The lipstick almost outweighs the pig

A sort-of-nearby house is for sale again, after being sold earlier this year for more than $150k less than the current listing price.  Photos show exterior improvements still very much in progress.

It's been quite a while since I looked at local real estate listings.  Neighborhood houses continue to sell quickly for ridiculous prices.

By ridiculous, I mean 100% higher than ten years ago.  Which makes the property taxes more than 100% higher, thanks to recent school-funding proposals that easily passed.  

At the same time, the public school ratings range from poor to barely-middling.  The student populations are majority-nonwhite now.

About half of the incoming house-debtors immediately set up leftist yard signs in their yards.  

Yesterday I was in St. Paul.  I only saw one family's children outdoors on a drive of a couple miles through residential neighborhoods, but there were dozens of ICE OUT signs.

I recently calculated the cost per square foot of a city building project.  It was more than the cost for the Federal Reserve renovation that Trump roundly and soundly criticized.  

I just now threw together a very optimistic estimate of the building's cost per visit:  building cost divided by number of building users over the lifespan of the building.  It came out to $11 per visit.  The real number will be higher.

Recycling around the house

I got an idea from magazine photos for replacing our collapsed family coatrack with a bench with a row of hooks above.   I used our former entry bench plus some planks that were waterbed salvage, plus some wood from our former couch, plus some hooks we already had.  After some crappier-than-usual carpentry--I was out of practice--it all came together.  It would almost look nice if I painted it, but paint doesn't hold up at my house.

It ended up being almost a double win, because the following week the laundry drain clogged and water went across the basement floor where all the coats had been piled before.

I used more of the pallet wood from the couch to make new seats for a pair of outdoor cafe chairs.  The seats will need some more Danish oil or something for a finish next spring, especially on the sawn edges.

I also de-upholstered a rocking chair seat.  There turned out to be two layers of fabric tacked over the original upholstery, plus a layer of something in between them that maybe used to be vinyl, but that had turned into slightly crumbly tar.  The springs were in poor condition, and I used more pallet wood to convert the rocker to a hard-bottom seat, with plans to find or make a decent cushion for it. 

I finished a lingering display shelf project.  The frame is from a wooden door screen we picked up for free, the shelves are tongue-and-groove scraps used as bed slats for a bed we were given, and I cut the shelf supports from more of the couch wood.  It came out looking fairly good; the screen frame had been painted in a nice color. 

We've also been dehydrating cabbage, onions, and celery.

Reconstructions

I found a solid-color plastic plate to serve as a tray on the bathroom counter, and it is working much better visually than the patterned one did.

Our neighbors decluttered their grown children's school and art supplies, and gave us two boxes worth.

My mother-in-law dropped off a chair that she had found and painted for us. 

I just finished reading an older book called Tested by Fire. It's the remarkable story of singer and businessman Merrill Womach, who was terribly burned in a plane crash.

The other day I cut out some butterfly appliques from a patterned fabric, and experimented with sticking them up on the wall with plain water.  Most of them fell down after an hour, but one stayed up for almost three days.

I made a sort of tacked-down slipcover for a upholstered chair seat. I had to piece the fabric together, using almost every last scrap. Then I put it on the seat upside down and pinned it at the seams, taking care to put in the pins so that they would be easy to take out while sewing. I used chalk to mark the actual sewing lines before taking it off the seat for sewing.

When the cover was ready, I stapled it to the underside of the chair where I could, and hand-sewed it to the original upholstery where I couldn't.

o

Turning things over

Sallie Borrink has a new community called Christian Women Seeking Truth going, with a mix of free and subscriber-only content from her.  She's a wise, mature Christian woman with a gift for searching out interesting and informative links.

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I've covered two more boxes with paper for the shelf, and I'm still working hard on my big project, which is now passing through The Stage Where It All Goes to Crap, and entering the Maybe I Can Still Stick the Landing phase. 

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I've also done a lot of organizing of children's clothing. A family at our church regularly hands down their children's outgrown clothing to us, and so I received two more bags to sort out and put away into our "kids' clothes pantry", which now contains sizes from baby all the way up to teenager.

A crate

I turned some of our lumber pile into a crate about two feet long, with a lid, to be used for storage.  Most of the wood was pine in 2x6, 1x6, and 2x3 sizes, but I also used some of the oak frame pieces from the child's upholstered chair that I disassembled a while back. 

Even with using power tools until I had to move operations into the kitchen, it took me most of the day. I used screws instead of nails, and drilled a pilot hole for each one.

Boxes

I thought of various alternatives for making storage boxes for the shelf, and ended up with paper-covered boxes as a medium-term solution.

