Adventures in Renovation

Today I called Tribles Appliance Parts looking for parts for my vintage stove. Yeah, sounds like the fuzzy tribbles from Star Trek that multiply uncontrollably. When I took the busted grates from my stove over to my friend Laura so she could weld them back together, this guy there told me he got parts for his vintage stove from this company called Tribles. He tried to look it up in the phone book right there but couldn't seem to find the location. He described a place with shelves stocked with piles of vintage stove parts. Just what I need!

The first location I called, the guy laughed at me. He said he couldn't do anything for me unless I had a model number for the stove (to see if Frigidaire still had parts). I have a feeling Tappan didn't have a model numbers for the stove they made that year. They probably just made one model of their Tappan Deluxe in 1948. No need for a model number.

Alright, so not that helpful. That's cool, I'll talk to another location. They'll al least be able to tell me which location stocks this stuff. The next guy rattled off a couple phone numbers for some place in California. "What's the name of this place?" I asked. "Antique Gas Stoves!" He replied as if I'm a totally idiot for not figuring that out already.

"Alright. And that number was 909..."

"Yeah, 445-0300." Now completely irritated for having to repeat himself despite the fact that he gave me a different number the first time. He practically hung up on me.

Being treated so rudely by these two assholes really pissed me off. At the risk of being my most juvenile blog entry yet, fuck you Tribles.

Posted by at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Two months and no posts. Sorry. I've been lazy. Not a whole lot has changed on the house in the last two months, so I haven't really felt like blogging. But then again maybe nothing has changed because I haven't been blogging. Hmmm.

Mostly I've been away on vacation or just doing non-house stuff. But today's a pretty special occasion for getting back into it. Today we installed the photomural in the bedroom. And it's awesome!

Since my Mom is a veteran paper hanger, her and my Dad came up to help with the installation. It went fairly smoothly, but murals are a really big pain to hang. Even for us veteran paper hangers.

The most important lesson we learned was to read the instructions. Instead of using some of the usual paper hanging tools, the instructions told you to paste the panels of the mural with a paint roller and to smooth it out with a dry roller. After some trial and error we learned why they told you to do it that way. You need to put a thin layer of paste on the back to minimize bubbling. The bubbles you leave in instead of smoothing them out because the mural panels wrinkle and tear very easily. Also smoothing them out too much can easily stretch them so they don't line up with the next panel. Smoothing too much with a smoothing brush actually left lines in the surface texture. So a dry roller works best to keep it smooth.

It was tricky but oh so worth it. It's amazing how it makes the room look so much bigger and the ceiling higher.

In case you're wondering, it's not one of the ones that I had up earlier for voting. Ha ha! Suckers. Just kiddin' folks. Those were good times, weren't they?

I found this one while looking at some new photomural books at the wallpaper store. I instantly knew this was the one. It's very similar to the murals that everyone liked the best from the survey tho: the birch and bamboo forests. Here are the final results of the survey.

Anyway, I'm going to finally get back into updating the blog. I was surprised by how many people were missing the blog when I started neglecting it. I had no idea that many people would think this was interesting enough to follow. But then again, I guess a lot of other people have boring desk job where they sit in front of a computer all day too.

I'll try to finish those up and bring everyone up to speed this week hopefully. I even have a couple posts that I wrote but never finished from months ago and orphaned photos I uploaded to Flickr but never posted their entries. Blogs maintenance ain't easy!

Posted by at 1:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)