Mod Mischief

On Tuesday, I dutifully carried around a camera * and did my best to photograph my day for the A Day Project . It was a pretty boring day. Here's the unabridged version The day started the same way my mornings always start, with coffee. Unfortunately my new job requires me to go in early (for me). I check my emails after getting dressed. I head to work with my travel mug of coffee firmly in hand. I've usually also got a thermos with me. I have a pretty nice view on my commute. I normally pack a lunch, but since we didn't have any leftovers in the fridge, I treated myself to a BLT. It was a beautiful day for lunch on the lawn on the hill. Chris had to run some errands downtown so he met me after work. After a long day,  it's time for some home brew and a snack. I do the dishes while Chris gets started on dinner. I'm so lucky that Chris is a great cook. Me made us a delicious meal. After dinner, we start a loa...

In honour of Star Wars Day , here is a picture of where we store our kitchen utensils. If you only knew the power of the Dark Side...   And of course, I have to include a shot of one of our Death Star record clocks. Impressive. Most impressive.

Chris and I came home from a wedding on Saturday night sometime after 1am. The house smelt like smoke but we didn't think much of it at first; we figured the neighbours must have burnt their dinner or something and the smell had stuck around because all the windows were closed. We opened the windows and started to get ready for bed but, instead of dissipating, the smell kept getting worse. Smoke seemed to be coming up from the vents so I decided to go outside, just to check that everything was okay in the apartment below us. From the street, even with the lights off, I could see the downstairs kitchen was filled with smoke. I knocked on the door and rang the bell but no one answered I grabbed our phone and called 911 while Chris managed to get the pets out of the house.  I had never called 911 before but I'm glad I didn't hesitate to do it when I did. Minutes after my call, 3 firetrucks, 3 cop cars and an ambulance were on our corner. When the firemen broke int...

Last week we threw a party. A party of awesome. Basically, it was an excuse to test out a bunch of ideas for the Ultimate Party Challenge on Instructables , but since neither Chris nor I really did anything for our birthdays we were overdue for some celebrating. Having recently organized the den ( resolution #1 ) we were finally able to open up most of the apartment and throw a real party (as in more than 20 people mingling about). We asked our friends to give us their best or craziest party ideas and this is what we wound up with: Bubbles! While we couldn't pull off a full ballroom, we filled the stairs with bubbles thanks to a bubble machine picked up on clearance at Wal-mart.  Glow-in-the-dark drinks! A little tonic water and some B100 complex vitamins go a long way under the glow of black lights. Full instructable here . Watermelon punch fountain! Unfortunately we left this one to the last minute and it shows, but version 2.0 should be epic.  French onion dip i...

Making a tutu, modding water guns, drinking beer and eating chips... Yup, it's just another Saturday night at the tta.

This house is killing me. Okay, that might be overly dramatic, but when I can't breathe, my eyes are all red and I can't sit still because I'm itchy from head to toe, it feels like I might rather die. I never used to have allergies, but when I hit my twenties I started to notice my nose was always runny and things got progressively worse. It's now normal for me to go through at least one box of Kleenex a week (thankfully they're compostable!). Since moving into the tta, it's become unbearable. I recently got tested and was not at all surprised by the results. Culprit #1: the cat We've never let her into the bedroom, but Simone still manages to shed her hair and dandruff onto every surface in our apartment. I'm also allergic to the rats but they're so much smaller and contained it wasn't a big problem when I only had them to deal with. Culprit #2: the carpet When we were apartment hunting I knew I didn't want carpet, but this pl...

The previous tenants left us their dining table. The Ikea Ingo table wasn't quite what Chris and I wanted for the kitchen, but we decided it would be perfect as a coffee table. Inspired by Will Means' nightstand and  several octopus tables, we set out to give the Ingo table new life. We sanded it and cut down the legs. Chris put together a stencil image in photoshop and we printed it off and laid it out on the table. We cut the stencil out of acetate and painted around the edges. Then we painted the whole thing a sexy black. Finally we peeled off the stencil and gave it a shiny coat of polyurethane. The finished kraken table!

