Vintage Halloween

There is just nothing like a deadline (or a party, in this case) to spur one to action. Earlier this month, we decided to throw a Halloween party. Within this month we finished hanging our upper kitchen cabinets, the range hood, fully cleaned out our garage, laid down sod in our backyard (finally), rearranged our living room, and decorated and decorated and decorated! If you have things you want to get done, throw a party!



The theme was Twisted Victorian/ Steampunk/ Goth. The decorations were disturbingly creepy, instead of gory scary. There were glittered and metallic skulls, butterfly "specimens" pinned to the wall with T-pins, framed anatomy of bats, brains, bones and eyeballs, yards and yards of tattered cheesecloth and black tulle, bloody candles, spiders, kerosene lamps, Vintage Halloween postcards banner, and apothecary jars full of eerie liquids containing pickled snakes, blood, a human heart, a brain, and some skeletal remains in a glowing substance. I had SO much help from friends! Stephanie meticulously cut out all the butterflies, Julie came and helped make, paint, and assemble the graveyard and ghosts (and brought child laborers too), Rachel came and helped decorate for endless hours, and Michelle came over twice to help with decorations as well (she even touched glitter for me when she HATES glitter), my mom picked up the kids that night so I could finish prepping, and of course, you'll see David's photos below. We have such awesome friends!









A few of my girlies... We have an 80's valley girl, a Roman goddess, a vampiress, and a victorian lady.


What's wrong with a room full of men enjoying a good game of Just Dance for Wii...? Haven't you ever seen an Amish man dance?


We had a couple of different areas set up to hold everyone, which is why the garage needed to be cleaned out. The garage was transformed into a dance floor (which, frankly, few people danced on) but most people sat out here for a while trying to talk over the music...


My handsome hubby.


Valley Girl and the Gothic Princess finding common ground on the dance floor.


Erin and Janae looking for the perfect tune to dance to.





Binghams rockin' to Walk Like an Egyptian


Julie totally kicking my trash (hence the stern look of concentration and consternation on my face).


Medusa's toga is having a wardrobe malfunction while her beau-turned-stone shows us how it's done.


These steampunk goggles were handmade! So cool!


Miss Jamie is leaving us for the Spud State, so we took the opportunity to get a good group picture of the girls.




Graveyard at night.


And during the day. After the windstorm, it doesn't look so hot, but you get the idea.


Dave Bingham set up his equipment in a back room at our party and took some amazing pictures of all of us. I am a Victorian Raven Lady and Doug is my "handler" who wears an eye patch because I pecked his eye out once. It's a bit involved, I know. David did just such a wonderful job on the pictures!







We were so busy with the party prep that we didn't carve (or even get) pumpkins until Saturday morning, after the party.






Then we had a family party in the garage that night. The kids loved dancing under the black lights to the loud Halloween music.




My scary bat boy.


My brother brought back this Lederhosen set from Switzerland when Hylton was a baby because he thinks he looks like a Swiss baby. Hylton is finally big enough to fit it, so he got to wear it to trick-or-treat Grandma Bobbie and Papa Jack-Jack last night.


A witch, a Swiss boy, and a bat.


And here's our new backyard. It's still pretty bare, but compared to what it looked like with mounds of dirt for months and months, I think it looks so beautiful with that long expanse of luscious greenness and the pretty fall leaves.



Half of the yard is done and we are MUD-DY! It was lightly drizzling while we were laying the sod and then right after we finished, it started POURING! Nothing like great timing!

10.10.10 @10

Must. post. today. As much as I'd rather go watch my movie, I feel I must participate in the October 10th, 2010 phenomenon.

We've owned this fixer-upper for one full year as of September 24th. And the kitchen is still in the unfinished state. I can't feel too bad, really, considering all the simultaneous projects we've been immersed in and the fact that we have three little munchkins running around, but it's still a little embarrassing. Anyway, I got tired of not being able to put things away, or find anything, or, well, of just plain not having cabinets and a range hood, so- if you want something done, you've got to do it yourself!

The first day, I reorganized the food storage. I took the rolling shelves back OUT of Evie's closet and took them BACK to the garage and put the canned food on it, stacking all the food storage boxes in Evie's closet on the floor. Much better use of space, I don't know why I didn't do it that way before. I was SOOOO tired of digging through this pile of food for months and months everytime I needed to make a meal (and usually not finding it because I didn't know what items I was missing for grocery trips)!



