Making Things Better- episode of battling with the dogs

For the past several years I have not used my master bedroom or bathroom, the reason is because the bed is awfully uncomfortable, and the floor suffered a lot of pet damage from mostly Bella when I first got her.  Instead I rather sleep in a much smaller bedroom on the second floor and slowly this room just sort of turned into a junk room that no one wanted to have anything to do with.  

Lately I've really wanted to slowly repair the damage and make it a welcoming space again.  A month ago I finally found a floor refinishing person that charge a reasonable price and also seemed very professional so I booked myself an appointment.  The wait list for him is a whole month but I figured that it was worth the wait.  

As with all home improvements, everything takes longer than expected.  It was initially a one day $1000 floor refinishing job, that turned into three days and costing three times as much.  Once the damaged floor pieces were ripped out, I discovered more damage on the subfloor, which also needed to be cut out and replaced as well.  Unfortunately the flooring contractor is fully booked and I had to wait another half months for him to squeeze in two more days of time to finish the job.  

It was extremely labor intensive work and the two people team did a great job waving in the new wood and polishing off the top layer.  I opted for a much lighter color which turned out pretty well!  Also moving all my wardrobe out of the closet was such a huge task and I wonder how I have accumulated so much clothes! 

The "After" turned out very well and I really like the lighter color!  It's not a "perfect" job but for the purpose of this room this will do and it makes me feel 100 times better than seeing the damaged old floor.  I'd really like to re-finish the rest of the wood floor in the house eventually. 

I've made a list of things that need to be done in order to finish "detailing" this room.  I can really get lost in details but it's something I enjoy so much and it's ok to take time to do each room slowly but get it done right!

Here's my one bedroom to do list, 

1. Replace existing baseboards.
2. Paint the interior wall and ceiling
3. Reinstall closet doors and replace closet door hardwares
4. Replace ceiling light fixture
5. Change out curtain rod 
6. Outfit new window treatment
7. Custom make window seat cushions.
8. New bedroom furnitures
9. Repair window damaged by Uggie

I've been playing with ideas on how to furnish the bedroom and it's so fun to put a mood board together.  I really just want this space to be comfortable and calm so I can use it again. 

I am really hoping that Uggie has grown out of the window eating phase, as he hasn't been chewing on that window for a while...

As for Bella, do you think she's sorry?  I'm not so sure.  Just this morning she got mad at me for making her go potty outside when the ground is a bit wet from a little bit of drizzling rain.  She was not amused!  It's not easy to see in the photo but she is actually quite a large dog and she can easily do some damage to the house compared to Kelly, but I love her so much and I already forgive her for being naughty!

 

Planning a few small home improvements

With end of year approaching, I started decluttering around the house again.  It only seems to make sense to declutter the house twice a year because stuff just accumulates over time and without some interference my house could get a little out of control.

I'm also working on a couple projects around the house to make my life a bit easier.  My main floor master bedroom has really served as a junk room and dog room for the last few years because it was so uncomfortable to begin with.  When I first moved into the house years ago I was quite inexperienced with home furnishing and spent a lot of money buying very uncomfortable furniture and mattress etc.  I finally decided that the expensive things that I can't use are really not an asset to my life so I'm planning to purchase new ones to replace them.  That lead to thoughts of redoing the whole room altogether.  For now things that need to be done in the master bedroom that's somewhat urgent,

1. Refinish hardwood floors. 2. Order new window panel. 3. Declutter bedroom drawers and closet. 4. Order new window seat cushions.

The one item that has to be done before everything else is actually getting a new HVAC system into the house.  Being super procrastinator on house maintenance stuff, I somehow survived the whole last winter without proper heating and over the summer a somewhat working AC unit.  This year with temperature dropping slightly I'm just not dealing with it and constantly having a minor cold from the house being a bit too cold.  I figure winter time is probably a better time than summer to have this done and there's nothing I can do about it.

Another super big item on my to do list is to empty out my garage and workshop completely for a studio conversion project that I've been slowly planning.  The space needs to be freed up within the next couple of months or so in order to make proper plans... on top of that, I think living a clutter free life is just good Fengshui!

Home maintenance always seems never ending and so expensive, but I'm grateful to have my own place to live in.  I'm kind of excited to make some positive changes in my home and looking forward to have some fun with the new design!


