I posted the new Poe shirt for ladies in all three shops. This shirt caught the attention of many people at the Rochester show and overall, got a good response.
Also this weekend, Nicole and I will attempt to prime the dining room once I finish sanding it tomorrow. I’ll be so relieved when its done.
Nicole and I started dieting. I hate dieting. I love food, but I’m about 10 pounds overweight. We decided to try SparkPeople.com. It’s a free dieting site that has pretty cool Apps for recipes and calorie counting. I’m on day 2 and it hasn’t really been all that bad. I went running yesterday which was sort of brutal but I made it out alive. If I can get back down below 200 I’ll be happy and celebrate with huge bag of candy.
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| This will be my reward if I reach under 200 pounds. The prize at the end of the rainbow. |
This weekend was the Mayday Underground Arts and Crafts Show. We did this show last year and this year it was just as good, if not better! I love getting to see the faces of people that look at our stuff. Being an online business, you never get that experience. It’s also a great way to test new items to see if they are worth carrying. The moss green woman’s Poe shirt caught a lot of eyes and eventually sold. I will have a picture of it this week because I ordered more and decided to carry it. I took the Poe design that I already had and added a twist. I love the way it turned out.
During the show Nicole and I met another vendor at the show who was interested in how I screened the onesies. He was a screen printer also but was at the show selling handmade fairy doors. They were these amazing handmade doors that go in garden’s, etc. Very cool and very original. We eventually started talking about our experiences as screen printers and I mentioned how I was in need of a flash dryer. For those of you that don’t know what this is, it’s an expensive piece of equipment that makes drying/curing inks on shirts a breeze. He mentioned he had one that he had fixed up, that he wasn’t using. He bought it broken from a guy for dirt cheap and fixed it, but has since gotten a new one. I could have sold nothing at this show and could have been happy. We got a flash dryer from this guy and it works great! Christmas will be so much easier to deal with this year. Its been almost two days and I’m STILL totally excited about acquiring this tool! Thanks Again Chris!
The Mayday Underground show is tomorrow, all day. I’ve decided to bring some trial products to the show to see what reactions they get before I sell them in my shops.
This Saturday is the Mayday Underground show in Rochester. We love doing this show and highly recommend that if you are in the Rochester area, come on down! Even if our shirts are just too cool for you, there are really great vendors at this show offering really great options for unique holiday gifts.
Last night was the first Halloween for us living in the new house. We had no idea what to expect, in fact if I had to guess, I would have guessed that there were going to be few trick or treaters. We had gotten three bags of candy and 45 minutes later I was out the door scurrying to get more. We couldn’t believe it. The first Wilson Farms was out of candy, so I tried another that was about a mile away. Luckily there were bags of candy left at inflated prices. I figured three more bags should work and they did. Barely.
I realized one thing after this experience. I pretty much hate Halloween. The occasional little kid walking with their parents in a ridiculous costume sometimes made it all seem worth it, but not quite. I wonder if this is what it was like when I was little? Then I wonder how annoying it was for people when I reached that awkward age and was still trick or treating. I know that I was annoyed when the occasional 15 year old, 18 year old, and 40 year old (?) stopped by for a treat. Did I miss something? That’s right, a 40 year old women (she could have been mid 30’s) actually came to our house with her plastic bag asking for candy…and you have no choice really. I mean, you do…and then you risk becoming a target for later issues. The lack of costumes was also pretty amazing. It’s not worth it. Halloween is pretty terrible.
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| Ric hates Halloween and horror movies. Ever since he watched “The Ring” he fears VCR tapes. |
Happy Halloween! I’m pretty excited as this is the first Halloween in our new house. We have no idea what to expect for Trick or Treaters in terms of how many we will see. This is a tough Holiday for me because I love candy, and I have been candy-free for over a month now. This year we tried to go the route of picking up candy that I don’t actually like. We picked up “Dots”, “Toostie Pops”, and “Marvel Comic Dips” (basically fun-dip). There will still be and urge for me to eat these things, I’m not going to lie. But I’ll stay strong. Its sort of like the equivalent of a smoker that has run out of cigarettes, and has no money to buy them, so he/she picks through the ash tray for some gross nub to suck out whatever nicotine that remains…but not as gross.
Over the weekend we managed to get our sun room (now declared a reading room) about 90% finished. I totally love the room so far. Its relaxing. Last night I spent the last two hours hanging out in there under a blanket, with a glass of wine, reading. I know that for some reason that description makes me sound like a woman, but try to look at it like I’m a man that enjoys wine, that was reading and was cold. The room is great. We have some things left that we still want to do in there like building a bookshelf, and some decorating tasks, but its pretty close to being finished.
