The trench

I've been avoiding talking about this. I guess I thought if I didn't talk about it, it would go away. OR, it would magically get fixed by the plumbing fairy.

The downstairs bathroom (still unpainted) smells bad. It's always smelled bad. When we came to look at the house they had candles burning in there. I should have known. And I don't mean, it doesn't vent well, or it smells a little musty. It smells BAD.

Imagine if you will a port-a-potty. I want you to close your eyes, and imagine that port-a-potty is at a week long music festival in Texas, and it's day three. The temperature outside is 97 degrees and the port-a-potty is right next to a BBQ stand. Ok now imagine that somehow that port-a-potty is accidentally locked and left to sit in the sun and heat until day seven when it is picked up by a guy named Jerome. Poor Jerry goes to work on getting it open, and when he finally succeeds in his mission, the door flying open, the wickedness that emerges knocks him back on his ass, and melts his eyebrows clear off. That my friends is the smell I'm talking about.

It comes and goes as it pleases. Sometimes it's gone in under and hour, and sometimes it lingers all day. It seems to be worse in the morning, but then sometimes it disappears for months at a time. It seems to have no correlation to how much the toilet is used or if water is run in the sink. Leaving the door open or closed makes no difference whatsoever.

Sometimes when you get up in the morning, you go into the kitchen, and as you round the corner by the fridge it hits you like a brick wall. The smell is so bad it actually triggers the fight or flight instinct in me. It also fills me with disgust and shame. Why do we have a smelly room?

We've had so many plumbing problems with this house, and I know in my heart of hearts that what it needs is for someone to come in, and redo the whole system top to bottom. It also needs to move into a better school district, but that's not going to happen either. When we moved in, there were pipes that were running uphill to drains, and leaky pipes. We lost a wall in that downstairs bathroom to a leaky pipe. That cost us a couple grand in pipe fixing, mold abatement, giant blowing fans, and dry-walling. My father who was here visiting, said if it was his house, he'd have fixed it for $7.32 and a trip to home depot. It was his way of letting us know our mold is bourgeois.

Ok, so the smell seems to be getting worse in the last few weeks. I think it's crying out for me to pay attention and finally call in a professional. My greatest fear is that the plumber will be just as stumped as we are, and we'll have to pay him $300 to tell us there is nothing he can do. Or worse, we'll pay him $300 to pretend to do something that in no way makes our bathroom not smell like a trench full of rotting flesh and poop on fire.

Yay homeownership!

Don't fence me in...

Sunday morning Jack and I went to the Studio City farmers market. It's a little bit of a hike from here, but they have a petting zoo, and pony rides, or as I like to call it "Salmonella Village". They have a teenage kid walking around with a pooper scooper, but as you can imagine, between the animals crapping and the toddlers stumbling around high on baby bunny torture, it's a disaster. Chickens are popping out from under every surface, and the baby goats with crap encrusted furry butts are grazing up against every surface. This is like hell for someone like me. You know, someone who values their life. But Jack gets to pet a bunny, laugh at a chicken, and see where hamburgers come from, and so, I endure.

I watched in horror as a dad allowed his one year old, who was barely walking to crawl around on the ground, where fresh crap had just been scooped. He was also wildly clutching for bunnies, getting handfuls of sawdust which he was crazily rubbing on his face. There are not enough wet wipes in the world to clean this child, and his parents should just start over.

They have these little foot pump driven hand washing stations outside the gates. In order to wash your kid's hands, the water comes out about four feet off the ground, you have to hold them up while urging them to put their hands under the water. While holding your wiggling 30lb bundle of joy, and pumping furiously with one foot, you must somehow free your right hand (or your left if you're a communist, or my mother, or Barack Obama) and try to squeeze some soap onto the their hands, which are now everywhere, but under the soap dispenser. You do all of this, sweating, trying to speak in your sweetest patient mommy voice, while a line of parents and their E. Coli tainted children pile up behind you. You try your hardest not to shout "PUT YOUR HANDS UNDER THAT WATER AND RUB THEM TOGETHER OR SO HELP ME GOD I'LL MAKE YOU REGRET THE DAY YOU WERE BORN!" Because you know, he's two, and might not yet understand threats of this nature. Too vague and philosophical.

Holy Shit and Merry Christmas!

