You may have noticed on my Master List that there are at least three rooms in the Liberty House that will eventually have built-in shelves and storage. I need places to put things, otherwise I set them down in the middle of the room and they stay there, um, forever. Now, the future study and the cupboard-under-the-stairs are places you may expect that kind of thing, but the bathroom?

Well, here it is in its current state:

This is, by the way, is the first floor bath and has the distinction of being the one functioning bathroom in the house right now.

Other than a small spot in the ceiling that needs to be patched (and the shower trim I replaced before moving in), it’s not in bad shape from a functional standpoint.

The tile is ceramic, and the fixtures are all higher-end, but the whole thing is very… vanilla. And with the pedestal sink instead of a vanity there is exactly zero storage to speak of.

I actually bought that cheap little shelf from Target and a few $7 baskets from World Market just to hold the basics while I figure the rest of the room out. Here are some things I’ve considered:

1. Ditching the pedestal and putting in a larger vanity
2. Knocking out a wall between the bathroom and downstairs bedroom (aka future office) to make a linen closet
3. Creating built-in shelving around the sink and toilet
4. Training the cat to fetch my soap, shampoo, and freshly laundered towels when needed.

Yeah. Scratch that last one.

One of the things that I don’t love about this room is how the toilet feels like it’s just hanging out in the middle of the room. (Something I articulated really well in this video.) I’m afraid just sticking a vanity on that wall will feel even more awkward in what is already fairly narrow but oddly open space. Switching the positions of the vanity and toilet is also an option, but not until I have one or two more working bathrooms in the house.

While adding a closet by messing with the wall between the bathroom and bedroom isn’t impossible, it would definitely feel a little “tacked on” to one room or the other.

Which leaves me with this idea…

Try not to fall out of your chair in awe of my drawing skills. Or because you’re laughing so hard.

The truth is you don’t often see built-in shelving in a bathroom around a pedestal sink and toilet. I’m still trying to decide if it would fit or look completely awkward.

Here are a few of my inspiration images for this bath:

Yep. That’s the Rustic Beachy Bath from Memorial. Haven’t quite got enough of it yet. Also, that mirror was one of my irreplaceable finds, so it came with me to the new house.

Love the shelf above the pedestal sinks for some additional storage.

And the shelving with the vertical paneling behind it in this image, which I showed you yesterday as proof I’m alive…

As one of the two often-used and mostly-functional rooms in the house, this shouldn’t be high on my priority list, but building the shelves feels like it would be a fun project and a fairly quick win  (and I mean that relatively speaking… as in, quicker than demolishing and rebuilding the entire master bath.) Those ceramic tiles will go eventually too, but not until I’m ready to tackle the whole kitchen, and that will be a little farther down the list.

So, built-ins in the bathroom? What do you think?

I don’t often repin cute little sayings on Pinterest, but every once in a while one catches my eye. (Actually, I take that back, I just checked out my Words That Aren’t Mine, But Could Be board, and I do pin a lot of cute little sayings. And by “cute” I mean funny and/or awesome.)

Some of you Family Handyman subscribers may have gotten your March magazines last week (or two weeks ago? time really flies when you’re unexpectedly buying houses online) and wondered why I wasn’t flashing one of my favorite tools around in there. Truthfully, I have no idea. Maybe they have something against Paslode cordless finish nailers, since that’s the article they skipped, but having used this baby almost daily since I bought it I can tell you it makes my little heart go pitty pat.

They did post the longer version of the article online though, so for those of you who want to know just how much I love not having to drag the three-hundred pound compressor around when I want to shoot nails at people build stuff, you can check it out here.

