Girlfriend power

The bourbon-slush-and-buddy garden renovation process

By Susan Caba
The Resale Evangelista

Sometimes all you need is a friend and a refreshing treat to get done what’s needed for so long to be done. Could be weeding out the stuff that’s accumulated in the china cabinet over the years, sorting through three Weight Watchers cycles of clothing, or parting with 14 boxes of college textbooks which are not only out of date, but available somewhere on the internet.

For any of these onerous tasks, a buddy can be the secret to success. The refreshing drink? That’s the reward for the friend willing to sally forth with you into the dark corners of your clutter.

I’ve been on the receiving end of these kinds of partnerships many times. This week, I’m the willing buddy. While visiting friends in St. Louis, my friend Susan Nell Rowe and I tackled her backyard garden. Five days later, we’re bruised and hobbling, but triumphant.

We did it the ResaleEvangelista way. Between Goodwill and the death-row plant tables at Home Depot and Lowes, as well as using things Susan already had—many of them hidden in the basement—we kept the cost under $750. That total included a new garden gate and painting the garage. (Yes, I said we painted the garage. I can’t believe it, either.)

The bourbon slushes—oh dear, I just noted that a mere typo would make that “bourbon lushes”—kept us going. Recipe to follow.

Anyway, the real key is what another friend, Laurie Vincent, calls your “body double.” This is the person with some special talent that you, yourself, lack.

Could be she/he is an organizational genius, has off-beat ideas for repurposing stuff, will firmly insist it’s time to discard the silk roses from your (first!) wedding (and the mauve china, too), possesses the tools and skills to repair almost anything, or simply has the patience to sit and talk while you work.

When you draft this person into service, some magical synergy occurs. Your own energy and abilities multiply, and you accomplish what previously seemed impossible. Like painting a garage.

I’d write more about the garden project, but Susan is tapping her foot. The garden is almost done, but there are pictures to be hung in the dining room. So, more details in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, here’s the recipe for bourbon slushes:

Bourbon Slush

• 1.75 cups of bourbon
• 12 oz frozen lemonade
• 6 oz frozen orange juice
• 3/4 cup sugar (optional—we do the diet version)
• 2 cups strong tea
• 6 cups of water
• Mix the lemonade, orange juice, water and tea in a large pitcher.
• Add the bourbon, stir and freeze in a large, flat container
• Serve scoops into a glass, garnish with mint (optional)

Saving “brown furniture”

Don’t hold back–color it bright!

Susan Caba
Resale Evangelista

A formerly ugly wooden dresser, now glitzy red

Thrift shops and resale stores are filled with solid wood furniture, most of it brown.

Brown as in natural wood, often with fairly glossy finishes. I’ve never looked at the potential for painting this furniture and therefore bringing it up to date, for two reasons.

First, I started buying furniture in the Eighties, a time when original finishes were sacrosanct. You just didn’t paint golden oak or walnut or mahogany. Second, I thought painting these finished pieces would be a pain–that they had to be sanded or scuffed up in order to take the paint.

Well, I was wrong. I still wouldn’t paint a beautiful piece of golden oak or walnut or cherry. But you know, a lot of the furniture from the second half of the last century is so boring, not to mention ugly. And any life to the wood is buried beneath the finish–it’s depressing.

Recently, I’ve seen several pieces of this type of furniture painted in rich colors. It looks great. And I’ve learned it’s not that big a deal to prepare the surfaces for painting, even if they are somewhat glossy.

That brown dresser in the photo? It’s the same one pictured at the top of this post, painted a glamorous, glossy red. I found it on TheResplendentCrow.com, where Sucheta gives tips on turning ugly, boring brown furniture into pieces to be proud of. For example, she used Tulip Red by Fine Paints of Europe to get this gorgeous, rich red with a high shine. Generally, she said, “it takes 13 million coats of red paint” to achieve that finish. This job took only two coats of the Tulip Red.

“Red pigment is very transparent. Not only that, red also tends to be very dull, lackluster, meh…you get my point,” she says. “I won’t be exaggerating if I said this is the most vibrant red I have gotten my hands on.”

As for sanding and other preparation for painting previously unpainted furniture, there are plenty of websites offering advice. They tend to be of two schools.

Traditionalists argue for thoroughly sanding the furniture before painting. Modernists (in my view) say that isn’t necessary–a coat of Kilz or primer should make the finish coat adhere just fine. If you want a flat finish, you can either use “chalk” paint, or just regular flat paint.

