Arm Pain

I mud and taped the ceiling downstairs today. It was horrid. My shoulder quickly cramped up and I had to take several breaks. The cut on my left hand (I sliced it on my desktop computer last Friday) hurts again. I got mud under my fingernails. My neck hurts. And I was so mind numbed and achy that I actually took a nap around 4:00! I never take naps. Even when I lay down to do so I can't. I don't really care that I did a really bad job of smoothing the mud because we are wallpapering the ceiling. Yes, that's right. We are buying pre-pasted wallpaper and sticking it to the ceiling. We already have a pattern picked out:

Finished Drywalling!

 Atton in front of the dresser, which we've got at the foot of the bed.

I did the drywall next to the door. Still need to do the small bit at the top there, which I forgot about till now.

Then I did this wall.

Here's the corner.

Poor measuring. At least it'll be covered!

This is the last piece. Except for that small piece above the door we're done with drywall!

Victor and I mounted the panels up on the frame. Taken from the window.

You can see the wood shed back there, Victor put the tarp over it. Taken from the door.

This is how I wore my hair today. I see one of my sticks was too far down but that's ok. Basically it's a sock bun, then I tied a hair scarf around it under all the loose hair then I made a braid using the rest of my hair as one piece and the two pieces of scarf as the other two strands. At the bottom I tied the scarf off and wrapped around the bun. I finished it off with hair sticks. This is after I'd worn it all day.

Finished Wall

Here's the corner where I finished off this wall.

This is looking up at the frame.

This is showing where I need to put a sill or plate or something on there.

10/26/2011

Here is what I did yesterday. I put those three panels up.

Victor and Steven set up a place nearby to watch for deer.

Here's the front.

And here's what I've done so far today. It took a lot of researching but I finally found a few sites that agree with each other on how to do window frames. You drywall the sides and top and then put a sill or whatever the proper name is on the bottom. I haven't screwed this in yet, but I will. A lot of the sites talk about corner beads but I don't have any. I'll think about what I want to do.

First Snow

It started snowing in a near-cartoonish manner. One moment all's overcast but otherwise clear, next moment it's dumping snow on us. It's all melted, though. They're predicting snow for tomorrow too. Boney got excited and ran up a tree (he likes doing that). Atton ran under Victor's truck and gave us the saddest most pathetic look then ran for the house. I know the picture looks blurry but it's not it's snow.

We got these two panels on the ceiling in the downstairs. We also managed to break the light cover, but getting a new cover should be cheap. Steven came down and helped us hold the panels up.

Also,  today I finished my book, Song of Ice and Fire book 3. I was sure wrong about some of the stuff I'd thought would happen. I wound up crying at one point, actually, but I won't spoil as to about what. I can't wait to start book 4. I'll probably do that tomorrow. Or maybe I'll read the prologue tonight. We'll see.

Carpeting

First two pictures were taken yesterday.

Here's a picture that's sorta got the nail strips in it. We had to do some patchwork stuff at this edge.

And here.

We were going to use the carpet from the old bedroom but it was too small, so we used the living room piece. It was cut into a trapezoid for some reason so I had to do some trimming. Not on this wall, this is the corner of the left wall and the window wall. Victor and I hauled it up there yesterday and I spent most of today smoothing it out and trimming it and stuff. Then my mom came down with the carpet cleaner and cleaned it for me. This is after we cleaned it.

Around the stove pipe. I'm putting stair edging or something around it, unless I can think of something better. I had to patch that corner. You can hardly tell I did, too. I used duct tape. It's also what I used on the other side of the pipe, too.

Here's one side of the stair opening.

Here's at the top of the stairs. We might carpet the stairs too, we'll have to play with scraps and see how it looks.

10/15/2011

I saw this leaf on the ground yesterday and had to take a picture as it reminded me so much of...

 

...the Koroks from Wind Waker.

Here are a series of shots showing the upstairs.

This panel will be put on later after we get the box spring upstairs.

The area around the stove pipe I'm still deciding on what to do with it.

 

The blackish dot on the wall is where the outlet is.

"You didn't need to lay the carpet today, did you?"

 

This is as far as we got yesterday. It's cut away from the pipe more than it looks in this picture. We still need to cut the pad around the other pad and then lay another. These pads came from the old house. Since there was going to be hard flooring put down and the carpet was going to be torn up anyway we took it with us. The pads seem to come in 10x6 pieces poorly cut, so we need to trim it down around the tack strip in places. You can't see it in this picture but we have tack strips nailed around the room at about 1/2" away from the walls. We did not put them down around the stair opening, though, because we're putting down stair edging and that should hold it in place. We're not using a knee kicker because they are too expensive to buy as a one-use item. But I'm confident it'll turn out good.

10/11/2011

 

This is a rope crown braid. Normally I have trouble doing regular crown braids and they wind up very messy. Rope crown braiding seems very easy, actually. It was a little messy coming up the other side (on the left there, you an see lumps at the bottom left) because I had to undo it to a point and redo it and I think I got lost. A crown braid is where you start on one side of your head and do a lace braid (like a french braid but you only add hair to one side) and the process of lace braiding brings the braid around your entire head in a circle. I honestly didn't rope braid to get this, though. I took two strands of hair, twisted, added to one side, twisted, added to one side, twisted, added to one side, etc. And when I ran out of hair to add I turned it into a rope braid. It was too messy on the left to keep it, though, (it was worse on the front) so I took it out. But at least now I know I can do this variation of a crown braid well enough that in a few tries I could be wearing it for real!

I finished putting up drywall on this wall. Picture is crooked because I wanted to get as much of the wall in as possible so I put the camera up against the opposite wall so I was actually standing next to my camera.

Then I started putting these down under the angled pieces. They're just leaning there for now till I figure out how to attach them. There's 4" Between them and the boards so there's nothing to screw them into. I have a few ideas, though.

And I put one on the other side.

Itches

I keep getting itches to sew something. I'm going to make a To-Do list of projects. First and foremost will be curtains, but after that the rest of the list can come in whichever order. The curtains are in a silky kinda fabric that's a swirl of greens, grays, blues. And it's got sparkles on it. The backing is a darkish kind of green lining fabric.

Here's some of the things on my to-do list...

10/10/2011

We put the bed frame together and brought in the box spring, so now the bed is up off the floor and in the corner, as you can kinda see in this picture.

Me, my mom, and Victor put up the last piece of ceiling drywall upstairs.

I measured and cut this and put it up. I didn't get the angle right at the top so I had to scrape at it a bit. I think the issue was either that I didn't measure the top right or I had drawn the cutting line wrong. Either way, it's up now. And it's really starting to echo up there!

10/06/2011

We hung these two panels today.

 As well as the last one on the first wall.

Arwen's Helms Deep Braid

 

Before today I thought it was a typo that the tutorial for this braid was titled Arwen's Helms Deep braid because she was never there. But I found out it's from a deleted scene from the LOTR movies. So I tried the braid out and here it is freshly done. Basically it's eight braids, two of which are lace braids. Then you group them into twos and do a four-strand braid. I used two pins on the lace braids to keep them in place.

Detail of the lace braiding.

Here it is after I've worn it all day.

 

From the side.