I seriously teared up a little as I was organizing cans by genre on these shelves. I'm getting a little choked up even now, looking at this thing of beauty.


Ahhhhh.... a walkway! And floor space!


This is how our garage looked, this time, last year:


I will not quickly forget the frustration of climbing on boxes and digging through every box a million times anytime I couldn't find something!


Look- there's our kitchen flooring and Ikea kitchen in boxes and the door to our refrigerator!


Here is my little baby taskmaster, keeping Daddy in line. "Scrub that pot faster!"


The next item was the cabinets over the office desk. On Monday, I set about figuring out how to install the upper cabinets. The hole is for a new outlet for the microwave. The idea to get the microwave up off the countertop was recent one, so we didn't have the outlet for it.


I felt a little like this woman that day


because Doug came home to find a clean house, Thanksgiving dinner on the table and upper cabinets:

You know, which really is the norm around here- I try to make sure dinner is hot and ready when my man gets home and that I have my best heels on and a bow in my hair... right before I gently remove his shoes and settle him in a chair with his favorite magazine. ...oh, the sarcasm...



The hang-up all these months was the uncertainty of being able to install the range hood myself. For one thing, it is pretty darn heavy (and awkward), and for another, it required a very precise install of the venting pipe and the positioning of the range hood itself for it to all work together. And lets face it, I barely scraped by in Geometry.



Yes, that electrical wire is holding the pipe up until the construction adhesive sets... This is not Safety 101.




Tuesday, this is how Doug found things when he got home. No dinner, place is a mess, project not done, kids clamoring for attention, wife standing on the kitchen counter. That's more like it.


But later that night when he got home from his meeting, things were all back to normal again.


One cute little pajama guy who has just learned how to blow up his own balloons.


On Wednesday, I installed the final two upper cabinets and realized I didn't have enough hinges, so I made a last-minute trip to Ikea with the kidlets to pick some up. Being that close to finishing, I couldn't bear to have no cupboard doors- even for a little while! They got installed at 11pm that night. I am a woman on a mission!


Now all we need is some trim, crown moulding, backsplash, and baseboards and it'll be a done deal! Oh, and the cabinet lighting. I'm pretty darn happy to have a fully-functional kitchen back! Especially when one remembers how long we were operating like this:

La Chaise Remodèle: Deux

I went to one garage sale this summer. One.
Luckily, it was pretty wonderful. It was one of those ones you see on your way home from somewhere (like swimming lessons) and realize you have a wallet-full of cash and the sun is shining and you feel good and know that it is kismet!
For $15, I got a ton of nice clothes for me, Doug and Evie, a gardening book, a free front door and this beauty:

...No, not those... This:



So pretty.... my precious...


The girl who was selling it asked me what I was going to do with it and I told her frankly, "I have no idea- but something!" Genetics makes it impossible for me to pass over something like this and not want to take it home, give it some love, and make it all better. It was hard deciding, though, whether I wanted it to keep the masculine feel with leather, or give it a daintier touch. I went for dainty, but kept it clean for a more modern feel.

A coat of primer and two coats of Heirloom White later:


The back had to be installed first since it is inset.


Then the burlap over the back piece for sturdiness and batting for "fluff." The part that took me the most time was sewing the cushion for the seat. It was my first upholstery zipper, but thankfully it was much like installing any other kind of zipper. The major hang-up was when I realized the I couldn't use the buttons I had painstakingly covered to make the backrest tufted. That would only have worked if I had been able to install the front fabric before the back. Lesson learned... Finally, the top upholstery was brad-nailed to the frame. And...


Voila! Bonjour, mon petit jolie! (Being creative surfaces the high school French apparently...)
A cute little chair for the kiddos that looks so great in Evie's room.





I'm so in love... It may be time to retrieve the wing-back chair that has been collecting dust in my Grandparents' attic for 9 years (that Doug still brings up as an example of my inability to finish things I start, and as a reason to not buy cute projects like the one above-- can you tell this is a source of contention...?). In any case, it may be time to remove that weapon from his grasp and prove him wrong.
I think I am ready.