Bonus Lazy Wednesday Post: Apple Crisp Thingy!

Preheat your oven to 350* or thereabouts. Ten degrees either way won't matter.

Peel, if you feel like it, and core two apples (if they're big) or three (if they're small). I use a mixture of 2/3 Honeycrisp to 1/3 Granny Smith, if you're being particular.

Slice them thickly or chop them into chunks, whichever takes less energy.

Open a bottle of wine or beer. Take a swig.

Set the chopped apples aside in a pie pan.

Take a big bowl, or maybe just a big-ish bowl, out of the cabinet, or you can use a roasting pan, or whatever. No biggie.

Mix roughly a cup of rolled oats (not steel cut or instant) with a half-cup of flour in that bowl/pan/whatever.

Add about a third of a cup of brown sugar.

Sprinkle on some nutmeg and cinnamon. Maybe toss in some salt if you can be bothered.

Take another swig.

In the microwave, or with the power of your mind, melt about a quarter cup of butter. Sometimes I use more--way more, like a half-cup. Anyway, melt away.

When the butter's done melting, and you've maybe had a few Fritos and perhaps a slice of leftover pizza and put on your sweatpants, dump that stuff into your flour/oat mixture and stir like crazy for as long as you can stand it, or until the ingredients are pretty much mixed.

Take another swig. Consider the genesis of Fritos. Be thankful for them.

Now dump that flour/oat stuff atop your apples, making at least some effort to get it mostly even across and around the apples.

Pop that bad boy in the oven for 40 minutes or thereabouts, or until the apples are tender. If you can't be bothered to fish a knife out of a drawer, just look for little bubbles of apple-y juices around the edge.

Top with cream or ice cream or just eat it on its own.

Apply to face.

Holy crap*.

It took six hours, most of a sixer of Stone IPA, a pizza from the little joint down the street, and infinite curses and thumped thumbs, but the utility room is painted, the IKEA shit is assembled, the shelves are up, and the boys are amusing themselves in the leftover boxes.

And not a moment too soon. The neighbors are coming over tomorrow for dinner.

And I am going off to bed. Sheesh.



*Why did I do all this in one day, including trips to Home Despot and Ace? Because Attila looked doubtful this morning and said, "Uh...I don't know if you can get this all done by Wednesday."

I'll show *her*.

What I Did Today

Fair warning: If you are at all faint of heart or queasy of stomach, do NOT continue to scroll down for the majority of this post. Beloved Sister, this means YOU.

Today I decided to take the sink out of the utility room. It's a bathroom sink of the molded-fiberglass type, and it--along with the cabinet on which it sat--turned out to be the only overbuilt things in this house. Everything else that I've needed to tear out has come along nicely, but this nearly stumped me.

This is the sink in question. You can see from the steel wool on the floor that I had had some trouble last winter with mice in the house; they were coming from under that sink. Also visible in the foreground is my Weapon Of Destruction. I had to take the whole damn thing out in one piece, sink, cabinet, and all, as the previous owners of the house apparently installed the sink using construction adhesive and the Power Of Isis.

And here's what I found when I removed that sink and cabinet:

Yes, friends and neighbors, that is torn-up insulation. And old church tracts. And some weird plastic things, and part of an electric toothbrush, and TONS OF OLD RAT SHIT.

This is by far the most nightmarish thing I've found in redoing the house so far.

Now I have a nice box built to cover the old plumbing, like so:

Much nicer. The whole thing's held in place with three screws, so I can take it down without any hassle when I'm ready to replumb.

Tomorrow is painting and shelf-building and weight-bench-repairing day.

Sheesh.

Dear God, I hope this is the last time HN is a remodeling blog for a while.

I have eleven new windows and two new doors and a man who needs to get his ass in here, silicone-caulk a couple of things, and get the hell out.

Watching other people work hard is exhausting. Time to break out the LST.

I spent all day screwing, and boy am I sore...

...but the deck is DONE.

It's 12' x 12', built out of pressure-treated lumber, and is solid. It's not *quite* square--there's about an inch of weirdness going on at the far corner--but I don't think it's going to fall down in a heap the minute people start stepping on it.

Friend Suz The Critter Whisperer is going to email me pictures that I can then put up here.

Next up: Will Nurse Jo survive the Deck-oration process? Tune in to find out!

Siding! Renovation! Gutulousness!

First, a new cat picture. This is, of course, Notamus. He is exhausted after his under-the-house adventures.

It's hard to get pictures of Flashes, because he's rarely this lazy. I have a number of great pictures of Flashes' butt, the corner of one ear, or a totally blank frame, because he's always moving at high speed.

Next, the new sill plate and patch work on the house. You can kind of see why I need new siding.

Aaaaand new windows. Look up there, in the corner of this window. That's a plant. No, it's not growing from the inside of the room. It's taken root in the rotting wood of the window and is sending shoots out into the inside of the window.

A lovely "before" shot of the front of the house. Note the cruddy gray Masonite siding, the bad paint-matching near the front door, and the white Dutch lap siding that was covered up until a couple of days ago. The original siding (the white stuff) is at least a half-inch thick and is solid wood. If I had a million dollars and unlimited time, I would get it scraped and painted and say to hell with vinyl. 

If you look just above the date stamp, where the bloom of the butterfly bush is pointing, you can see where the siding is beginning to pull away from the wall in a big wavy area. This is the east side of the house, where things were in pretty good shape--the north side was losing siding at a shocking rate. I could grab pieces of it and just crumble it in my hand.

And isn't that a nice half-assed patch job on the front stoop? The concrete shifted after a hundred-year flood a few years ago, and there's nothing anybody can do to shift it back. It's kind of obvious that there's a large crack in the concrete, but what the hell--nobody wearing stilettos will ever be able to ring my doorbell.

The new siding is mostly on the front of the house now, though there are a few spots where it's not *quite* done. I anticipate it'll all be finished by Thursday. Huzzah! I'm hoping against hope that new windows and doors can go in late this week or early next. The dust is beginning to bug me.

In the meantime, the nice man from the lumberyard delivered sixteen tons of dimensional lumber and Dek-Blocks and decomposed granite et cetera yesterday. If it doesn't rain buckets today and tomorrow, I plan to make at least a good start on a deck in the back yard. Pictures, of course, will be forthcoming.

The siding job has gone remarkably smoothly. Honestly? I think you get what you pay for, at least to a certain extent, with stuff like this. The company I went with was slightly more expensive than the others, but the project manager has been by a couple of times and has called to make sure it's all going well. The workers themselves, while scary-looking, have turned out to be really nice, really careful craftsmen. The only hang-up so far has been a permitting issue with the city, which takes a minimum of five days to do *anything*, including answer the phone.

It's nice to come home from work and see what they've done during the day. Makes me feel like I've got a real house now, rather than a mungy little dump.

I suppose this means I'll have to start mowing the grass and, you know, actually *cleaning*.