Smitten Kitchen

There's a blog out there called Smitten Kitchen which is about cooking in a tiny apartment/closet in NYC.  A friend of mine showed me this really nifty recipe they did a while ago called White and Dark Hearted Brownies.  They looked ubber cute and not too complicated.  And to boot, I actually have a small heart cookie cutter that was perfect for this project.  You can use any shape really, but since I had a heart, I used it.

The recipe itself was pretty straight forward.  I bought Ghirardelli brand chocolate bars for the white and semi-sweet chocolates and that seemed to work out well.  I only wish I owned two 8x8 baking pans for this recipe as you have to bake two sets of brownies separately (one white and one dark).  So as an industrial engineer, there was a lot of waste in this process waiting on my other pan to cool enough to get the other brownies out and be cool enough for me to line to pan with tin foil again.

The recipe worked pretty well in the end.  The one piece of advice I would give as a way to enhance the difference of the white and dark brownie is so use clear imitation vanilla in the white brownies to keep them lighter.  I totally forgot and the recipe doesn't hint at it (at least the part I read) so my came out "darker" and don't show as great a contrast as what the photo on the site shows.  They were a big hit for the dinner with friends last night and were a delightful mix of flavors.  I thought it would mostly be different by color, so I was surprised by the difference between the two match ups; eating a dark with a white heart and a white with a dark heat.  If you have one pan, and about 2 hours to kill, I would try it out!

Basement Updates!

So it's been a while since I have had a chance to post what's been happening here.  Let's see if I can get a few things updated.  For one, we made a lot of progress in the basement.  And by a lot I mean we are pretty much finished with what we wanted to do.  Hooray!  It took a while, but it's finally looking like home.  :)

First we had new carpet installed.  This was a phenomenal enhancement.  It took most of the day to rip out the old nasty stinky crap and install our plush cloudlike carpet.  :)

A reminder of what we were hauling out.  YUCK!

The old stuff starts to come out.

The original floor.  Looks like an indoor patio

The new stuff gets rolled out.  Seriously excited about that.

Brand new carpet all installed.

Yes, it's really that fabulous!

And add furniture and it looks like a real room!

We have a couple more movie posters we want to add to the wall and speakers to install in a more permanent way, but the rest is complete for now.  In the future I think we will change the light fixtures and a few other things here and there, but it can wait for now.  We have bigger fish to fry!

Lesson Learned

There is a distinct difference between owning a home and renting.  I am not talking rent vs. mortgage, but more the "who does the maintenance philosophy".  When you rent, you call, 1-800-I-DIDN'T-BREAK-IT, but when you own, you get to troubleshoot your own mess and there's a good chance, you might not get it on the first try.

First lesson:
Our assumed knowledge that the cluster was going to take care of our front lawn mowing was quickly put in check when I came home one fine Tuesday to find that the entire neighborhood seemed to be conspiring against us to put us in our place as the news kids of the block.  I walked up to the house and stopped, looked left, looked right and everyone seemed to have mowed the grass magically between 9-5pm.  Hmm interesting.  Turns out a lot of them are signed up for people to mow their grass for them, some mow when those guys mow and then there was us, apparently wishing fairies would mow ours.  Time for a Home Depot trip asap.  We bought a push reel mower and remedied that problem pronto.  Neighborhood peer pressure is real and being nosy about people's yards seems completely natural now.  Thankfully most people take care of them around here, but it's a kind of stress I had never known. 

Second lesson:
On the trip to get the lawn mower, we decided we would finally change the door locks.  You never know who has extra keys even with the previous owners living in FL.  So we went ahead and bought a new lock and decided to install it the same night.  This was a mistake.  We started the project at 9pm thinking, a few screws and bada bing bada boom, DONE.  Hahaha...  Our new deadbolt was bigger than the old one, so we had to improvise on how to make that hole bigger as we did not have a chisel.  We put another hole in the door for the fancy handle lock we bought and over an hour later, we put it all together and said, ok, we are done.  Go to close the door, and what do you know?  It doesn't close.  Why?  Because our silly storm door handle butts up to the new curved handle (not knob) we installed.  I about lost it.  It was pushing 10:30 and I was flipping out because we couldn't close our door.  Rob improvised and removed the storm door handle so we could lock out house and go to bed.  However, now we have a problem, do we remove the lock we put in (mind you we had to put an extra hole in the door for it) OR do we put more hole in the storm door to move the latch?  Sigh...  We were lucky enough to be able to swap the lock and the handle on the storm door and it all closes, just barely.  My door wreath is actually provided just a centimeter of a buffer.  Close enough.  So, we will no longer start a project at 9pm and this is because all projects, no matter how seemingly simple they are are neither quick nor easy unless it's 9AM. 