I‘m not going to offer any particular advice, since I don’t have much experience. Check out these sites or others. LiveLoveDIY.com or CentsationalGirl.com.

What I will say is: Go for it! Glamorize a desk, a dresser or a bookshelf. Change the hardware, add legs or take ’em off. Follow Sucheta’s lead: Transform that ugly brown furniture and make it yours. The world will thank you.

The Resale Evangelista is dedicated to simplifying, clarifying and creating a more artful life by getting rid of stuff she doesn’t need and making the rest more useful and beautiful.

Give a girl the right shoes….

…and she can conquer the world

(Bette Midler)

Susan Caba

Resale Evangelista

Goodbye, high-heels, I hardly knew ye.

At least not recently, when age and lifestyle combined to make you obsolete.

And yet, I let you linger in the closet. Why?

Well, what was the harm? Who could predict…might I not have occasion to slip on the bronze suede and leather shoes and meet someone for a drink? Besides, bronze is really one of my colors and so, I had to have them–even though I was buying the same shoes in gray suede and silver leather for some long-ago black-tie event. I’m not sure I ever wore the bronze pair, but they were filled with promise.

The orange and magenta sandals? Well, I did wear those. As unlikely as it sounds, I had a dress in the same colors. And they looked good with jeans, too. In fact, I wore them recently to an art opening.

That is, I wore them for about 10 minutes once I got in the door. Then it was either take them off or limp awkwardly around the room, pausing to lean casually against the wall when the pain became unbearable. That’s when I knew viscerally, rather than just intellectually, that my days of wearing high-heels are over, despite their sex appeal.

My daily footwear is pretty much of the flip-flop variety. I mean, I have some dressy flip-flops, they aren’t just the $2.99 variety. Shoes aren’t the focus of an at-home ensemble that usually consists of sweat pants and t-shirts, occasionally augmented with a fleece cardigan or vest.

And then there’s the age thing. The one tiny bit of arthritis I experience is at the joint of my big toe, on my right foot. Exactly where high heels put the most pressure on a foot.

I once purchased a pair of black boots that required a rather peculiar angling of the foot to get them on, at which point I was basically balanced on the balls of my feet. The man I lived with at the time, a physical therapist, watched me trying them on. He could not believe I might actually buy them. “How do they hurt?” he asked, in a tone as pointed as the toes of the boots.  Now I know what he meant.

Sex appeal–let’s face it, that’s why high heels exist. Both men and women lust (for different reasons) after Christian Louboutin‘s red-soled, sky-high heels. “A woman can be sexy, charming, witty or shy with her shoes,” he once said.  And flirty, he might have added. I once wore a pair of high heels to work that caused a strong, silent type to pause in his conversation with other men and, as I passed by, comment “cute shoes.” The expressions on the faces of the other men were priceless. And the shoes were that cute.

Do you remember Candies? They were high-heeled slides popular in the early Eighties. I wore them practically every day when I wrote for the Iowa Farm Bureau. I was just out of college. Otherwise the staff was all male and predominantly middle-aged. The combination of my age, the Candies and the fact that I sometimes wore three earring studs rather than two, often seemed to flummox my more conservative colleagues.

Those Candies were so high and I wore them so often, the muscles in the backs of my calves shortened. I had to do stretching exercises to compensate.

Ironically, the other iconic footwear about then was the Earth Shoe. Oddly shaped and homely, the soles were constructed so that your heel came down lower than your toes–negative heel technology, they called it. I remember walking past an Earth Shoe store, long and narrow with two lines of benches running from front to back. The benches were filled with all sorts of people–elderly women, teenagers, hippies, businessmen. And they all had their legs extended to admire their new Earth Shoes. There was nothing sexy about Earth Shoes.

Here’s the thing about taking my high heels–or at least my highest heels–to the consignment store:   I don’t want give up my sex appeal.

I still want to make strong men weak at the knees. I’m not ready–and never will be–to be limited, literally or metaphorically, to sensible shoes. The high heels are gone.

But I’ll never part with the tiger-striped smoking slippers or my cheetah slides.

Plans: Restriction or Freedom to Grow?

This Cleaning Out Stuff is harder than it looks

…At least for me

Susan Caba
Resale Evangelista 

I woke up this morning with a sobering realization: Getting rid of a few jars of spices is not going to cut it, not if I want to empty my house of excess. At this rate, I’ll be taking stuff to the grave.

I need a plan. More than that, I need a structure that will help me execute the plan.

Structure is something I resist—and i crave. Why that’s so is a thought for another time. (Tangents are a good strategy for eluding the demands of structure.)