So I think I should have gone into another line of business. i.e. the business of being crafty. I could have been one of those quirky ladies at the local "art fair" with comfortable shoes, and an unnecessarily long braid. Oh and I'd use that crystal deodorant and eat lots of hummus to fit in with the other craft ladies...

Here is my tree topper. It really doesn't look anything like the one from Anthropologie. But in fairness, that thing is really freaking complicated, and made from NASA materials. This is my ode to that one. It cost about $30 in materials. So... there's that too. I'm actually not sure I want to put it on top of the tree, because it's so freaking sparkly and pretty, that I kind of want to hang it on our front door to alert the neighbors that someone REALLY fancy lives here. All the more incentive for them to rob us.

In other news, I spent the whole day cooking stuff from Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa Family Style Cookbook. Poor Sadie, her husband Tom is from Vancouver and his 78 year old father fell and broke his hip while visiting Butte Montana this week. He had supplemental insurance that every Canadian purchases before entering the U.S. It covered his surgery, but won't cover his rehabilitation here in the states. Sadie and Tom can't buy him insurance here, so that he can get well close by, because he has a "pre existing condition". Yay America! So Tom flew up there to get him and his motor home back to Canada two days ago. She and Hattie are flying solo for the foreseeable future. So I thought I'd make some chicken and biscuit stew, and homemade mac and cheese (with gruyere) to tide them over for a day or two. Oh, and did I mention Sadie and Hattie have a terrible cold? Of course they do, because life is HARD people!!!

Ok, I have to go watch the Roomba that Sadie lent me clean my kitchen floor. Jack likes to shout "Go Roomba GO!" when it's cleaning. He's such a supportive child.

tweet this suckas

Them's fightin words missy. I have no idea what twitter is. I mean I do, but not really. I signed up today, because the super savvy Nipper Knapp says that having a blog, and not being on twitter is INSANE. I signed up and tweeted my first tweet. I don't have any followers yet, so it's sort of like talking to myself on the internet. Maybe I'll just tweet my innermost thoughts for the next few days until I cause some kind of social unrest. I have filter problems as it is. I say things all the time that don't need to be said out loud. I'm sure this will end disastrously. I'm also sure that this is some kind of beacon signaling the end of my thinking life. But, uh, YAY twitter.

http://twitter.com/mrsnipperknapp

oh, so Barack Obama DID make it. I see. I stand corrected.

I went to Michael's in the Burbank today. I ate an In&Out burger in my car, in the parking lot. Which pretty much made me the biggest loser in the world. Call off the search, we've found the worlds lamest person. I was in between auditions, and had to eat, and I had to start my search for the elements to make up my awesome Anthropologie rip off tree topper.

Ok, so after spending AN HOUR in there, with Oprah's entire studio audience, I think I know why the tree topper costs nearly $400. I also saw what I would look like if I didn't stop eating In&Out burgers in my car. The tree topper consists of no less than 42,000 different things that cost $7.99 a stem, plus some kind of unidentifiable silver thread or floss or wire, that doesn't exist. They made it up. I had a thought that maybe I should order the stupid thing and take pictures of it, and then return it to the store. But that thought made me feel like I was on the slippery slope to becoming Sarah Palin or Joseph Goebbels or something. Not cool dudes, not cool.

Ok, so here are the contents of my basket. Please note the ten tons of leftover Halloween candy in the background. We only had 4 trick or treaters this year, which was thoroughly depressing. At least this year they were kids. Last year we had several groups of teenage cholas and their babies. The babies were all inevitably dressed as lil' devils and their child mothers were all dressed as sexy something or other. Sexy nurse, sexy fireman, sexy teenage mother. I'm getting old. I'm too ashamed to say how much it all cost. My plan is to use what I need and return the rest. I had a hard time narrowing down what I'd need in the store. Plus I was afraid one of those ladies was going to ask me what I was making if I hovered in any one spot too long, and I would have had to say "Something beautiful and expensive and nothing like the monstrosity you are here to construct!!! I'm different from you!!!!!!"

The dining room table is covered in glitter and faux teeny tiny ice cubes, and Nipper Knapp is pacing back and forth trying to remember the plot to arsenic and old lace, and his chances of acquittal.