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| We moved the rug from the guest room into this room. We now need a new rug for the guest room. |
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| This table needs trinkets. |
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| We found this 50’s couch a the thrift store for 50 bucks. It was in amazing shape. |
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| Nicole is going to sand down the wood and re-stain it darker. This couch is awesome. |
Tomorrow I will have a full report on the outcome of the Trick or Treaters!
The drywall is all hung in the dining room. Two days off of work and two full days working in the dining room. All the drywall is up and is partially taped. We are moving pretty fast on this room. Today after work I started pulling the wallpaper off the wall on the upper portion. I thought this would be a nightmare but I was totally wrong. Most of it came off in huge portions and the spots that were stubborn, I used a curtain steamer that Nicole had. It worked like a charm, even though sometimes it would spit boiling water on my hand causing me to cuss violently. Luckily I didn’t have to use it all that much. Saturday, Nicole is going over to her mom’s house to do some pumpkin related activities with her little nephew and I am going to get another full days work in there, taping and mudding, only this time (because it is Saturday) I will be consuming beer while doing it thus bringing a smile to my face.
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| Some of the seams aren’t lined up at the moment because of old house shifting, but with some trimming and mud tricks, I’ll get it looking like the bomb.com. |
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| Not much I can say about this one. Looks good to me! |
Tonight Nicole came home with a fall decoration that is amazing. An Anise Wreath. I love Anise. I keep sniffing it. I want to lick it. I love Anise. The Wreath was pretty expensive the first time we noticed it at Target. She found it on clearance for a fraction of the price. Now we own it and this weekend we will hang it up.
Originally the sun room was the first room we re-did. We painted the room, restored the old windows to try and get another year out of them, and made it a living space that we could occupy during the heavy remodel period. Eventually when our contractor finished up in the kitchen, we realized that the sun room was just too small to be the main room to watch TV in. It couldn’t hold more than two people. I was unable to have friends over for football and even worse, I was unable to have friends over for wrestling pay per views. That was unacceptable. We moved the TV and sofa into the big living room leaving the sun room empty and once again, unfinished. This of course drove me nuts. During the week I primed the ceiling and then painted it the same off white, (almost beige) as the ceiling in the kitchen. It was starting to look like something again.
There was an old, unattractive, ceiling fan in the room that we took down. It was ugly brass with old fashioned, cheap looking glass globes. It was just plain ugly. Cool looking fans were proving to be difficult to find but with a little Nicole magic, she had this fakakta fan looking totally awesome. She painted the fan “Carbon Mist” which was a super dark gray. We then went to Lowes and bought 3 new globes for lights. This ended up looking brand new.
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| This is the original fan style that we had in the sun room. This fan in the picture is the fan in our living-room but its the same style. |
That same day, I had gone to the store to get some liquid nails. We have been keeping an eye on those electric stoves that give heat and display a fake fire. They are pretty awesome and the store that I was at had some pretty good deals on them. When I got home, I told Nicole about them and we drove back to look at them. They have all sorts to choose from, some built into bookshelves, some with elaborate wood mantels, and then a simple metal model that looked like an old wood stove. Nicole liked that one. I totally didn’t think that would be the model that she liked but it was, and we bought it. We are now one item away from completing this room. A sofa. This room is going to become a reading room, or a quiet place to go do some laptop work. I can’t wait to get it done. I want there to be two rooms for people to go sit and mingle in for the cocktail party at the end of November that we are having for our families and close friends.
The break from house work has ended and Saturday my dad came down to help tear apart the dining room. Like every other project in this house, a simple idea turned into a huge pain in the ass. I needed help on the bay window. The plaster was crumbling and there were random sections of drywall that were heavily damaged. Another masterpiece created by the previous owners. We figured that if we were going to work on this project, we might as well do it right. We decided to tear everything down and insulate the entire wall. Of course when we started, we pulled down a section that had endured generations of water damage that was ignored. This section was rough, and there was serious rot. We pulled out some of the heavily rotted stuff and put in some 2×4’s so that we would have something to drill the drywall into. Plaster is awful and removing it is even worse. The dust and filth that spreads all over the house is brutal. It was clear that we were not going to finish this project that day, but I wanted to at least get help doing the upper portion of the bay window. I figured that if we could at least get that done, I could do the rest (or as much as possible) on Monday and Tuesday, because I took time off from work.
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| This was the area with heavy water damage and rot. Surprise!!! |
I have to admit, I was not in the mood for a project like this after a super busy week, but with an upcoming cocktail party that we are hosting, time is running short and we have to get this place as close to normal as we can before hand.
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