Work Weekend at the Cabin

We went to the cabin again last weekend and did some redecorating. The first project: the guest room. We got rid of the trundle bed that came with the house. I was trying to find a good photo of the "before" of the room, but the best one I can find is the one that we got from the realtor when we were looking at the cabin. It was decidedly a girls' room.

We replaced the trundle bed with my old double bed, one that I had gotten at an antique store when I was about 23.  It's an iron bed frame, sort of like an old hospital bed, very simple design. It was painted a different color when I got it, I can't remember what, but I sanded it and painted it with this cast iron finish. My parents have one almost exactly like it. I brought it with me into our marriage, and Martin, even though he is 6'3" and doesn't even really fit in the frame, accepted it snuggled into it with me (sometimes with feet hanging off the end of it). 

When Max was born, he co-slept with us, and it was even more crowded. We somehow managed, though, until I was pregnant with Otto, and it was clear that we finally needed to upgrade to a bigger bed, a king size bed. That was a really good decision, but I was not quite ready to let go of this little bed, so it has been sitting in the basement for many years now, collecting dust. I am so happy to find a use for it again. 

We hauled it out of the basement, set it up, and got out a big bucket of soapy water. Then we strapped that thing to our roof and hit the road.

Oh, by the way, someone stole all the polka dots off our car again. It looks so naked. This time it was really sad, as the boys had spent time drawing on every single dot with sharpies. We thought they might be less likely to be stolen if they were covered in drawings. Perhaps that made them even more appealing? They were little pieces of art. At least there are still hundreds of stickers on the windows.

So we set it up. And then we went shopping for a new mattress. It was funny how excited the boys were for this activity. They were very opinionated about it, at first, but luckily, we ended up finding a pretty decent one for a really good price.

The boys were initially reluctant to move the desk in to this room, and there was a lot of debate as to where exactly we should position the bed (we tried every option we could think of). It's a small room, but we found many configurations. But eventually, they were very excited about the new arrangements of the room. They thought they would want to spend the night down there, but instead, they just played in the bed, got a lot of sand in it and then wanted to sleep upstairs in the loft.

The next day, we got to work on those wicker chairs. I really didn't like them, and we had thought about Freecycling them, but we decided we could give them a little makeover and at least make them work for the moment. The boys washed them.

And then we all spray painted them.

We had found a bag of random colors of spray paint in our Chicago basement (a leftover from a previous tenant, who didn't take them when they left). We looked through the colors and picked out a blue-green color called Night Tide. Unfortunately, we ran out of paint before we were completely finished, but already they look much better (and we've ordered more of that color to finish the job).

We put one in the great room, where we also did a bit of redecorating. We moved the sleeper sofa from the sunroom to the front part of the room. There was also a lot of debate about where this couch should sit, and actually, the boys ended up preferring this arrangement:

And here's how the whole room looks from the loft.

Martin and I are still hoping to eventually move the sofa back to the other position, but for now, we've left it the way the boys want it. It's pretty cool that they have such strong opinions about it.

We moved the wicker sofa into the sun room (so we just switched the two sofas around). Max was surprised at how much more he liked the wicker sofa in this location. He said it looked amazing there. We had already posted it on Craigslist, but now we are reconsidering. Maybe we will keep it after all. The whole cabin is coming together really nicely. It's so fun to move things around, to rehab them, or to replace them with some of the other things we have collected over the years and have been unable to part with. It turns out our packrat nature has served us well in setting up a second house.

We had tackled the kitchen right away in the fall, although we've been adding/adjusting little things each visit. My parents gave us the espresso maker and milk frother as a housewarming present. We use those absolutely every visit. And then they got us a fabulous waffle maker for my birthday, hoping it would be a special treat, having waffles at the cabin. It is definitely becoming a tradition to invite people over for waffles, or to treat ourselves to them when we are out. Martin hung the pot rack in January, and most of the pots and pans are ones that we had in Chicago already, where we clearly had too many kitchen items in general. It was really good to divide them up. My dad got a few of those metal prints of the corn poster from my Uncle's farm and gave us one last Christmas. My Aunt Marianne wove the rugs on the floor. I love how when I look around, there are so many pieces from so many people we love, or from our past, just filling up the house.

In between all the work, there were waffles.

And another sunset walk to the beach.

Resident Rock Stars

And visiting rock stars.

A Boozey Birthday

Martin surprised us by walking in the door at 5:30 (well, he had promised to leave at 5, so it shouldn't have been a total surprise, but since we hadn't heard a peep from him, I assumed he was nowhere near ready to leave work). We hadn't finished decorating the cake, but it was fun to have him there to help with that part.

But first, he got a little sidelined with a plumbing issue. I suppose this is appropriate, given Mario and Luigi are some of the most famous plumbers around. We found the hole-y pipe by accident, looking under the sink for something else. I think we probably caught it just before disaster broke loose, since as Martin was looking at it, it actually fell apart (rusted through), rendering our sink useless. It needed immediate repair.