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Call it fate, coincidence, or what you like. Remember what happened last Thanks Giving? Remember? Remember?

Wednesday morning when I woke up, my husband showed me to a section in his side of the bedroom closet, and asked that I touch the wall. Afraid that he was pulling a prank, I refused, but eventually I put my hand on the wall, and discovered to my surprise that it was toasty warm. Turned out that he had discovered this while taking out his clothes for dry cleaning and noticed that the clothes was warm. On the other side of our bedroom closet wall is the fire place in the living room, and the last time we made a fire? Monday evening.

My husband had promised to give a call to the chimney sweeper sometime during the day, but he completely forgot about it until the day was almost over. While the chimney sweeper couldn't help him, he said we should call the fire department immediately. All this while I was puckering away on my fairy gardens, wondering how I should decorate a Christmas themed fairy garden. When my husband called me, I put down my gloves to answer the phone. He told me about the whole ordeal and that the fire department will stop by shortly to check out what was going on with the wall. We talked about what to have for dinner that night, thinking it would be a short 30 min check, we decided that Indian food would be the choice dinner.  While we were still on the phone, I could hear sirens fast approaching our neighborhood, and in the back of my mind I thought, no way, no way this was coming to my house.

The 5 seconds I had to put my dogs away in the bedroom, already an enormous fire truck had parked in front of my house with three firemen knocking heavily on the door, startling myself and probably all the neighbors. I answered the door and first thing went out of my mouth was," oh no no, I think you are mistaken, this is NOT an emergency."

Apparently, having fire smoldering in the wall is a serious problem.  Within a minute my house had turned from a zen haven to a completely chaotic war zone. First went my wall, an axe was brought in and knocked off a huge patch of plaster above the fire mantle exposing the brick walls. Firemen checked every possible place to see if they could have better access to the fire or any other place they could've missed, the chimney top, the attic, the basement, the side yard... our house was covered with firemen from roof to side yard, to living room, to basement.  Of course, being completely shocked by the turn of events, I protested mindlessly when the axe went down on the wall and said, "wait, you can't just break the wall, this is a historical house!!" And one of the officer told me,"but if you don't, then this is going to be a historically BURNT house!"

Looking back I have to say I was very impressed and appreciative of the service of the Orange County fire department. All these firemen in heavy suits and gears removed my delicate china carefully and quickly from the mantle without breaking anything. They were constantly sweeping the floors where the wall plaster and dust accumulated, and kept me up dated immediately whenever there was news on the progress. In order to minimize the damage, they called in a arson investigator to help figuring out the best way to go about it, the urban search and rescue team was brought in because they needed the special equipment, and treated our house as if it was their own house.

 

 (There were maybe 15 firemen in my living room)

(I had to put my doggies in the bathroom for a make shift dog house)
 
Finally the decision was made after talking to a chimney expert that we just had to break through the bricks above the fireplace. My entire fire mantle was removed as well as several pieces of old tiles. I had to gobble down some wine when they did this. Lucky for us, one of the firemen used to be a brick layer, so he was able to remove the bricks piece by piece without breaking them in case I wanted to salvage my 100 year old bricks.

( After the bricks were finally removed, the temperature inside was about 900˚ F. )

So here it is, the aftermath. I sat on top of my piano stared at the fire mantle and cried a little. Needless to say, we did not have Indian food that night. The next morning was a beautiful day, the world went on as if nothing had happened. My husband and I tried to clean up the bricks and tiles left outside. Piecing two of them together, Jeff read out a name on one of the bricks. It says," SIMONS." That same afternoon we went out for our Thanks Giving meal at a restaurant in Laguna Beach that Jeff had reserved a day ago, when we walked to the front gate, there it was, a spread of several vintage tiles cemented into the ground as a entrance decoration, and one of them read, "SIMONS." It was as if everything was just meant to be, and we've no better place to be than to be exactly where we are now.

Master bedroom progress

Last year I refinished the bedroom floor in the master bedroom and gave away the old furniture set to my gardener because he had commented on how much he liked it.  It literally took me a whole year to get working on it again because I didn't sleep in there and simply didn't have the time. 

