Tag Archives: Mike Reph

May 13, 2011 · 3:17 PM

Designing Woman: Part Three

People may think of a number of descriptive words for me, but D0-It-Yourself is not among them.

One of my favorite blogs that I read all the time is Young House Love, and they are all about the DIY.  But they’re DIY on crack.  They knock down walls and paint brick and tear out concrete.  They do an incredible job of making it look accessible, but it still scares the junk out of me.

Enter our hideous bar stools that the previous owner of our home left us — and refused to pick up when we found she had left them (but we could hardly blame her — they’re hideous, after all):

Not only is the pattern like something from a Ringling Brother’s Circus, but one of them was actually stained:

How did we live with them for 16 months?  If I think about that question too long I will go into convulsions, so in the interest of time, let’s skip that question.

When Mike and I decided that we finally had to get rid them, naturally we planned to throw them away and buy new ones.  But then some DIY-type friends heard our plan and were aghast that we’d waste money and resources on “such a simple project.”

Sure.  Simple for you.  This coming from the people who carve their own dining room tables.

We promptly ignored their suggestion and proceeded to look for new bar stools.  However, upon finding that any decent bar stool was at least $150 a pop, we figured why not try to fix our current ones?  If we fail we can always throw the embarrassment in the garbage and THEN spend the $450.

Off to the fabric store we went.  We chose a fabric, bought a staple gun and some backing and headed home for the dirty work.

First we took the stools apart to determine if we’d need to strip the fabric.

We decided that the backing on our new fabric was thick enough to prevent any of the old fabric from showing through, so we left the seat fabric on.

The fabric on the back of the stool, however, had to come off.  That was not a fun process.


We then proceeded to iron our new fabric to ensure it was perfectly smooth.  When I say “we,” I mean “he.”  We all know I don’t know how to iron.

Isn’t it a beautiful pattern?

Everything worked like a charm until this point.  The next step was nothing short of maddening.  We had to align the fabric perfectly, staple it correctly and tightly, and make sure the corners didn’t look freaky.  We alternated between talking to each other through gritted teeth like seamstresses on Project Runway, and cheering each other on like we were at the Mathletes Finals.

After dozens of removed staples, we finally had it:

…and then we realized we had to do it again two more times, and we almost decided it would be easier if we just sold our house and left the new owners with two torn apart stools.  Let history repeat itself, we said.

But we motored through, and finished all three seats and one seat back.

Those of you paying attention realize this leaves two seat backs unfinished.  How long do you think it took Mr. and Mrs. Reph to finish those last two seat backs?  I’ll give you some hints:

  • it’s the same amount of time it takes to get five credits at a university
  • it’s the same amount of time it takes to grow 1/3 of a baby
  • it’s the same amount of time that Seattleites enjoy the weather each year

Three months, people.  Three months.  For three months, two of our chairs sat there without backs.  For three months, we told our guests we’d “just started” this project and that we were going to complete it “this weekend.”  It was sometimes the last thing one of us would say to the other before falling asleep, “You know, we really need to finish those bar stools.  No seriously.  It’s embarrassing.”  The other would always dutifully reply, “I know.  Totally.  Let’s do it this weekend.  Oh wait, we’re out-of-town.  Next weekend, then.  For sure.”

This went on for three months.

Until this week.  This week, in a fit of energy, we decided it had to come to an end.  We got home from a date, walked right into the dining room and started stapling like it was our jobs.

Ladies and gentlemen:

Victory!

Aren’t they pretty?  But really, the attractiveness doesn’t even matter to me at this point.  The point is that they are done, complete, finito.

And just as I hoped, they bring in the red from the family room behind them, and help add a little color and interest to the space.

The other side of the victory is that what should have cost $450 ended up only costing $35 ($20 for the fabric and backing, $15 for the staple gun).  Even though they aren’t perfectly done, I’ll take imperfect at $35 over perfect at $450…at least for now.

Instead of teaching us that we are DIY-capable, this certainly proved to us that we should never remodel a home.  It took us three months to do the backs of two stools; I don’t think we should be knocking down walls and replacing granite counter-tops.  For the sake of our marriage, obviously.

To read about other design projects we’ve conquered managed, see here and here.

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March 30, 2011 · 9:43 AM

The Chicken, the Whole Chicken and Nothing but the Chicken, so Help Me…

Let me be clear: I have an aversion to chicken.

It dates back to my childhood years of poking my meat with a fork to check for veins or other signs that my entree used to be a live animal.

I wish I was past this.  I wish I didn’t care that there are things in chicken like fat and “gristle” (a word that still makes me shudder).  Mostly I just wish I was a vegetarian.

But then I couldn’t have steak or fish, both things for which I salivate.

So.  The chicken.  I deal with it on a semi-weekly basis because it’s easy, cheap and the husband enjoys it.   I usually just cut it up and cook it with some simmer sauce.  But do I like it?  Unclear.

