you are correct!  Jon thought it was super fun to climb up and down from the basement to the kitchen through the hole instead of using the perfectly good basement steps.

No, Jill, 1/16th of an inch off is not acceptable.

My super cool dad hard at work.  The sides of the steps are what take the longest because we had to carve out a part for the bullnose wood at the top step.

The finished product!  We are going to lay hardwood lengthwise across the stairs and we ordered the additional bullnose pieces for the edges of the stairs.  Unfortunately Lumber Liquidators only sells the wood that we need in 6 1/2 foot lengths (and the stairs are 38 inches across) so we had to buy two pieces at a cost of 45 dollars each!   I'm using the rest for an art piece, stay tuned for pictures.

And now, a Haiku about my dad:

Stair building genius. 
Is everything level?  Thrice.
Two steps, eighty screws used.

And a poem from my perspective:

This math is very hard. 
I cannot divide fractions. 
Find an app for that. 




Stay tuned for additional updates on our door installation, our nearly completed (OMG) master bedroom and the wall paper removal from hell.

Happy Contracting! 

The two hundred dollar swing

I apologize for my late arrival to Brown Beauty. I tend to stick my mind to one objective and ignore everything else going on around me when I get stressed. With a new house, new job, and a laundry list of projects to accomplish, these last few months have been anything but a breeze. So to all those I owe a phone call to, my sincerest apologies.

This is a story about a man and a bathroom:

Typically, a story about a man and a bathroom revolves around a long night of drinking, too much Taco Bell, or a lot of reading material. This one is different. Demolishing the bathroom was the first among a long list of remodeling projects that we will tackle on Brown Beauty. It is also the very first place that I realized that I have no clue what the hell I am doing.

It started quite simple. I wanted to move the doorway so that my bathroom door was outside of my vanity and not simply covering the toilet and shower. So I bashed some drywall and felt like a bad ass. Hours later I was still trying to figure out what the hell to do. I cut a hole in the drywall where my new doorway would be located but it looked more like a I suffered a stroke in the process. Suffice is to say, it was far from a straight line to frame in a new door.

At this point in the process I figured it was time to quit. It seemed like I was just puttering around and recklessly swinging my hammer. I decided to just remove one more small bit of drywall and then call it a day.  And so I took a few swings and heard a crack. I swung a bit to hard and on the back swing I destroyed the only good toilet in our house.

Brown Beauty has 3 toilets but only one of them actually worked well. A few days earlier, I even made sure to tell Jill that under no circumstances would I discuss replacing that toilet. And then I took a swing that cost me the only toilet worth a damn.

You don't realize how great a toilet is until its gone.

Tomorrow I will continue with part two of the bathroom. The Deuce.

Paint Party!

Last weekend the hubs and I picked out the paint color for the master bedroom.  We are hosting an open house/anniversary/birthday party for ourselves at the end of May and our goal was to complete the master bedroom before we moved into it.   Of course, by bedroom, I just mean bedroom.   If you saw the last post, the bathroom is a whole other can of worms.   And, at this rate, I'm going to just hang up photos of what things will look like in ten years and then herd everyone outside for drinking games. Because there's no way we are achieving this deadline. 

In the natural vein of things at Brown Beauty: 

1.  Drive to Home Depot and pick out Gentle Rain by Behr which looks like this: 

"What a sweet, nice gray.  Not to dark, not too light."  You say to yourself, chuckling slightly because this project is so easy.  

2.  Paint walls. A large swatch of wall.  

3.  Realize that the paint is actually dirty white. And hideous. 

4.  Ask yourself whose fault this is.  Your options are: Home Depot, your husband, Moe, yourself.

5.  Come to the conclusion that Gentle Rain just totally sucks as a color and is not gray. 

6.  Return to Home Depot (third trip of the weekend) to choose a better gray paint color. 

7.  Wear a gray shirt to Home Depot and compare all of the paint swatches to your gray shirt.  

8.  Find Gray Area by Behr.  

9. Home depot employee comments that the color is similar to your shirt.  "Yes! Exactly!  That's what I was going for!"

10.  Show the paint to your dad who comments that the wall must first be patched, mudded, sanded, mudded again, and then you can paint. 

11.  Hang your head in defeat because Nothing. Is. As. Easy. As. It. Seems.  

This is the color that I picked.  It is Gray Area by Behr. 

And let me tell you, I'm wishing and hoping that this is the final paint purchase for the master bedroom. Someday, the paint will actually be on the walls! 

Bathroom/Flooring/Gardening - Weekend Contracting continues!

It has been awhile since we've updated but the weekends are just so crammed full of weekend contracting excitement that I don't have a spare second to create a blog post.

This weekend, I started my 25' by 5' garden!  I love gardening and I come from a long line of gardeners.  One of my favorite memories as a kid was going into my grandpa's backyard and picking a sun-warmed tomato and eating it like an apple with salt!  It is one of my most delicious memories and I have wanted my own backyard garden for basically my whole life.

So, this weekend, my dad brought the tiller and we mapped out where the garden will be:

 

It was VERY hard work.    My dad has never let anyone use his tiller (except me!) and that's probably because it feels like a baby elephant is pulling you forward chewing up the land.  You literally have to lean backwards with all of your weight and dig in your feet to keep the tiller in place.  My shoulders and upper arms have never been this sore!  But, it was all worth it because after we framed out the garden with some pressure treated 2 x 12s, I got to plant my cukes, tomatoes, onions, peppers, and brussel sprouts.    I'm also putting in beets, carrots, potatoes, various lettuces and an herb garden.

I am so happy to have a yard and place to grow food.  I don't have to have chase that elusive garden fresh tomato taste anymore!

 

Here is a gratuitous picture of Moe, jungle cat.
"Who the hell planted all this grass out here and why am I just now finding out about it?!"

We also finished the demo on the bathroom, which was not as easy as they make it seem on HGTV.  I might be done with that channel.  What type of new tile would you like? is probably the very last question you should ask yourself when putting in a new bathroom.  They don't tell you that the marble tile used by the old owners is super heavy and has been glued on  by some alien crazy glue previously unknown to man.  They also don't tell you that pretty much every toilet installed in the 70s has leaked at some point in the last 40 years and you have to replace all of the plywood before you put down cement board, a resurfacer to make everything level and then you can do the tile.  But, you also have to do 700 other steps, like secure the vent, hire an electrician, fix the shower drain that  dad cracked became cracked in a freak accident, purchase drywall, replace the insulation, install plumbing for a rain shower.  The list is endless.  

This is what my master bathroom looks like right now.  In all honesty, it is very exciting to have a completely blank slate to work with.  I can do anything I want in that space and I couldn't be more excited about the rain shower!  I wish I had that super cool animation software utilized by the notorious Property Brothers to show exactly how the bathroom is going to turn out. 

Sorry it took so long between posts!  I'll try to update more frequently!  

Weekend Contractors out.