Back in late August I suffered a very bad medical incident that literally threw my life upside down and took me away from being able to live a normal life for months.  It made me realize what an awful and dangerous world we truly live in and there are some medical professionals who could care less about me as a human being and my life meant nothing to them.

While struggling to survive and repairing the damage done by others, I put my focus on home improvement projects again because it's something that I'm passionate about and it always guarantee to brighten up my day.  I finally ordered a new bed, this time I upgraded to a king size low profile bed because I had wanted my pups to be able to jump on the bed with ease and also have plenty of leg room for all of us.  It took me a while to bring in the mattress because the one I had wanted was quite pricy.  I ended up going with a luxurious Beautyrest mattress that has a plush pillow top.  I took Kelly to the mattress store and she helped me negotiate a great bargain.

Yesterday the mattress got delivered after a two week long wait, I immediately went to HomeGoods and picked a new set of quilt and sham and also order a water proof mattress cover online.  In the evening when I got home, I slowly worked on the bed and made dinner for me and the pups, it was such an amazing feeling to focus on something happy.  I'm already loving the natural wood color of the new bed and the mattress feels like soft cloud.  

Our first night trying out the new bed was amazing.  Bella was a bit confused at first as she likes to head upstairs when she's ready for bed so I had to lure her downstairs with a treat.  I slept so well on my new bed and I couldn't even put in words how good it felt to finally get a new bed!

The remaining things that needed to be done include installing new baseboard, fixing the window that Uggie chewed up again!) and making new custom cushions for the window seat.  After that I just need to declutter and organize my closet and also switch out my current IKEA dresser with a new one.  I also want to install some new window covering and I already found some new lace curtain that I really like.  I'm also contemplating painting the room again... but I do still love the current wall color!  So, that's the plan for now.  I can't believe it has taken me this long to get to it but I'm really loving how it's turning out!

Bobby's Tale-- The Adoption.

These were two of the first few pictures I took of Bobby, probably from the first day or two after I got him back from the animal shelter. You can see that he was super skinny, because there was basically no meat on the bones, he didn't even have a butt cheek!

I didn't know what came over me that day when I went to the animal shelter. I had a broken old Blackberry that had a internet service worse than a go phone, and after I decided to search for an animal shelter address for the first time, it led me to the middle of a residential area. I almost gave up but tried another address and ended up finding the shelter I wanted to find. Did I suddenly gained a interest in sheltered animals? Or was Bobby calling me that day to pick him up somehow? Who knows! It was, at least I heard, a very high kill place. Pets are kept there for only five days. It was Bobby's seventh day. When I went there, my eyes immediately spotted him because he was standing up with his paws holding the metal bar and cried the loudest in there and shaked his tail very very hard. He was locked in the middle of a row of cages, very dark inside and he kind of blended in, so I didn't get to see him very well other than that he had very shinny and large eyes, and a very very big black nose, it was dry and cracking. He had this thing that never quite changed, when he was very very scared, he screams, I mean, not like a bark, but a scream, like a mad little girl on top of her lungs. Our groomer later laughed and told me when I sent him for a hair cut the first time that she had never met a dog who screamed like that, I cracked up and said, "yep, that's just him." So then I bent down to see him on that day, he reached out both paws, squeezed my hand and pulled it into the cell to lick it. He also grabbed my heart into the cell. When I got up and ready to walk down the hall a bit more, he started crying, it kind of surprised me, so I went back. I looked at his perfectly round shiny eyes and cute black nose, couldn't believe a dog like that had to be locked up in a cell. It was such a sad place that I almost cried looking at all the dogs there. It took all in all ten minutes to take down his number and go up to the office to fill out an application. Then, he was mine.

I was told that he would be ready to be picked up the next day after he was spayed. After I paid a meager $80, I grabbed my wallet with both hands and walked away, but then immediately turned back to the counter. I have this annoying habit of repeating myself many times of the same questions when I know perfectly that I am being redundant. I walked up to the cashier and asked him again, "so this procedure that's going to be done, is it safe?" He rolled his eyes, and said, "woooooo noooooo it is very dangerous, is it very dangerous?" He asked the girl behind him, and she said, "yep." I still had my wallet in both of my hands held high up to my chest and said, " O.K., thank you." And then turned around and walked out. When the emotions started to chill, I thought to myself, "oh, no, what have I done?" That night when I got into bed, I thought, "the little black dog is having a tough time right now, but he doesn't know that after this day, tomorrow he will get sunshine and lots of running on the grass!" Then I fell alseep.