Recently I’ve been flipping through various cookbooks and the same recipe keeps jumping out at me: whole roasted chicken.  Every single recipe taunts me with how easy it is, how low-maintenance, but they all seem to forget one little tidbit:  I have to TOUCH the chicken to make it.

So, without actually touching it, I managed to get this 4.5lb chicken from its packaging to my chicken-only cutting board.

Ten minutes later, the chicken still looked like this, because I was pacing back and forth in front of it after reading the following in my cookbook: “Remove organs from cavity of chicken.”

Surely there must be some other way.

I finally decided that without rubber gloves I was going to have to resort to using a paper towel.  I wrapped my hand in the paper towel and stuck my hand into the “cavity.”   It only took about two seconds for me to realize that I could not feel a thing, nor could I move my hand to grab at anything.

I was going to have to do this the hard way.

I took off the paper towel, counted to three and dove my hand in so fast I convinced myself I wouldn’t feel a thing.  But I did feel a thing.  His organs.  How do people do this?!

I promptly threw them in the trash and then washed my hands within an inch of their life.  Only I should have kept reading because it wasn’t long before I was rubbing salt and pepper all over the bad bird and then shoving a lemon up his rear.   Good times.

I became a huge fan of rosemary in the process, because I quickly discovered that I can jam it into the chicken without ever touching the slimy flesh.

My jaw really hit the floor when the cruel authors of the cookbook demanded that I lift the skin away from the meat with my finger and put whole garlic cloves underneath. Excuse me?

I put the whole thing in the oven and instantly realized why people love cooking chicken this way: you can walk away for an hour.  This, in cooking, is priceless.  Usually when I cook chicken, it’s stir-fry style and I have to stand there and move the chicken pieces around for twenty minutes.  With the whole chicken method, I’m watching Bethenny Getting Married and having a glass of wine.  Why didn’t I know about this sooner?

The resulting bird was really a thing to behold: all golden brown, perfectly crispy on the outside and tender and juicy on the inside (and by inside, I mean the meat…not the “cavity”).  Mike was astonished that such a thing of beauty would come from the work of my hands, especially since he knows about my aversion to poultry.

So now I am caught in a bind: do I make the chicken more often, considering how easy it is and how much Mike likes it?  Or do I banish forever the image of my hand up the backside of a bird?

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March 17, 2011 · 11:50 AM

Disposing Martha

There was a time when women got married, bought a four-bedroom house, and expertly knew how to care for every aspect of their home. 

2008, the year I got married, was not that time.

And my mother knew this about me.  She knew that not only did I not really have a clue about home maintainance, but that I was taking the easy road by living in a condo versus a house (thereby eliminating half the work — cleaning out gutters is not part of my spring cleaning routine).

So she turned to the expert to teach me how to become a decent homeowner:

Yes, she bought me Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook, and I’ve never looked back.

While most people would stuff this on a shelf and only dive for it in the wine-on-carpet disaster scenario, I have decided to read it cover-to-cover.  I tend to retain information like this, so I figure if I just read the whole thing I won’t need to look everything up all of the time.  Naturally I do this in a closet with a flashlight, because reading it is, of course, mortifying.

What’s less embarrassing is when that book totally saves the day. 

Last week, Mike and I were talking about how we tend to make each other do chores based on gender.  For instance, I always do the laundry and change the sheets, and he always takes out the garbage and fixes anything that breaks.  

But then the garbage disposal broke.  And we got into a tiny argument about the fact that neither of us intrinsically knows how to fix a garbage disposal.  I was extremely dismissive, you know, in that charming “Not my problem!” manner.  He was slightly irritated that this was his job just because he’s wearing the pants.

And then it hit me — MARTHA!

I ran into the den and pulled Martha off her place on the bookshelf.  I remembered reading a little how-to on fixing the garbage disposal.  I raced through my index, found “Garbage Disposals” and flipped to page 89.

“How to Fix a Jammed Garbage Disposal.”  Eureka! 

(I love how she even has optimism in her How-To.  No, your disposal is not broken — it’s merely jammed!  Let’s fix this in a jiffy!)

Mike opened the cabinet below the sink and had all his tools at the ready.  I started reading from Martha (everything was numbered and extremely detailed with things like “1.  Turn off circuit breaker to stop power to disposal.”  I honestly would not have thought of that).

After shutting off the power, Martha told us all about removing blockage and using our “reset button” (disposals have buttons?). 

After jamming things around in the sink for a few minutes (no actual tools required), we turned the power back on and tested the disposal — voila!  The genius of Martha lives on!

Mike’s look of shock was barely disguised, and my victory dance wasn’t remotely concealed.  We felt like we had broken through the genderism and had actually fixed something together…well, the three of us — Mike, Abby, and Martha.

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