For any of you who are so-so about whether you need one of these and aren’t convinced by a picture of me batting my eyelashes at mine, here are a couple of projects I used it for recently…

Reinforcing some of the bars on my chicken-coop-turned-coffee table:

Tacking together my extra-handy (and fun) wood toolboxes:

Installing the custom jamb for that closet door I built on camera:

Putting in wood shelves:

And building a knock off of a Pottery Barn pinboard:

Not to mention the window trim and baseboard installation that seems to have been a staple of my existance for the last year. I’m actually considering adding the 18 gauge cordless brad nailer to my tool collection as well, but I need to replace my table saw and fill a couple of other smaller gaps in my toolbox first. Oh, and buy a house and a tractor.

Hey, a girl can dream, right?

As for projects that don’t require nails, the Pipe Dream Bed is definitely next up on the list, but the Liberty House has thrown a little wrench in those plans, since I’m not going to build a 500 lb bed out of 1″ gas pipe and then disassemble and move it in a couple of weeks. So instead my spare bedroom looks like this:

Honestly, I’m really jonesing for some nice big sawdusty house projects, and it looks like the Liberty House is going to oblige with those sooner rather than later, but not right this very second like I’d prefer. However, instead of sitting around staring forlornly at my tools, I’m getting my project fix virtually thanks to Apartment Therapy’s Homie Awards, which are going on, uh, right now.

I’ll admit to having been a little salty in the past because there wasn’t a lot of recognition for those of us who spend our spare time making kissy-faces at our power tools instead of picking out curtain fabric. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with curtain fabric, it’s just that my gift is building houses, not decorating them. But hey, look at that, they have a DIY category this year.

Even if you don’t vote, it’s a great place to find some new DIY sites to follow!

So, I might have gotten a little ahead of myself about posting interior pics today. I hope you’ll forgive me, but it was wishful thinking that things would move faster than they have with this house, which has meant a lot of sleepless nights for me this week, let me tell you.

Anyway, I’m going to give you the full tour of the house (I guarantee you’ll be surprised, since you could have knocked me over with a feather when I walked through it) just as soon as all the legal stuff is taken care of.

The good news is that I made it over two of the smaller hurdles to officially having the keys to this place fairly easily. The BIG hurdle is coming up soon– hopefully early next week, so I can get it out of the way and then enjoy smooth sailing until closing. For a little taste of what I’ve been going through for the last three days, here is an email verbatim from one of the people I’m working with to take care of the legal crap:

Stanley,

You have mentioned differ title company’s mane in title provider. Please advise if you want to switched to another title company?

 Singh Devi [not her real name]

As you may suspect, my name isn’t Stanley, but no amount of clarification on my end seems to get the point across. Clearly one of us isn’t speaking English, but to be honest on the amount of sleep I’ve had in the last three days, I’m not sure it isn’t me. So, it’s been an adventure fraught with questions like, “Am I making this bigass check out to the right person, in the right country?”

In the meantime, however, you guys have come up with some great names for this house. Among my faves:

• From Allie – “The House of Unexpected Adven-Hey look at that new saw.” (So appropriate, but a bit of a mouthful)
• From Karen – Brick Manor
• From my BFF from college – The Calling House
• From a lot of you – The Brick House, or even just The Brick (or Bric-a-brac, also apt)

To be honest, “The Brick House” was growing on me pretty early on, until my grandmother pointed out that it rhymes with another “house”, and now I cant get that out of my head. She suggested I name the property, not just the house, and I’m completely bummed that Wuthering Heights is already taken.

We’ve been kicking around names like “Tenterra” (after my mom) and my suggestion of Hilltop Manor (since it is at the top of a hill-ish thing), although the word “manor” is a little too stately for me. Those Brits were so good at naming their properties. Perhaps Longbourn after my favorite Austen novel?

Nothing has stuck yet, but I’m working on it.

And, for a little taste of what I’m working with here, I’ve sketched out a not-even-remotely-to-scale floorplan:

The original brick part of the house was built in 1860, and the addition on the back of the first floor came on in the 90′s to my best guess.

This is not what the house looks like inside, but eventually…

The future Study, perhaps?

A Farmhouse Kitchen in white and wood…

A cozy Parlor (if I name this house anything “manor”, the living room has to be called a parlor.)