The tta’s first party was this weekend, on the eve of my birthday. Inspired by the Lewis Carol craze, we hosted an Allison in Wonderland Tea Party.  What we ate: I was still baking and assembling sandwiches in the kitchen when the guests started to arrive. We served mint cucumber tea sandwiches smoked salmon on rye toasts prosciutto and goat cheese tea sandwiches deviled eggs (we used whole grain Dijon and it looked so pretty!) and for dessert lollipop flower cupcakes , and eat me cookies (made with this great recipe from Martha )   Most popular drink: Well, it was a tea party. But on top of the orange pekoe and earl grey, we made skittles vodka . The shots didn’t make me grow any taller but they did have certain magical qualities. How we set the stage: Freecycle delivered in a big way! Chris and I lucked into an entire box of silver teapots, serving trays and cream and sugar sets. We picked it all up the day before ...

I love people watching. While I was doing the dishes today I saw a guy pushing a huge amp down the middle of the street with a guitar on his back. He stopped to take a break and some guys started chatting with him and they all had a smoke. I can't help but wonder what sort of gig he was going to, on foot, on a Saturday afternoon. These are the people in my neighbourhood . In other news, Chris and I have finally come up with a name for our apartment. From now on it will be known as the Turquoise Tile Atelier or the TTA for short.

We painted the living room this weekend. I was really worried when the colour was going up on the walls because it looked so dark, but it lightened up a lot as it dried and I'm very happy with it now. When putting my records back into our expedit, I decided to organize them by colour. Some people don't like the recent trend of bookshelves arranged by colour , but  I rather like the look of it. Since these are the records I paint on and not the ones I would like to listen to, I don't need to worry about finding a specific one. Besides, Tavi likes things sorted by colour and that 13 year old is way cooler than I'll ever be.

Slowly but surely, we're making progress in our apartment.  After several hours scraping and scrubbing, with the help of some Clorox Green Works, the tile was free of paint and Chris was able to recaulk the top of the counter. It wasn't nearly as bad as we feared it would be . We taped off the opposite wall ...   and painted it one shade lighter than the tile. Now we're on the lookout for a round bar table because we've decided to convert the kitchen table that came with the place into a coffee table for the living room.

  the kitchen - before When we first moved into our new apartment we were surprised that all the tile in the kitchen had been painted over. You'd have to be crazy to paint over tile, we thought. But sure enough, at some point the landlord hired a painter with a spray gun who painted the entire apartment (walls, ceilings, fixtures and everything) off-white. The only room to escape this whiteout was the bathroom, whose turquoise and black tiles gave us an idea of what to expect under the paint in the kitchen. what we found But maybe they weren't so cra z y after all. When we started scraping the paint off the tile we discovered that before the great apartment whiteout, someone had tried to paint the tile in a checkerboard pattern with less than fabulous results. It appears that they started painting but never got very far and what they did do was pretty sloppy. The paint the would-be checkerboard painters used was very persistent and after hours of scrubbing and scraping it ...

Chris cleared the steps on this way to work, then I did the same when I left the house this morning. And yet this is what we came home to this evening. There's actually another step under there. Looks like winter has finally arrived in Ottawa.

Our new apartment has some great old features including cute transom windows over all the doors. At some point, someone must not have liked the windows as much as we do. When we moved in they were all painted over! Luckily it was nothing a little paint scraper couldn't fix. One down, another to go... It was time consuming but well worth it as the hallway is looking much brighter already. hard at work Unfortunately the glass above the bedroom door is broken so we'll need to come up with a different plan for that one. Regardless, those paint scrapers are about to get quite the workout. Now that the windows are done, we're going to try to uncover the tile in the kitchen.

When we asked our landlady if we could paint the new apartment (very important on our list of things to know about a place) she said we could as long as we got the colours approved by her first. Last night we sent her our proposal and when I checked my email this morning there was an enthusiastic response of "Absolutely, that would be great!" Here are the photoshoped images Chris whipped up to win her over: Soft grey in the living room Glossy black on the stair rail Turquoise accent wall in the kitchen