The next day I shopped for a new dog bed, new food bowl, a new blanket, and putted it in the passenger seat and came to the shelter again to pick him up. I could barely contain my excitment, imagine my first time rescuing a little dog from the shelter, it was a good deed! I was directed to wait outside a mobile building where Bobby would be released to me, then I saw the vet, he had a big belly and a greasy apron on, and he looked kind of like a butcher. He said to me, "ok, let's see the paper work, hmm, yeah, ok, this little guy right? haha, very energetic! Wait here!" He went in, shut the door behind him, a while later he came out and handed me a stack of papers and a dog. I looked at him not understanding what he meant by "very energetic," but I was soon to find out. I took a couple of hard stares at the little black dog making sure it was the same one I picked yesterday, and took a look at the paper work that he handed me, on the column of Pain medication applied at this time, it said, "None." So are you telling me that you cut off his balls without giving him any pain medication???

He certainly didn't look like it. Right off the bat he was jumping up and down, smelling everything around him, pulling hard on the leash dragging me left and right with him, then I finally got a good look at him under the sun. He was much skinnier than I thought, his hair looked really dry and messy, it was not the all black and shiny coat like I imagined at all.

The whole riding home I put this little guy near me on the passenger seat. He behaved really good in the car, but looked a little unsettling, not knowing where he was being taken to now. And I felt a little unsettling, not knowing what to expect, kind of felt like I just randomly picked up a homeless person and putted him in my car and took him into my private home. When I opened the door to my house, Kelly jumped up like a cat and viciously barked. I had to separate them for a little while, realizing that perhaps she didn't "really" understand that serious heart to heart conversation I had with her the night before about bring in a new dog. After realizing that the new dog was not going away, Kelly got mad.

The first night was really hard, Kelly soon went from being mad to afraid, she hid in the little space between the bed and the night stand and stuck out her fluffy head to check if Bobby was there, and only when I took him out of my bedroom, did she came out to play. Not knowing this new environment, for a couple of times, Bobby tried to bite Kelly's neck, not for real, but to scare her. That night, afraid Bobby would attack Kelly, I decided to put him in the bathroom right next to my bedroom. I had a sizable bathroom that's a little bigger than my bedroom, don't ask me why, it just was! So I putted Bobby there and closed the door, he immediately started to scream, I right away felt bad, so I let him back into the room and let him slept next to my bed. I was amazed at how sturdy he seemed, he just got spayed, had a bit of a high temperature, and yet he was very happy and excited. He couldn't take a bath for the first week because of the surgery stitches even though his hair was quite dirty. I ran my fingers on his rib cage and butt and felt nothing but bones, and felt so much sympathy for this little guy. The shelter said he was a stray, but who abondoned him? Where was he from? What had happened to his last home? How did he look like when he was a baby? If only he could tell me... The whole night I was half asleep, half awake to keep a watch out for him and Kelly, and so did the next several night. It was a little stressful, a little funny, and a lot of excitment.

Later my boyfriend came to visit me, and he name the little black dog Bobby, after Bobby Kennedy. So that's how it all started, a really plain and humble beginning, nothing exceptional, but what turned out to be the most amazing and precious 13 months I had with the most amazing little dog in the world. My home was old and crumbly, my kitchen was crammed and small, but I felt lucky because I had everything that I needed.

My husband and I discovered a wonderful Jewish deli place not too far away from us. For the first time ever I had a potato pancake with sour cream and apple sauce on top, and lots of manu items that I can't quite pronounce or understand. I tried the corned beef with sauerkraut sandwiched between two pieces of Rye bread, and it was delicious! I've been trying to eat vegan food these days, but right now I am needing some food comfort to balance out the doggy stress... execuses, execuses, right?

As far as the battlefield on the doggy front, things are quickly falling back to normal, which is pretty amazing. There was a total of three "accidents" yesterday, and only one this morning, so the statistics is encouraging.  I decided that it's just too mean to keep Uggie (yeah a homeless dog named after the movie star, what about it?)  in the crate during the day, so I put him on the leash and leashed him with me around the house. As difficult as it may sound, it was actually pretty easy. I had him sitting by my feet while I worked on the computer, he didn't cry like mad this time. The only down side? He almost chewed through the leash and escaped!