That may or may not contain a fireplace…

Definitely not giving up my dream of black doors…

And lockers are a must-have in the mudroom. Even though it’s just me and the cat.

I’ll tell you this, it’s a big house with a lot of potential. I can’t wait to get started on it.

I know, I know, I kind of dropped a little bomb in the middle of the “Hey I’m going to buy some vacant land and build a garage on it” party yesterday. I have to start by thanking all of you for the support, laughs, words of encouragement, and– specifically Laura from Door Step Home– for calling this my Unexpected Adventure instead of my Have You Lost Your Ever-Loving Mind moment.

Which, by the way, my barometer regarding whether or not I have indeed lost my mind is if I can hear my dad’s head thunk on the desk from one state away when he reads this website. So when I texted him a pic of the house and said “thinking of buying this at an auction tonight” and he was all “BUY IT NOW” I knew I was in the clear as far as sanity-checks go.

How I Ended Up With A House (Probably)

If you’ve been following this site and some of my adventures for a while you know that I spent the last two years pouring a lot of my heart, effort, time, sweat, blood, and youth– oh my God, the gray hairs– into the Memorial House. It was supposed to be the home I would live in forever, and when that changed almost eight months ago, I have to be honest, I felt a little adrift. And exhausted. Not from the physical work, which is something that grounds and centers me, but from the emotional part of finding and creating a place for myself. That might not be something that resonates with everyone, but since I did a lot of bouncing around when I was a kid, the concept of “home” has become an important part of my sense of stability as an adult. (How’s that for a little random Wednesday morning amateur psychiatry? You all thought I was a one-trick-pony with the house-building stuff, but no… I do insightful revelations regarding childhood too.)

The truth is, at the beginning I just didn’t think I had it in me to find a new house that was supposed to be home, and I considered– and spent a lot of time looking at property– for something to flip (like this) so I could continue doing the work I love and have a house to live in without the commitment.

When I just couldn’t find a house to flip that fit the bill, I started to think a little less temporary. I wasn’t ready for the whole house-building thing again, but something smaller? I could do that. So I started on plans for the Hillside Cottage because I didn’t believe I was going to find just the right thing, and I’m not one to sit around and wait for “perfect” to fall in my lap when I can build it with my own two hands.

So here was a lesson for me… finding just the right land to build my future house on is just as difficult as designing a home itself. And right now, where I’m looking and for what I wanted, there weren’t a lot of options. I went so far as to track down a guy who owned a huge parcel of farm land that wasn’t for sale and tried to negotiate a 5-10 acre lot off of it from him. It was going to be expensive, and a little risky since I was only planning to build a glorified garage on the property which–while awesome–isn’t great for resale.

I started to think that if I really wanted property, maybe I should consider buying something with a crap foreclosure house on it for cheap and bulldoze the place if necessary to build my cottage. Not that I could ever bring myself to bulldoze a house (clearly, since the last time I literally built a house around a house) but still, it got me thinking. It also got me to change the settings on my real-estate search to include single-family homes on large lots.

And that’s what brought me to this house yesterday.

It popped up on my search and was vaguely on the way home from where I was looking for land, and I’ve always said I wanted to rehab an old brick farmhouse. I almost didn’t go… I mean, mentally I’m prepping to build an 800 square foot loft to live in for the next three years, what the hell am I going to do with 3000 square feet of 150 year old farm house?

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know this: For the first time since leaving Memorial (and maybe even before that, since selling my first house) I feel like I’ve found something with the potential to turn into my home. I wasn’t actively looking for it– I’d decided it wasn’t going to come around and I’d just have to build the damn thing from the ground up, if that’s what I wanted– and then, there it was.

So it was random, yes, but really when you look at the whole story, not quite as crazy as it sounds.

Enough Blabbering About Your Feelings, What About The House?

What is a little crazy is that I basically put an offer in on a house that–other than a short stalker-ish session peeping in the windows–I’d never seen the inside of.