I'm just trying to by my baby a new pair of shoes. Mea Culpa

I'm playing the mother of newborn triplets and a four year old in a commercial this week. The real mother looked at me and my skinny jeans and then she punched me in the face (in her mind...)  I don't look like a supermodel, but I'm nowhere near what I looked like after giving birth to Jack. When I was 26, I played the mother to a 12 year old boy in a yogurt commercial. A few years ago, I auditioned to be the wicked mother of a man who was my SAME age. This business is super helpful to women, and their view of how women should look. If I see one more face botoxed beyond recognition, I'm going to barf. LADIES: it doesn't look better, or normal, or "fresh". It looks WEIRD!!! Skin doesn't look like that. Sorry that I contribute to some of these images. But someone's got to pay the mortgage. 

Obviously, I should have gotten a PhD in romance languages, and gone on to be an interpreter at the UN, but ladies and gentlemen, I decided to sell stuff and be pretty as long as nature would allow. I see the bite coming, don't you worry, I see it. 

Ta-dah!

I've decided that the key to finishing projects in a timely manner is outsourcing. I like to think of myself as ambitious. But I'm also lazy. I'm ambitiously lazy. I told Nipper Knapp yesterday that I think the garage office should be my project room. I said I think the reason I have a hard time finishing things is because I don't have space to do them. I'm always packing things up mid-project and putting them away, making it harder to get back out and start back up, so I move on to another project. He said "OH, so THAT'S why you have so many projects going." Bastard. I came upon Alicia Paulson's website the other day, and I think the photos of her studio are dreamy. Look at that shelf filled with fabric. Swoon!

Ok, so that's the next thing to get done, but right now we have something that we got started on this week, and it's finished! And by we, I mean Roberto, our neighborhood handyman, and all around most helpful person ever, and his entire crew. He told me last Friday he would start the tile Monday morning. He and his crew also work for Barbara, our landscape designer, who is also a freakin genius, and took our sad dirt lot and made it into an oasis for us. Apparently they had to start a job for Barbara on Monday as well, so they were shuttling guys back and forth. On Monday Miguel, the youngest, and my guess the guy who gets stuck with all the crap jobs, came to tear out the old tile. They discovered that the house flipper we bought the place from had tiled right over the plaster, so they had to take the wall down to the studs and start over. On Tuesday Momo, Roberto's brother Geronimo, who is the craftsman of the crew, came and put up the hardybacker, and made a chalk line for the tile. Jack loves Momo, and stood in the kitchen door for two days saying "What's Momo doing?". 

Our house was built in 1928. Nothing is even. The floors, the windows, the walls, the cabinets, nothing is perpendicular to anything else. So when Momo the perfectionist started to tile, he was dismayed to see that everything was galley gimble. I could tell it was making him crazy, and I assured him that I didn't expect it to be perfect, just better than the barfy bean colored tiles that we had before. 

They had to make a million cuts to make the tiles line up correctly and so the tile work went into Thursday. Roberto came with his wife and worked until 9pm that night despite our protests that they go home. We bought them In&Out burgers and sent them home with a box of burgers and fries for their boys. Some stupid consolation. At one point, after we had gotten Jack to bed, Nipper and I were downstairs ready to watch TV. We had an overwhelming sense of guilt, and were trying to hide in the living room. Could we have tiled the kitchen ourselves? Yes. Should we have? NO. It would have taken us 3 or 4 months, and we would probably be flirting with a trial separation. Plus, we are contributing to the economy. So there! Suck it guilt!

Roberto also had to have his electrician come in to do a few things. We've had to unplug the garbage disposal every time we run the dishwasher because the previous owner put them on the same switch. So thoughtful. We also had a plug in the middle of this tiny wall in the middle of the room that I'm not sure what you'd plug into it. We had him take that one out and put one in the back hallway so I could move the microwave back there, and free up some counter space. When we moved here, my mother said "You don't have a lot of storage space in that kitchen" and I thought she was spoiled. She has one of those awesome kitchens with an island the size of a large motor home, and custom cabinets, with drawers, and pulls, and things that spin so you never have to bend over. Dream kitchen. But she was right, we have stuff crammed in every single inch of that kitchen, including the back table that is overflowing with crap. That my designated disaster area. The household junk drawer. Nipper Knapp is not allowed to say "What's this?" OR "Where is this thing going to go?" If it's on the back table it's got immunity from his O.C.D.