Here's what I did to train him: we went to the backyard several times throughout the day for Uggie to go to bathroom, and I always praised him when he did good. When I was in the house, he was on the leash. There was a couple of times I had to go out of the house to run errands, so I crate him, but I putted him in the bedroom with Kelly and Alfie, so that he didn't feel like he was left out. I also left chew toys and a Kang toy stuffed with wet dog food inside the crate for him to play with, and for the most part, he was pretty content. In the afternoon I took each dog seperately for some serious long walks to burn off some energy and get fresh air, then I kept them in the living room til I was able to find time to feed them dinner. After dinner, bathroom break again, a little bit of belly rub for everybody, and it was night time. Uggie went back to the crate, Kelly and Alfie stayed inside the bedroom where Uggie's crate was, and I was free to do things that I needed to do.

This afternoon while I was clipping away plants in the backyard, Alfie and Uggie somehow found a vine from a fern plant, they each got hold of one end of the vine and started playing tug of war. I watched them in amazment for a long time, it was the funniest thing I've seen ever!

I'm not too sure how to go about showing my home improvement photos since I haven't updated anything for a long time and much has changed since then.  I guess I should pick up from my last major update.

From my last post you can see that we had just done the framing of first and second floor around the fireplace and chimney. We had to change the framing one more time when the fireplace was fitting in as it was short by a couple of inches. At that time the house was a total and complete chaos because the walls were knocked wide open, standing from the living room, you could see into the bedroom as well as the second floor.

(First floor looking into second floor)

 (back of the fireplace is our bedroom "closet," if you can call it that)

 

(looking down from the second floor)

For the actual fireplace, I opted for the Rumford fireplace because I could not reuse the interior part of my old fireplace.  After doing a bit of research on my own, it turned out that this is actually a very efficient type of traditional fireplace. Although I had to go with some cinder blocks instead of bricks, pretty much everything else was chosen with historical accuracy in mind. It's one way that I coupe with my house being smashed into pieces. Anyhow, I chose to have the fire bricks laid horizontally because it's suppose to be a older style.

My general contractor put in a gas pipe even though I said about a million times, no gas, please! So we took out the pipe and replaced that piece of broken brick!

Since our house was built in the 1920s, way before "prefab" fireplaces were common place, I was dead set on getting a custom built-from-scratch fireplace back. I'm not sure if it was really that smart of a thing to do, but that was one thing I insisted. Mind you that the cinder blocks in the new fireplace only goes about six feet high so there was no concern for weight. From the cinder block up was just wood framing and a metal flute going to the second floor and roof.  The interior part of the fireplace was ordered all the way from San Francisco, we had to wait for a week for all the parts to get here. The two pictures above is my fireplace contractor himself working on the project making sure all the measurements are correct.

And voila, there, a fireplace, well, almost!

 

Next step was to work on the surface of the fireplace. During the initial demolition, the workers were able to salvage piece by piece most of my fireplace tiles. However, a large portion could not be salvaged and I could not find exact replacement tiles for the life of me. No problem! My fireplace contractor Craig is a very creative guy and he opted to cut large tiles into exact smaller sizes and trimmed each corner of the tiles exactly as my old ones.

 

 

Then we played with different dyes to try to match the existing fireplace tiles.

 Of course, some tiles turned out pretty close, others not so much, we discarded the ones that did not match, and kept the better ones.

 Came installation day, it was measuring,

measuring, 

and measuring! The new fireplace is bigger in size than my older ones, in order not to disrupt the tile pattern, we sneakily enlarged the grout by a couple mm each row to fill in the difference!

I was on my knees for days working on coloring the tiles. I whipped out my ipad and matched the tiles as close as I could to the photos of my old fireplace, and laid them on the floor ready for the worker to just grab and install on the right spot. I was there pretty much the entire time making sure all the tiles were installed back to the right place.

 

Now, a fireplace, well, almost done! To be continued...:)

*Update, I guess I should show a picture of our fireplace as of today. We are just waiting for the cabinets to be installed on either side!