Third lesson:
We got a dehumidifier with the place and plugged it in to get it to start sucking out the many months of dampness that occurred from the last time it was plugged it.  It's been going like a workhorse sucking out loads of water from the air.  It feels much better in the basement, thanks to this machine, so generally we approve of it.  Turns out we didn't put the bucket back totally one time and since we moved it to be near the sump pump (high point of basement), it created a bit of a stream that ran back to it's old resting place near the drain.  DOH!  Thankfully, this didn't happen for days and nothing was damaged despite the basement being loaded with a number of items waiting to go in the finished basement when the new carpet arrived.  Sometimes things were done for a reason, if not always apparently to us.  Sigh.. 

I am sure we will learn our fair share of lessons and it's nothing that you are really understand until you do own a home.  Optimistic thoughts overrun any sense of reality and so you are just going to try and learn the hard way.  Oh well.  We are getting there and trying to have fun while we work.

Stair Lifts

So our house came with a few added bonus items.  Some of which we like, the back deck.  And there were other things we didn't like, such as the stair lifts.  Oh the stairs lifts...  When we first walked into this house, we immediately knew why the photos of the house were taken the way they were.  The completely hid the stair lifts.  After we figured out what in the world they were, it was like oh wow.  There were two of them in the house, one on each stair case.

At the request of our friends, we took a recording of the stair lifts in action. Sorry it's on it's side, Facebook was able to rotate it, but I can't figure out how to do it otherwise.  :P

From Household Projets

No one should be surprised when we say we took them out and yet some still were.  They said, why are you getting rid of these?, you can use them to help you move in or what about for the B&B movie??  Still, they went.  Of course this was easier said than done.  They are made of cast iron and were heavier than heavy.  It took everything Rob and I had to get them off the first set of stairs.  We learned to split the second set while still on the staircase and that seemed to work out much better.  In both cases the stairwells look infinitely better.

These stairwells are also going to be getting new carpet due to the impressions from the heavy beasts and grease that was transferred onto them from the removal of the lifts.  Another step in making the home ours.

First Days

The first few days in our new home seemed a little unreal.  Our realtor wasn't with us showing us around and we had the whole run of the place.  It was a very wonderful feeling to sleep in a place and wake up because you were done sleeping, not because of noise from neighbors or the smell of smoke or whatever annoyances come with renting.

We enjoyed our first meal in the new house of Chipotle and champagne.  You have to have energy food right?  We used our fueled lunch power to bust through an amazing amount of cleaning that needed to be done.  We didn't think it was that dirty of a place, but everything still needed to be at least wiped down some.  So some 5 hours later we were finally done with the first pass on the house.  It was hard work, but we were loving it.

The next morning I spent the day recording the "before" shots of this house, cleaning more, and another trip to Home Depot (of course).  Friday night we started painting the basement walls for our first major overhaul project.  We decided since we were going to replace the carpet down there anyway, we might as well try and paint and not worry about hitting the carpet.  For our first painting project, we were impressed with how it turned out.  Sure there's a couple of goofs, but we plan to fix them.

Here's the before photos:

And here's the in progress:

And the final result with the walls:

We also replaced all the plugs and switches in the basement.  The final step for the basement face lift is new carpet which will be coming Wednesday.  We will show the photos for the after again then.  We are just really happy we had a choice to put something other than beige.  :)

We Are HOMEOWNERS!

We are officially homeowners!  We just purchased our first home and we are thrilled.  To finally have roots, to finally not worry about rental agreements and rent increases and what to do every year.  To do it, we only had to promise to pay back an obscene amount of money and fill out a lot of paperwork that said we understood what that meant.  The first year anniversary is supposed to be paper, so I think it was only fitting we signed about 300 pages to seal the deal. 

We are proud to be homeowners are excited about this new chapter in our lives.  We hope friends and family frequent it to fill it with laughter and love and great memories.

One Year

LOVE
~ By Roy Croft ~

I love you, 
Not only for what you are, 
But for what I am 
When I am with you. 

I love you, 
Not only for what 
You have made of yourself, 
But for what 
You are making of me. 

I love you 
For the part of me 
That you bring out; 
I love you 
For putting your hand 
Into my heaped-up heart 
And passing over 
All the foolish, weak things 
That you can't help 
Dimly seeing there, 
And for drawing out
Into the light 
All the beautiful belongings 
That no one else had looked 
Quite far enough to find. 

I love you because you 
Are helping me to make 
Of the lumber of my life 
Not a tavern 
But a temple; 
Out of the works 
Of my every day 
Not a reproach 
But a song. 

I love you 
Because you have done 
More than any creed 
Could have done 
To make me good, 
And more than any fate
To make me happy. 

You have done it 
Without a touch, 
Without a word, 
Without a sign. 
You have done it 
By being yourself.