I happened to have a larger box on hand that I was able to cut apart and reconstruct as two smaller boxes of the size that I wanted.

For the paper, we did another round of shaving cream marbling. This time I tried mixing a base color all through the shaving cream, and then swirling in a second color. It turned out all right, but I think this technique works better if some of the shaving cream is left white, to help the gaps where it doesn't touch the paper harmonize with the marbling.

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A journalist finally got the percentage of Minnesota coronavirus deaths with a serious underlying health condition out of the Department of Health:  94%, with an additional 4% "unknown".

Apples!

We've been blessed this year by a couple of families who have shared the fruits of their apple trees with us.  And then some, because their trees are very tasty varieties.

Earlier in the fall, they gave us more than a five-gallon bucket full, and then last week my husband went out with a crew of helpers, and came back with something like five bushels more.

So we've been making applesauce, and dehydrated apples, and apple pie filling, and apple juice, and apple crunch, and filling up all our freezer containers. 

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The other thing I've been working on is making a little more storage space in our living room, for everyone's little odds and ends. I was thinking of building some sort of shelf for this, but decided that it would be better just to make better use of the tall, narrow, mostly empty bookshelf that is in there. So I made a new shelf to replace one that I originally left out, because of an awkwardly placed knot in the wood, and I am thinking about how to make baskets.

 

Fall

 Following the advice of The Nester, I foraged in the yard for branches and flowers to make into a fall flower arrangement.  I'd say my efforts were moderately successful; I had to go out and get a few more branches to fill out a skimpy place, and one of the flowers that I am using is 97% dead already.

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While hunting in the depths of a closet, I found a pine cone wreath that I had forgotten about, and hung it up. It has had a remarkable effect in making the decor around it visible again. Sometimes you just need a bit of a change.

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I've been re-reading a book by Deborah Burnett from twenty years ago. I don't know much about her, but I am finding her advice on intense and thorough visualization and creative problem-solving helpful, along with her emphasis on timeless design principles.  It turns out that she still has a website with lots of good ideas, plus a few not-so-good ones.

More secure seat covers

The chintzy dining chair finally met its end when one of the screw holes ripped out, which got me back to thinking about how to mend the vinyl seats of two steel chairs. The damage was too large for a patch, but I didn't want to completely redo them yet, either,

That left me with making covers for the seats. I found that I had just enough of the waterproof canvas left over from the chair and table projects to cover both seats.

I decided to take the seats off and staple the fabric to the underside, right over the vinyl. The fabric was thin enough for me to get away with this; something thicker would make it hard to get the screws back in far enough.

I did have to piece the fabric together, so there is a seam running across each seat. Since this is a temporary solution, I wasn't very fussy about gathering in the corners, so the whole process went quickly.

Putting things together again

No curfew in Minneapolis or St. Paul last night, only continuing violent crimes.

Coronavirus numbers in tests, hospitalizations, and deaths in Minnesota have held quite steady since mid-June. I suppose an uptick should be expected in early fall, once school and other fall activities get going a bit. Summer is very much the off season for most organized social activities around here, because the people who do the organizing go out of town to their families' cabins.

I made progress on many things last week.  I mended more clothing, and some knitted dishcloths, and a mitten. I aligned the reel mower. I moved two bags of toys out of the living room, back down to the basement where they belong. I established a better workflow for a refinishing project that I am working on, and am finally making progress on it. I found my what-to-do-next cards, which I had completely forgotten about, and am getting back into a routine. I am also easing into exercising with hand weights again.

I've been gradually moving some pieces of decor around, trying things in different places.

Boom

We had a crabapple tree come down in last weekend's big storm.  It had started falling down a few days before that, with one branch resting on the roof. Now when I see media images of storm damage, I look for the rotten places in the trees.

We also lost power, which put some of our preparations to the test. We did well on lighting, having lots of little LED lights.  My husband the electronics tinkerer has many LED bulbs (random internet image); these can be powered simply by putting a button battery between the two wires.

[If you add a magnet to that, you have a "throwie".  Much more about throwies here, including discussion about whether or not it is really safe to power LEDs that way, and how to add a resistor to improve battery life.]

One LED will put out enough light to read by, at close range, but LEDs also put out some ultraviolet light, which isn't good for eyes, so I limit my LED reading time, and I don't shine them directly into my eyes.

Our power was restored the next morning, saving us the trouble of canning up the contents of our refrigerator. We have the Jackie Clay canning book, which includes instructions for canning dairy products, with a caveat that this goes against modern canning recommendations.

What went not so well for us was not being able to whisk the car into the garage, because of an overpopulation of bicycles. A branch came down right next to the car.