You might think I’m a bit of a house-buying daredevil, but here’s the truth. I made a little agreement with myself that the highest bid I would place is what I would be willing to pay for just the land and the barns, without the house even on the property. And the purchase price (including the house) ended up being about 50% less than what I would have paid for the same number of acres of vacant land from the farmer I met with earlier in the day.

I mean, it would have been fun to do a walk-through of the house and spend a few weeks agonizing over the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I of purchasing it, but the nice thing about the auction was that it crammed 21 days of stress into a 3 hour time period.

So, I walked into that house for the first time today with the expectation that it was worth nothing to me, and I would bulldoze the damn thing if necessary and still be happy with the property and barn.

And I know the outstanding question on everyone’s mind right now is, “Is that the rumble of a bulldozer engine I hear in the distance?” The answer is, I don’t know yet. Until I’ve got confirmation on the water and heat working properly, all bets are off.

But, do you see this?

It’s essentially a three car garage plus workspace with a loft up above. It’s got gaping holes in the walls, yes, but I could easily tear this structure down (or even just down to the studs) build the Hillside cottage right on this foundation if necessary, and I’d still be ahead of if I’d bought completely vacant land.

So yes, I bought a house. But really what I bought was property that happens to have a house on it, and the semantics really do make a better case for my sanity. If all goes well I’ll be able to share pictures of the inside of the house (and barns), along with the final determination about the bulldozer by the end of the week.

Also, I totally need a name for this place, and I’m running on less than five hours of sleep, so if anyone is feeling particularly brilliant, drop me some name suggestions in the comments. The most clever thing I can come up with at the moment is the Sidetrack House– referencing both my extra-short attention span which landed me the house in the first place, and the fact that it will be a front row seat to witnessing the Train Wreck of AWESOME for the next couple of years. (You’ll have to search that reference out of yesterdays comments, but it’s well worth the laugh.)

Here’s how I kicked off the week. I already had a jump-start on feeling awesome with the successful Moonshine Lamp project that I knocked out over the weekend and I decided to continue on that theme and make this a “power week.” You know, serious productivity, no distractions, and a lot of getting shit done. I started out Monday by getting a head start on my chores and hauling my huge country garbage bin out to the road first thing in the morning, instead of doing it last minute as I was rushing off to work.

I threw a coat on over my pajamas and felt good, empowered, ahead of the game, I may have flexed my muscles a bit and felt a little like superwoman as I walked outside… right up until I happily slammed the door behind me and, thanks to my automatically locking door, stranded myself out in thirty-degree weather, in my pajamas, in the middle of nowhere, without my keys.

So awesome.

And I have to tell you, I stood just outside the door with my hand on the knob, mouth open in disbelief, and spent a good ninety seconds trying to process what to do next. The pervasive thought going through my mind was, “If only I had my phone…” Except, if only I had my phone what? Who was I going to call? I live 30 minutes from any family, no one has a key to my house, and all the Twitter updates in the world weren’t going to be able to wish the door back open for me. (Why I wasn’t saying, “If only I had my keys…” is still a mystery to me.)

So I hauled the garbage out to the road, did a few calisthenics to keep any important parts of my body from freezing off, formulated a plan B (break a window) and plan C (start jogging down the road in my hot pink polka dotted flannel pants and flag down the local farmer on his combine… to what end, I have no idea) and then started searching for a key I thought I’d hidden somewhere on the property in case this ever happened, but, of course, had no clear idea of where I actually hid it.

Somewhere in that 25 minutes of general insanity it occurred to me that I’ve been through some big life changes in the last six months, but up until this point I’d never actually taken the time to think through the implications of being single and somewhat isolated from the general public. For the last 5 years there has always been a partner to call on, or a close neighbor or family member just down the road, and to be honest, I got used to having that safety net.