So here are the before and after  pictures. If I had a million dollars I would love to have done a whole big kitchen renovation. Taken out a wall, added french doors to the patio, retiled the floor, gotten real cabinets with drawers, and other storage things that make sense. But I don't have a million dollars. I have about thirty seven dollars. Nipper and his dad painted the kitchen right after we moved in. Shortly after that I painted the cabinets and installed the green glass knobs and drawer pulls to match my jadite appliances and dishes. I had this awesome upholsterer make the curtains from this fabric I bought 6 years ago, before I was married, or owned a house. I knew I'd have a kitchen someday, and I knew I'd want curtains from that fabric. 

BEFORE

thanks but no thanks for the country kitchen cabinets and horrid soffit

I alternately refer to this tile as the "home depot especial" and "refried tile delight"

The neighbors told us that there was a craftsmen era built in breakfast nook here that the flipper tore out

AFTER

Ta-dah! My mom insisted on getting us the oven hood, she was right, it finishes the space. Thanks mom!

I took the door off the glass cabinet so I wouldn't have to listen to the cabinet door banging 32 times a day. I am impossible to deal with. I know. 

The white tile makes the kitchen look so much bigger. I went with a dove grey grout so it would match better with the grey countertops and stainless steel appliances, which by the way NEVER look clean. Poor Nipper

I got the "fake Saarinen table at Ikea. It's called the Docksta, and it's kind of the greatest rip-off ever. The Eames chairs are from Modernica, and they were a birthday gift to Nipper Knapp from my mother last year. 

Today I went out and bought what I keep referring to as the "Cadillac of dishracks", (sorry Nipper) and an under the cabinet paper towel dispenser. Not having the paper towels sitting on the counter anymore kind of makes me feel like we are Vanderbilts. Like we moved out of the cave and into the DE-luxe apartment in the sky. We're movin' on up people...

All in all, I'd say we spent just under $1000 over the course of two and a half years (not including the gift chairs) to make the kitchen look like the kitchen I imagined I'd have all those years ago. Now if only I could have imagined a second bathroom. I never dared to dream that big. 

PRETTY! I'm just trying to get a fix...

Ok, so I'm kind of a Christmas junkie. I start listening to old timey Christmas music sometime mid-summer. I don't subject Nipper to it until mid-October, which is two months too soon for him. But it makes me happy in an immediate way. It makes me nostalgic and hopeful, and I don't care who knows it. I even made a Pandora station that only plays Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and The Rat Pack singing Christmas carols. Pandora is kind of the greatest thing that ever happened to me (after Nipper and Jack and the soy gingerbread latte at Starbucks that also comes but once a year).

I was on Anthropologie this morning looking for those owl towels, so I could copy the embroidery pattern onto the towels I got at Ikea for Sadie (terrible, awful, cheap unethical, going to hell). I saw that they had their holiday stuff in. Yippee! I look forward to this stuff all year. I'm like an addict who only gets to get high one month out of the year. The other 11 months, I'm just sick, and trying to maintain. Also, I'm sure much to my mother's chagrin, none of this has anything to do with Jesus. Or not much at least. It's more about the feeling of it. The twinkly lights, the smell of the tree, and the cinnamon in everything, wrapping presents, giving presents, scotch tape. I once wrapped all of my friend Mike's presents for him one year, just because it made me happy. I'm more generous in spirit at Christmas time. I don't look at other people and sigh as much. It's powerful stuff.


So Anthropologie... I have a pretty great collection of ornaments, but no tree topper. Those angels seem too something or other for my taste, and those weird finial dealies are just uhm, too violent for my lovely tree. So I'm always looking for something clever to put up there each year. I keep thinking I'll just make a tin foil star like the kind you'd have made in elementary school.

Well, ladies and gentleman, I found this beautiful little nest at anthropologie, and had an Etta James AT LAST moment, until my eyes rolled over the price. THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY NINE DOLLARS! Did Barack Obama make it? Damn you to hell Anthropologie.

So you know what's coming right? I'm going to make one just like it. Now I wonder where I can buy silver floss like that. hmmm. Pictures coming "soon".

imogene + willie

I'm sorry. I apologize. I know this is slightly stalky obsessive behavior. But these people have made something awesome and it needs to be shared.

Check out the new video on the front page of Imogene + Willie's website. Did I mention they're having a pinewood box derby this weekend???? Gah!!! Who get's to be this cool?

Progress

When I left the house today this is is where the kitchen was at. When I got home it was almost done. Hoorah! Hoorah! No more refried bean tiles! Nipper said the fridge is messy, but I pretended like he wasn't talking to me, and left the kitchen. We might just get through this week in one piece.