Beloved Cafe

Hey folks,
I just wanted to show off my new stew. It's all vegan and you will leave the table as full as a if you were at Thanksgiving. I used fresh Carrots, green beans, Braggs, rice and some other stuff. I also made a nice plate of fruit. It was a great dinner. This next dish is what I call Robey Delight. It has a little of this, a little of that and a lot of vegan love. I sound like Bob Ross. How would you like to wake up to this plate. It has tempeh, mushroom, garlic, potatoes and nutritional yeast flakes. Yum!! I know they both kind of look the same. Well I'm off for a bike ride to Whole Foods and Ninth Street.

Dust & Cake

I feel like blogging but I don't know what to blog about, so this will probably be another chapter in useless blogness. This picture here is me after sanding the plaster in the front room (the room where the wall was taken down - see last blog).
Now that the room is opened up, I had to redo some of the plaster by repairing the cracks caused by the house shifting over time. I never really worked with plaster before but it doesn't seem to be too hard once you get the right mixture of plaster:water.
We had to peel off all the wall paper before plastering t0 ensure the cracks were completely filled. Most people would say to knock out all the plaster and put drywall in. I find plaster walls a lot better because they are more acoustically sound, so to speak. They are also less fragile than drywall; these walls were built to last. I don't really care if the walls are completely flat or perfect. I want to spend my life living making music etc. rather than spending my whole life making this the house someone else would like ("marketable"). Not to say that having plaster walls isn't a good selling point. I love all the old charm and craftsmanship put into the house.

Oh yeah. Here I am baking a cake. I also made seitan with ginger/bbq sauce. My wife got mad at me. She was baking scones that were longer than the chesapeake bay bridge, and I asked if they were square, and she started accusing me of not appreciating her efforts to bake all the time then stormed out to lift weights (see our new set below). About 2 hours later she came out and told me to make meals for awhile. The scones tasted fantastic but not as good as my cake:

I don't know what Bingecafe is going to do without any new food. I guess she can copy my recipes.
(wife note: the seitan was like a charred log)
Until next time, from the sloping band house,
NL

What Wall?

Alright, so this 1928 bungalow had a dividing wall making it into a duplex. After talking to a few friends who restore old homes, I decided to knock this wall down. At first my wife wanted to keep it and just make a window, but we both agreed later that just to remove it. There is more light throughout the space now and it makes the front room more grand. The wall itself was made out of gypsum board so it was quite easy to pull apart. Most people would have used drywall but in this case they went the cheap route. With the good help of my trusty sledgehammer, I knocked down the majority of the wall. The hardest thing about removing the wall has been relocating the electrical outlet to the other wall, which will be done with a junction box and some extra wire that you can pick up at your local hardware store.

When tearing down walls sometimes you find great treasures of gold, silver, or money that most people forgot they hid. In my case, I was lucky enough to recover 2 great baseball cards:

Although I don't care much for the Phillies, my favorite childhood baseball team was the Mets.

I like to support our local Hardware store, but many times when I go to buy something (like the junction box) they don't have it in stock. Now if the Mets didn't have any baseballs in stock, what would happen? They'd lose their jobs.

The other day we got a "free" piano. Well it wasn't exactly free after we paid some people to help us move it into our house. But here it is:

The following night, we met a neighbor (we'll call him "Bond") who moves pianos for a living. Bond tells me that everyone is busy buying the newest electric pianos on the market and he's stuck throwing away grand pianos that only need a little 'lovin. Just like this piano here. Six keys are broken but we have all the parts to fix them.

We have a ways to go on this sloping band house, but until next time, I doubt this information helped at all, but maybe someday I'll put something really educational here.

Sleepin' In

Ya-hoo! Some days you just need to kick back and read a good book by Mark Twain (Roughing It). And I sure am roughing it. Yesterday we scraped the tiles in the small bathroom and took out all the rotting grout and prepped the walls for painting. We're about to walk down to the Scrap Exchange in Durham to pick up some paint. I like it there because they use all recycled products and it's a great source for making art without using new materials. Check them out.

Get your Water on

Ok. After the $130 lesson on how to cut a pipe and put a new pipe in, I feel kind of stupid. But hey, we all can't be the top of the class. We have water now. I inserted my backwards P-trap (see pic) then went to Hugh's to get a part. The man at Hugh's was very impressed with my digital camera (I brought a pic of my work to show the size of the slipcover I needed) but not so impressed with my backwards installation.

Now it's fixed but the hot water valve is leaking (insert crazy laughter here). Yesterday I did rebuild the other toilet successfully. There I feel better. Now we can wash our hands and use the toilet feature in the same room. Until next time, your host Neutral Lippy signing off this Sloping House.

Plumbing

I don't want to talk about this. But my wife wants me to have a blog so I can leave comments on her blogspace. If you don't think she knows that I'm writing this, you're wrong. She's typing it right now.

I was attempting to mount our bathroom sink onto the wall, and dropped it onto the pipe, busting the pipe open. No water for 1.5 days now. Yea-hoo! So we called the plumber for tomorrow. It's tough to admit you cannot do everything. Puts you in a raw mood sometimes but James Bond movies are always comforting.

Anyways, I'd rather be playing guitar. Which I will do once we fix our upstairs rooms. Stay tuned for more updates from the Sloping House.