The truth is, while there are plenty of friends and family members who would be there for me if I needed it, the only way I feel completely comfortable is being self sufficient. (From the girl who insisted on installing 14-foot long pieces of siding on the house all by herself, this is a shock, right?) And while I’ve been getting by on luck, it’s time to be a little more planful about my future life as a single girl living out in the country. So here’s my short list of must-haves I’ll be incorporating into Hillside Cottage for safety, comfort, and general quality of life.

1. Impossible To Get Locked Out Unless You Lose Your Actual Brain Door Hardware– At this point I’d say we don’t need any more context on why this is a good idea.

2. Door Entry Alert Chimes- I’m not a fan of of big security systems that require activation, deactivation, and potentially awkward explanations to local law enforcement. It doesn’t make me feel safer, and the truth is that even as a single woman, I’m not worried about being able to defend my home– perhaps you’ve heard, I’ve got good aim with a hammer. Okay, and I keep some heavy artillery around as a backup in case I miss. Regardless, I don’t need a full blown alarm system on my house, but since the main living space for Hillside Cottage is upstairs I have a feeling I could start straining my ears at the first sign of a noise on the main floor to determine whether or not to go on high alert. Some simple entry alert chimes will take the guesswork out of it.

3. Tractor/Mower – Well seriously, every country girl needs a tractor. More importantly, however, is the ability to plow myself out from under a foot of snow if winter around here starts acting like actual winter. Right now my big plan is to four-wheel-drive my way out of it, or just hole up in my house until spring.

This sub-compact tractor from Kubota can work as a mower, backhoe, loader, or post hole digger with the right attachments. I totally need one.

4. Generator - I’ve also been rolling the dice  when it comes to maintaining power in my rental. At least twice last year the power went out for 2 or more days, and I was in a much less rural area then. So getting a generator (and figuring how to hook it up to my panel) is high on the priority list, even though it’s hard to fork over the cash when it’s 50 degrees outside in February. Plus there are probably some other items on my Storm-slash-alien survival list that I need to start hoarding in the basement like a crazy person.

5. Bottle-less Water- This is more of an annoyance than a necessary-so-I-don’t-freeze-to-death item, but since all of my paper goods get burned, and my compostables go to the garden, my only recyclables are the dozens of plastic water bottles I go through a week. Dealing with hauling them to the recycling center was never actually my job before, but I can tell you this… it’s a pain in the butt. And even with a bigass softener on the house, the water where I’m at still has the distinct flavor of rusted nails. Or blood, if you’re feeling a little vampire-ish. So in an effort to save the environment and not end up buried in plastic water bottles, I think I need one of these:

And will go well with my favorite glass water bottles:

6. Remotely Accessible Thermostat – I once left my house in the middle of January for a long weekend in Vegas and while I did not come back married to a stranger, I did come back to a house whose interior temperature was somewhere around 12-degrees. When the water in your toilet bowl is frozen solid, you know there’s a problem. And since there isn’t anyone to check on the house for me when I’m away, one of these thermostats that can be monitored and controlled via iPhone is not just a cool trick, but an absolute necessity.

Okay, and it’s kind of a cool trick.

7. Independent Car Battery Jumper- I actually love my big SUV specifically because I’ve owned it for the better part of a decade with no mechanical problems (which includes the time I accidentally drove it into a ditch, where it laid on its side until AAA came, and then once all four wheels were on the ground, drove off just like new). I’m not sure if you can use a tractor to jump start a car battery, but if not, it probably couldn’t hurt me to have one of these around… at least until I give in and buy myself a vintage pickup to take up the third spot in my garage.

I feel pretty confident with these additions to my already enormous tool collection, I’ll be set to take on anything life throws at me– whether or not I’m stranded outside in the snow in my hot pink pajamas.

What tools and equipment do you keep on hand for self-sufficiency?

That silence you hear is the sound of me blinking forty-seven times at the prospect of DIY that doesn’t involve power tools and sawdust. My brain has a hard time wrapping itself around the concept– I mean, who doesn’t want to play with tools in all of their spare time?– but intellectually I know that well-rounded individuals do things besides work, build-houses, and write about building houses. Right?