Luckily, Gilman's Hardware was still open and a less than a five minute walk from our door. Martin was back and had fixed the problem in under a half an hour. Plus, he had all these funny stories of our neighbors to relay: our friend Carl repairing his front porch and stopping to pass on birthday wishes, the neighbors a couple of doors down lifting a giant barbell weight right on the sidewalk while all his friends drank beer and cheered him on. He wondered at all the fun stuff he usually misses because he is at work until the neighborhood is relatively quiet.

And then it was time for cocktails to toast the birthday boy.

And put the finishing touches on the cake.

With that task complete, we all walked to Daddy Cool's, a relatively new restaurant in our neighborhood. Also less than a five minute walk. And serving hot dogs, one of Otto's most favorite foods. Otto got a kids meal, a plain dog with a side of macaroni and cheese. Pretty much a perfect pairing for him. Max got a Chicago dog, with all the trimmings. Martin got the Clevelander, which had barbecue sauce, cole slaw and fries on it. And I got the German (the obvious choice for me), charred sausage with sauerkraut and mustard on a pretzel roll. Mine was decidedly the best dish.

Feeling a bit too full from our adventures in dining, we headed back to the house, just as the sun was setting. The boys sat on the steps while Martin and I got to work hiding all the Boos (and realized we needed some actual booze, in order to break down all the grease we had consumed in the previous hour).

And then the hunt began.

 (Pop.)

The remains of the Boos.

Then we played "Stick the tongue on the Boo." 

And now time for the piñata/boss fight.

King Boo went down without too much of a struggle.

Everyone was still feeling full from Daddy Cool's, so we opened presents before cake, hoping to delay that part just a bit longer.

From Grandma and Grandpa, Otto got a giant stuffed sea turtle, some books, eight bags of M&Ms, and a really cool necklace made of some sort of tropical nut. When I saw it, my first instinct was to say it was a kukui nut, although I have no idea what that is or how I would know that. But when I looked up Hawaiian nut necklaces, a kukui nut lei was the first thing I found. So I think that is what it is. We will have to talk with them further to find out what it means. But for now, as Max says, it both feels and smells good, so they are wearing them.

Otto wanted to put the candles on the cake himself, in his own vision of how they should look. Fabulous, I think.

We were all too tired to eat the cake, so we just admired it, and then put it in the refrigerator to be eaten the next morning. Otto was asleep before I even finished brushing my teeth, hands clasped around his new turtle's flipper.

Party Prep

Otto wanted a Luigi's Mansion themed party for his eighth birthday. Max had a Super Mario Party a couple of years ago, and I think Otto wanted to have a similar but different one. And since he's always Luigi to Max's Mario, it was a good choice. Luigi's Mansion is the only video game where Luigi is the main player, which is another reason the boys liked it so much. The main idea of the game is that Luigi wins a mansion (in a contest he has not even entered—probably a good clue right there that it was a shady deal). It is advertised as a beautiful estate, and the pictures who it in sunny splendor. But when he arrives, it is dark, the house is overgrown and scary and...haunted. So he has to hunt all of these ghosts, some of them "Boos" and some of them other characters. He walks around in the dark, armed with a flashlight and a vacuum cleaner like weapon, for sucking up all the Boos. He is looking for Mario, who had gone there earlier to meet him, but has disappeared, so he walked around calling, "Mario?" The kids love that part and imitate it regularly. The final big battle is with the King Boo. So obviously, he was our piñata target. 

Piñata making.

 Day two, checking if it's dry and adding another layer.

Adding the crown.

Painting the piñata.

Details added.

Tools needed.

Filling up the piñata.

Befriending the piñata. (He doesn't realize he'll be smashed up in just a few hours.)

The main activity for Otto's party was to be Boo hunting. The boys would dress as Mario and Luigi (we are varying from the script a bit) and hunt for Boos which would be hidden throughout the house. We attached pins to the toy vacuum cleaner and the small hand vacuum for destroying boos. In the end, we made about 43 Boos (Otto notes there are supposed to be 50, the the white balloons came in packs of 15, so we started with 45, and there were a couple of casualties in the making).

Boo making.

The Boos are piling up. (We had a couple of balloon avalanches while we were adding them to the stack, which was both frustrating and hilarious.)

Luigi confronts a few Boos.

Pin the Tongue on the Boo. Another party game of Otto's invention. He had very specific ideas about everything and was involved in the making of every part of it, often correcting me if I was going forward with an idea of my own, because he had a strong opinion of how he wanted it. It was really fun to let him just take over. And cool to watch him go.

Almost ready.

Just the cake to tackle now. We had decided to make the mansion itself.

Here we go.

And now...it's time to party.