Punching up plain carpeting

I've been reading a series of magazines from a nearby sidewalk library, and I noticed that many of the rugs pictured were two-color designs, with one color predominating.

That got me thinking about how to take a solid-color rug, and add yarn to it to make a design. Eventually, I remembered that I have a punch needle (which pushes loops of yarn through a fabric from the back), and I wondered if it could be used on commercially-made carpet.

I tried it on two different carpet remnants. I found with the first one that the carpet backing was too strong to push the needle through; I would need to pre-punch each hole with an awl.

With the second, the needle went through more easily, and I was able to punch in a line of loops all the way down the length in only a few minutes. My hand was tired at the end.

I found that I had to set the needle at almost the longest loop length setting to get the loops to show in the carpet pile. (Longer loops than that would require pulling by hand, and it would probably be better to work from the front with a rug hook.) Putting a loop through every other square of the backing mesh made a line that looks just like a line of paint drips. For a more solid color, I would have to punch every square, and more than one row, and even then the original pile would still be mixed in.

Ready to sew

I had a little time, and pulled out some fabric from a sheet and a homemade pattern, and cut out pieces for a blouse.

The pattern is drawn from a thrift store blouse that I had, which was probably home-sewn, since it had no tag. It fit me well, and I eventually wore it out. This will be the fifth blouse that I have made from the pattern.  I’ve gotten better at sewing buttonholes, but still am working on getting the collars to turn out well.

While I was looking for the pattern, I found some interfacing that I had forgotten about; that will probably help.

The other things I’ve been doing lately are mending, and slowly catching up on yard work.

So far Minnesota is not seeing an explosion of coronavirus cases, from the protests or from any other form of opening back up. There have been smaller protests every weekend so far.

How the Democrats will lose in 2020

Or at least, how they richly deserve to lose:  through the continuing slow-motion failure of the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats keep talking about health care and how it needs to be reformed, hoping that no one will remember that they were the ones who shoved that 1000+ page law through in 2009.  People who especially are being screwed by it:  young adults (subsidizing costs of older adults), parents of younger adults (having children staying on their plans until age 26), people getting health insurance through their employers (being ineligible for subsidies), single-income families (paying way more than Obama’s “affordable” 9.5% of income), and lower-income people nearing retirement age (paying far more than they can afford).

Out of curiosity, I looked into health insurance options in the high-unemployment coronavirus economy.  COBRA still exists, and now sucks worse than ever, because the ACA requirements generally raised premiums.  Thanks to Trump, there are now short-term plans available, but they may not count as having had “minimum essential coverage” when you try to get on a better plan later. Christian cost-sharing plans have not yet developed adequate fraud protections, I believe—without any evidence, just based on intuition. Going on Medicaid leaves the possibility open that the program could seek to recover the money it spent on you from your estate after you die, although at present they usually don’t bother to.

That leaves buying insurance yourself, either on or off the exchanges, or self-insuring.  My question was how a change in income would be reflected in a change in premium subsidy, for an exchange plan. It appears from this article that most of the time, an income change earns you a 60-day Special Enrollment Period, with subsidy re-calculation, aside from perhaps being required to report changes in income anyway. But with exceptions and changing rules and state-to-state variations, it just looks like a giant headache...one that could continue into next year with tax return preparation for tax year 2020, since the amounts of subsidies received versus subsidies qualified for have to be reconciled and squared up.

I’m tempted to think that the options presented there would be more understandable if they were presented in flowchart form, but there are too many unknowns. As I have said before, this system was designed to fail. It is simply too complex.

One minor point from near the end of the piece:  changing insurance plans will usually reset your out-of-pocket costs counter to zero. That’s a cost to factor in.

Finished the bowl, and a few other things

I decided to use puff paint to cover the gap between the lining strip and the upper inside of the bowl. The gap proved to be a little too big to bridge with paint alone, though, so I found a piece of twine, stuffed it in, and then painted over that. Now the bowl is finished, and in use. With the paint colors that I used, it looks very Eighties.

I also made a new seat for a kid's chair. It's an old school chair, with a metal frame and a plastic seat and back, where the seat had broken. I mangled the rest of the seat off, and then the chair sat for a couple years waiting for the right piece of scrap plywood to come along. I cut the plywood to shape using our scroll saw, found bolts in our hardware hoard, and drilled holes in the plywood for them.

Then I noticed that the bolts were slightly too large for the holes in the metal frame, so I had to drill them out a bit larger. The pointy end of a file will work as a deburring tool (for taking off the little rough bits of metal around the edges) in a pinch.

Out in a flower bed and some planters, I am trying to grow flax this year, from grocery store flax seeds. The idea is from a short article in Farm Show magazine about a Canadian lady who got into growing flax that way.