I’m waiting for someone to say, “No, no, not at all… what you do is totally normal,” but all I hear is crickets.

Well, about six months ago, right about the time my frustration about not having enough time to do everything I love peaked, I decided to start making some changes. I didn’t realize it at first, but I was applying the same principles I use to tackle construction projects to essentially DIY other areas of my life– time management, eating, exercise, creativity, folding my socks.

Uh, probably not so much on that last one.

I also realized that what I do on this website for my power tool related projects is as much a part of my learning and assimilation process as actually building the stuff, so I started doing that for other areas of my life as well. Researching, documenting, taking pictures, and writing.

Most of it didn’t seem to fit in with DIYdiva and the way the site has evolved over the years, so I hoarded it on my computer for months and expected it to end with that. Instead, I found myself having more and more conversations with friends and family about how the DIY philosophy was really helping me make a difference in other areas of my life. I’ve always said that if all of the hours I’ve spent writing posts for this website over the last seven years just helped one person believe in the “can” instead of the “can’t” then it was worth it, and I’ve decided to carry that principle to other areas of my life as well.

Which is all a really long introduction to this new section of the site:

DIY Life (http://lifestyle.diydiva.net)

There are still some things to clean up on the development side over there, but as you can tell by my loose interpretation of spelling and grammatical rules, I’m not a perfectionist when it comes to blogging. It’ll get shined up eventually. Also, I don’t expect most DIYdiva visitors to be incredibly interested in the content, so the posts and feeds are totally separate from the power tool badassery (or, let’s be honest, insanity) that you usually find here. But, if just one of you is struggling with finding a little balance in your life, feel free to follow my journey to see if I can find a little balance in mine. At the very least it will probably be good for a laugh.

Here’s a little excerpt from my first post on DIY Life.

Building My Life Like a Construction Project: Less Sawdust, Still Crazy

If I could characterize last two and a half years of my life, I think it would be appropriate to say I’ve been channeling a female powertool-wielding version of the Tasmanian devil — plowing through work, life, projects, and relationships in a tornado of sawdust, general building debris, and unintelligible noises.

Did I make progress on a lot of projects? Yes. But  in the wake of those big things I accomplished (like building a house in my spare time) I left a path of destruction through almost every other aspect of my life. You know, things like my personal relationships, physical well-being, and what could loosely be termed as “general sanity” even though we all know I was a little crazy to begin with.

The truth is that in some respects I do thrive on that single-minded chaos, but I’m really only able to fully embrace things like spending eighteen months looking like a zombie because I know it’s only for a finite period of time. I’ve always said that I can do anything for a year (two, if I really push it) but when that time is up I need to find ways to recalibrate my life. As you can imagine, the farther you lean into the chaos, the harder it is to find some balance in your life when it’s over. Which is exactly what DIY Life is about.

(Click here to read the rest of this post…)

So, there you have it. A new, non-construction related project for 2012. My posts over there won’t be quite as frequent as they are here. I mean, balance is good, but playing with my tools will always come before brushing my hair.

And don’t worry, tomorrow we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming and talking about house plans… can’t wait to show you how the Hillside cottage is shaping up.

There is so much crazy in the air right now, I can hardly see twelve inches in front of me.

Oh wait. Maybe that’s sawdust.

Either way, I might have some awesome things to post this week, but I can almost guarantee none of it is going to be coherent. However, to make up for the fact that I probably won’t be able to form intelligible sentences, I promise to take extra pictures. And eventually I’ll tell the stories that go along with them, like why these awesome dudes (with even more awesome mustaches) were hanging out in my kitchen…

And how I built a closet door from scratch this weekend that could withstand a nuclear blast…

And what it’s like to move from this bathroom into one that is covered in hot pink tile…

And how many trips it takes to move all of my tools to a new home…

This reminds me of that trick question about being given a billion dollars if you could count it all out one dollar at a time, which would basically take you thirty years. Except with power tools and a thirty-minute drive. Math might not be my strong suit, but my experience with moving things tells me that this could be a very long week. Awesome, but long.

