How I found my Kitchen Sink

I have had some rather bad transactions on Craigslist, and some good ones, and this was a good one. 

This Kitchen sink is a Blanco sink. It is a granite composite sink, very durable where scratches and stains are concerned. And it is SO BIG!

The sink was 100% in wonderful shape, selling at a bargain price, new in the box, and only being rejected for a small manufacturing blemish on one side. The owners had their kitchen sink in an island, and the mark was visible, but in my sink the mark would be facing the wall side and never be seen. The fact that the sellers replaced it with the very same sink in their very nice kitchen spoke to them being pleased with it. 

I had several reasons for choosing a white sink. One was I wanted an old-fashioned looking sink. Also I learned from one of the RVs that we have hard water that dries white on dark surfaces. You would never notice that with this sink. A friend and I were also talking about how dark a stainless steel sink can look, especially in the gloomy winter.  This sink wasn't exactly white but it was light enough, and is also easy to keep clean. I am very pleased with it.

With the kitchen sink on the premises, would the actual kitchen be far behind? Stay tuned. For quite a while. 

I saw this kitchen at Lowes, and would have brought home the entire thing on the spot:

Why didn't we? So many reasons... all good reasons. Do you ladies that sew ever see a dress in a department store, and say "Oh, I could make that! I won't buy it because I could make it cheaper myself." Did you know guys do that, too. Of course we could hand-make this kitchen! 

(How often do you ladies go home and make those dresses, by the way?)

A Tile Bargain and A Sunday Drive

We were getting ready for flooring! Making decisions on flooring finishes should have been fun. We had one flooring decision that I think was fun, but the tile floor was turning out to be a chore. Perhaps that was because there is so much to choose from!

Hmm, too marble-y.

Rather plain. 

Too much like concrete. 

Long and skinny?

Tile places close earlier than most stores, so just about the time you have seen the tile selection, and want to go back to the first store to consider a purchase, they are probably closed. Then you wonder if, when you go back the next day, you ought to check out the 5 other tile shops in the area.

My husband took some time to jump in and help me make tile decisions. We went to a tile store or two, and managed to look pretty normal when the salesperson told us the prices. Or maybe salespeople might be used to some pretty strange face contortions.

We chose tile for certain rooms because it was a more natural choice than chemically-made flooring like vinyl. As usual the more "organic" you go the more expensive it is. (What do you think of this stone tile? We liked it but it didn't make it into our finalists)

Some of us went to the ReStore(s) and saw what they had. Wow, lots of good deals! Expensive brands of fancy tile for fifty cents a square foot. It was so tempting, but those shopping trips turned out to be a waste of time as there was not enough of one kind to do a room bigger than the half bath. 

After bringing home too many samples, we decided we were looking for gray. Who knew that gray could be so many colors? And then when you bring it home, it changes colors to things like purple.

We usually ended up at Lowe’s. Still there was some doubt as to whether or not we had found “IT.”

But this ongoing hunt for tile was wearing on me: I started dreaming about tile and that was disturbing! In the meantime my painting job at the house was delayed because of all the driving around!

Finally something happened: an ad on Craiglist popped up from a tile shop that was not usually open to the public. They had a clearing-out-the-warehouse sale and we picked up plenty of a larger gray tile for $1/sf. It looks kinda like a cement sidewalk, and that concrete look was not what we were going for, but surprisingly we have been very happy with it. It has it's own "look" but it seems to "go" fine with the house. It is very good quality, I've been amazed at how durable it is so far. I have dropped things on it and dragged things over it, and haven't seen any marks yet. 

So the laundry room/mud room was provided for. Next was to find tile for bathrooms. If I thought that laundry room was hard to shop for, I was in for it with the bathroom tile selection (just warning you, whining about tile might feature in a lot of posts...)!

One of the boys was interested in trying his hand at tile, which would be a huge money saver on labor. He borrowed a tile cutter and practiced a bit. 

We let him start in the water heater closet. We figured it was a good place to use to learn from any mistakes. 

And now a little bonus.... after all that gray how about some green? It was springtime, and a favorite drive is a couple hours east up a steep, winding road to a beautiful high prairie. 

At just the right couple of weeks, this prairie is bursting with wildflowers. I thought we were a bit early for the most abundant flowers at the time of these photos, but we still saw quite a few and it made a nice afternoon break for us. 

What a beautiful place to rest our eyes. 

The prairie is privately owned but bordered by forest service land. Because of the wild horses grazing around it, the area looks like a mown park. (Hmm Forest Service... have you ever thought of using wild horses elsewhere to keep the fuels trimmed?)