The thing about plans, at least those that are followed, is that they cut down on decision-making. Making decisions saps mental energy.

Exerting the will power to carry out those decisions consumes more mental energy. That’s why habits—so long as they support the plan, rather than sabotage it—are helpful. Doing something by habit consume less energy than deciding each time to do the very same thing.

I’m not in the habit of getting rid of things.

I have plenty of excuses why not:

• “I shouldn’t just give that to Goodwill—I should put it in a garage sale (or on Craig’s List or eBay).”

• “But I got that when I went to Taiwan (or India or Peru or Antarctica) with Mary (or Max or Tim or Judy) to Abner’s wedding (or to see the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu or icebergs).”

• “I’m saving these dishes and pots and pans for Max’s first apartment.”

And those are just the rationales for small things. Like I’m going to make more than $5 on anything that would otherwise go to Goodwill, or forget significant trips and people, or that Max will want these dishes and pots and pans—not to mention that there’s no telling when he’ll settle into a place worth the cost of shipping them.

I see that I’ve wandered from my thoughts about structure and habit. That’s because I got away from the keyboard for a few hours to contemplate my reluctance to really dismantle these spaces. Those thoughts haven’t gelled enough, yet, to put into writing.

Here’s one of the fragments.

I’ve been thinking, unconsciously, all my life of structure as restriction. Structure was a chain link fence that might inhibit creativity or spontaneity or even escape. Now I’m trying to picture it more as a trellis. Pretty in and of itself, a trellis supports weaving, climbing and tumbling vines as they rise above the ground while reaching for the sun.

In the meantime, I’m taking a little oak bookcase from the basement to Goodwill, even though I’m just sure I could get $10 for it on Craig’s List.

5 minutes in the kitchen yields a baker’s dozen

Susan Caba
Resale Evangelista 

Ever open a drawer–say one in the kitchen–and feel compelled to empty it? Me neither.

But last night, standing around waiting for the coffee to drip through the filter (yeah, I know, exciting life, eh?), I opened the drawer with utensils to see what I could see. Then I opened a couple more drawers, and a cupboard or two.

Here’s what I found:

1. Four red lobster-claw crackers. I have only a vague memory of ever cooking a lobster at home; if I’m not hallucinating, that would have been more than 20 years ago.

2. Four bottle-opener keys. I generally open bottles with a.) the corkscrew or b.) a twist of my wrist.

3. Four yellow plastic wine glasses, which I envisioned using outside. But I prefer my wine in glass goblets, which cost 50 cents at Goodwill, so who cares if they break.

4. Four plastic holders for corn-on-the-cob and four sets of picks to hold the corn cobs. I imagine these were meant for the lobster and corn-on-the-cob feast I can’t quite remember.  

5. A chipped Waterford red claret glass, in the coveted but discontinued Alana pattern. The chip isn’t big enough to throw the glass away, but I never use it. I sold the other 11 stems when I realized a.) I didn’t want to take them outside and b.) they don’t hold enough wine by today’s standards.

6. My mother’s nutcracker. Haven’t cracked a nut in decades. They come in bags now.

7.  Two sterling pickle forks that belonged to my grandmother, Bobbi.  I also had five cordial glasses that Bobbi’s sister gave her–“If there had been six,” the sister said, “I would have kept them for myself.” A cleaning lady broke one, so now I have a nice even number. The glasses are packed away and the pickle forks will soon join them.

8. A wooden lemon reamer, given to me by a friend who insisted I couldn’t live without one. I can.

9. A large tined implement for slicing multi-layered cakes; a rod for sharpening knives; a pastry cutting something or other, which I first mistook for a potato masher, and a device for cutting the aluminum around wine corks–who does that?

10. Two garlic presses, one fancy, one simple. The fancy one I probably bought during a phase when I thought I was going to cook, not assemble meals. The simple one I bought when Max was in fourth grade because we needed to press out some clay curls for the Indians in his Native American project, and the fancy press didn’t work.

11.  My son’s baby spoons and forks. As I recall, he ate mostly with his hands.

12. Two sets–two!–of chopsticks. One in a rosewood box, the other set–less-fancy–loose in the drawer. Neither set has been used. And let’s not forget the 12 black stone chopstick rests, and the six ceramic soup spoons. Did I mention I once had delusions of myself cooking?

13. Six individual crystal salt cellars and six little spoons for sprinkling the salt.

There you have it. Five minutes and a baker’s dozen of things to take to Goodwill. Sometime soon, when I gather strength, I’ll reveal my china habit. Stay tuned.