It’s not going to be too long before outdoor work is going to require three layers of long-underwear and my awesome (yet gender neutralizing) Carhartt bibs. So that’s something to look forward to when the temps get around, you know, forty, but until then I’m making the most of the mild Autumn weather with projects like this:

Those are the Master Bathroom doors, by the way, which haven’t been actually hanging on their hinges doing the things that doors should do — like blocking the direct line of site from the driveway to the commode– for three or four months now. The good news is I’m just a few pieces of door trim away from needing to try to hide behind four sheets of toilet paper if unexpected visitors come over. The improvement in quality-of-life cannot be overstated.

Also going on outside, more wood is up on the porch ceilings and looking fabulous.

And, for the first time ever you can walk around the front porch at night without fear of tripping on a stray piece of lumber and chipping a tooth. (I don’t know why I picked “chipping a tooth” but it seemed like a feasible example of something that could happen to me on any given day.)

It’s been about a year since I first thought getting some exterior lights on the house might be one of those things that improves my relationship with gravity. I had all kinds of fancy ideas there, but MysteryMan prevailed with a “simpler is better approach” and I think he picked just the right thing.

As you might have guessed by my last post, I’m dividing what time I have on the weekends between finishing up things on the Memorial House and searching for a new big project. This weekend I checked out something completely different from that last one.

This, my friends, is a blank slate. The reason why I’m considering it is because it’s a donkey friendly blank slate. It also happens to be located not too terribly far from my new friends Katy and Brandon at the Turtle House, and since I was so close I had to stop by and get the grand tour of their big project. For anyone who is unfamiliar, they bought a house that had been siting vacant for 10 years and looked like this:

(image via Turtle House)

And were crazy enough had the vision to see it could look like this:

(image via Turtle House)

So a couple after my own heart, for sure. The house is going to be all kinds of awesome when it’s done, and it was fabulous to meet some Internet friends in real life, who didn’t even look at me the slightest bit strangely when I showed up unshowered and slightly high on paint fumes. Which means all-in-all I’d call it a pretty successful weekend.

No kidding, in the last 48 hours I’ve cleaned almost 90,000 infected files off of my computer, which is still not working. Ninety thousand. Needless to say, I haven’t been doing much other than sitting at the desk shooting death-rays out of my eyes at the computer for days. The good news is that I bought an external hard drive and managed to transfer all of my files and pictures off the computer while it was in Safe Mode, so at least the last two years of my life no longer hangs in the balance.

I’ve been meaning to get the thing backed up for, oh, a couple of years, but with the whole house building thing, I never managed to find the time. So here’s the “good advice” portion of this post:

Go to carbonite.com right now and get yourself setup for online backups. $50/year is totally worth it.

Also, if you want to know how to protect yourself from this kind of disaster 1.) Don’t search for song lyrics, anything “free”, or adult content websites. 2.) Read this and do what it says.

Updates, Kind Of

When I started this post I thought I might accomplish something significant on the kitchen or with the interior doors of the house yet this weekend to update on, but no, the slow death of the computer is also sucking the life out of me.

So instead the update is this, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a little more garage living in my future, and if there is, boy I hope that garage looks like this.

(You must check out the full slide show via New York Times here.)

Freebies

Okay, moving on to something that makes sense… free stuff. (That won’t crash your computer, I swear.)

1. Spice Label InDesign File

If any of you want to make spice labels similar to mine but have Adobe InDesign and want to chance the wording, I’ve added the link to download the .indd file to this post, or you can just click here.

2. Everyone Needs a Good Drill

And Joey and Lana are giving this one away here, along with some other great tools. You should check it out, because as far as I can tell, there’s no reason not to have more power tools.

That wraps up the number of somewhat-coherent sentences I have in me today. I swear as soon as the computer is fixed I’ll have the other half of my brain back. Probably.