 

Back Again: Lost & Found Creativity

 Well I certainly had no intention of taking the entire month of September "off!"  My weekly writing time for it came and went throughout the month, but to be honest I did not make any effort to catch up. I certainly was busy, but it seems like it was a lost month anyway. I was traveling, sorting, purging, starting school, down sick, in a mess, but here's the oddest thing: I lost my creativity at the end of August. 

By "lost" I mean gone, zero, finished, through. I felt like shutting down all writing/publishing/blogging projects, selling my craft supplies and burning my sewing patterns. It was different than just losing your inspiration or looking at your hobby and wondering what to do. It was different from saying "I'm taking a break because I don't have time." It was something in me definitely saying "It's Over, Forever." I felt no obligation to continue anything.

I argued with myself-- don't get rid of it all just yet! Wait and see if something comes back. Think of the money you will have to spend if you suddenly decide to create again. Don't shut your projects down, you may yet write. So I did not act on it, but it was a "for certain" feeling.

I don't know what happened that Creativity just up and walked out on me. It has been years since I have sewn anyway, maybe I was tired of keeping the stuff. I was very much into my papercraft but that sort of ended this summer and I lacked time. This blog can become daunting because of the enormity of the photos I am sorting through for it, it is easy to be de-motivated. I was doing a lot of sorting of items that had been in boxes for years, maybe it was decluttering overwhelm. I had just finished a 3-year writing project, maybe it was goal-achievement exhuastion. One of my children was on a trip that we were all very excited about, but maybe with the extra person gone it affected my brain! Whatever it was, there was a part of me that kept checking with the other part: anything sparking yet?

I was a bit disturbed, because I have been writing and crafting constantly since I was seven years old. It is so much a part of my life, even when I can't do it, my creative mind does not shut down. I dare not even think of something creative (whether writing or hand-work) at bed-time because it will prevent sleep!Yes, I have seen hobbies come and go and let go of supplies. I have had to put things aside as I had no time, but never forever. And there was always writing. So you see how I was looking at myself wondering what happened?

It was three weeks later that some little inklings of inspiration started to sparkle. Why? I do not know. Traveling was over, I had found a bunch of sewing supplies in the declutter that I had been missing for years, it was mid-September, we were back on a school routine. Whatever it was, the sparks became more frequent but it took another couple of weeks for buckle-down motivation to follow. I hope today to get a few posts scheduled and get back on track here!

I want to know: Has this ever happened to you?

Lights: Keeping Up with the Times

 

I didn't mention this in my last house post about the lights, but there was a bit of debate between myself and the electrician about the upstairs light fixtures. You see, the standard had changed. 

We had decided on recessed lights for most areas. We were all for using LED bulbs because of their long life and the ability to get the tint we wanted. But our electrician told us that basically canned lights with bulbs were out and the new flat LED fixtures were in. No need to drag large metal boxes to the attic to install. No need to have the hassle of screwing in bulbs.  No need to buy the "rings" to put over the bulb for a nice finish. The new kind were so easy to pop in the holes in the ceiling, were all-in-one, decorative, light weight and super compact. They were also cheaper. Sounds great! 

What concerned me was that in however many years the light does die out, the entire unit has to be thrown away. There is no way to replace the little "bulb" (which is just a very small bit of tape with a quarter inch LED on it). That seems so wasteful. The electrician assured me that these lights last so long that it would be years and years before any had to be replaced (these things could last ten or twenty years depending on usage). That brought up another question: will the replacements be more expensive in ten years? Will the standard sizes have changed meaning we have to renovate to replace? Not only that, but a lot of the larger, decorative fixtures are this same sealed, no-bulb-to-replace style now. The thought seems to be that styles change and you will want to replace your fixture with a new look by that time anyway, so toss out the entire thing. This whole new way of doing things didn't seem the wisest way to me! 

 I'm sure the electrician thought I was really weird to hesitate when it was clearly, from his point of view, the greatest thing since sliced bread. The debate went on, but sometimes there is no swimming against the tide of change. We ended up putting in some of the big-metal-box-in-the-attic recessed lights, but also lot of these little LED discs. It became unavoidable when they were so much less expensive, time-saving and frankly so widely available. They really are better for install, smaller, unobtrusive and look great. I am happy with them. I would probably buy them again (I could use a couple more here or there...). Actually they might become the only choice in the stores after a while. I just wonder what will happen in a decade or so when the lights go out. Maybe by then someone will have figured out how to crack them open and change the wee light strip inside.