The magazine looks very interesting, full of very creative homegrown inventions for farm and garden, although I think the single issue of it that I saw was a special edition that gathered these from a number of previous issues. I may try a subscription at some point.

I was growing to try to sprout some of the seeds first, to see if they were growable, but didn't get to that before the time I wanted to plant them, so I just planted away, and will see what comes up.

Doing what I can

Our yard has a number of nice features, but many of the landscaping elements are deteriorating badly.   I was sitting outside for a while yesterday, just looking at all the things that I couldn’t do anything about.

The solution for not being able to do something is to find something that can be done, and then do it, so I started picking up some twigs and leaves that were within reach of my lawn chair.

Right away, I found an agate in the landscaping rocks. That is not so unusual in Minnesota, where some gravel deposits have lots of them, but in this case the timing was right on the mark.

Most have tested negative?, and a project

Apparently Minnesota, with a rate of positive tests that has been around ten percent, is also one of the states with the highest rates of positive tests. At the same time, ICU beds have gradually filled beyond the number that were available before the pandemic started.

The Minnesota State Fair, which is a very big deal around here in the weeks going into Labor Day, was cancelled for 2020.

In other news, I have been working on a replacement for a "stuff bowl"--a decorative bowl that serves as a holding place for stray small objects, until they are put away. I had been using one of my husband's large pottery bowls, but he wanted it back.

So I have been trying out a new craft idea:  a sort of papier mache, but with fabric and acrylic or latex paint instead of paper and glue/paste. For a base or form, I used the lower part of an ice cream bucket, cut to the height that I wanted. For fabric, I chose a stretchy textured synthetic that has proven to have poor durability on its own.

A bowl with some kind of a regular visual pattern seemed best for the location, for balance; there are already shiny and organically-textured things there.

I found it helpful to use a smaller plastic container as a stand, so I could work on the bottom, sides, and inside top edge of the bowl all at once. I cut out a largish circle of the fabric, and made regular cuts so that I could closely wrap the form, gluing the fabric in place with paint.

After it dried, I sponged another color of paint on, to help bring out the fabric's textured pattern, and then gave it a coat of Mod Podge, to help the surface feel smoother.

For the inside, I cut a circle of fabric to fit the bottom, painted it in, and then covered a strip of plastic from the remainder of the ice cream bucket with a tube of the fabric, to cover the inner sides. I hot-glued the strip in place, and painted that too.

The next step is to find something to cover the space at the top of the strip.

Velcro for de-pilling

I wanted to de-pill my winter coat, which is woven wool on the outside, before putting it away for the season. I started out just pulling fuzz off by hand, then got to thinking about sweater stones—scratchy     stones used to snag pills and pull them off.

I realized that the hook side of hook-and-loop tape, aka Velcro, would do the same thing. I had a piece in my bag of elastic and bias tape and other sewing bits, so I tried it.

It worked well, brushed lightly over the surface of the wool. The Velcro does clog up after a bit, and it helps to have a pin or a needle or a paper clip wire to get underneath the lint and lift it off the hooks.

Sent outside

We have a free-from-the-side-of-the-road table that is not needed in the house, but which could be useful on the deck. I don’t know whether to call it a large end table or a small coffee table, but it is a little over two feet square.

To help it weather the outdoors, at least for this summer, it needed its grooved top protected, and the shelf underneath mostly removed.

I did the shelf part first, since the table would have to be upside down for that. I drilled holes at the corners with a bit brace, started cutting with a keyhole saw, and finished each cut with a regular hand saw. Otherwise, I could have used my husband’s jig saw, but I prefer hand tools, which are usually much quieter, safer, and cheaper than power tools.

For the top, my preference would have been to cover it with sheet metal, but what I had was fabric left over from the latest armchair project:  some sort of canvas with a waterproof backing. I had to piece it together a little, and for this I did flat seams by overlapping two pieces, and then running two parallel lines of stitching down through the overlapped part. This particular fabric was a bit difficult to maneuver through my sewing machine with the size of pieces that I was working with, so the end result does not lie perfectly flat. Just good enough for a temporary solution.

Having run out of upholstery tacks with the chair project, the best solution for securing the fabric to the top was staples, along the sides of the top. I folded the edges of the fabric under before stapling. Like always, I found it difficult to hold the staple gun firmly enough to make all the staples to go in smoothly; many of them got some assistance from a hammer afterward.

And that was it. Ideally, I would like to paint both base and top, in different colors, but that is not a priority at the moment.

Bed week?

Last week I:

Turned and repaired the mattress.

Stitched up some rips in the mattress cover.

Mended a corner of the sheet.

And patched worn-out areas of the quilt.