Gardening

The weather is so lovely it's really hard to think about working on the inside of the house. I feel the need to stop at every nursery and home improvement store and cruise for plants! I also wish I had taken the time to dig up every last rose at my old house. Although since at least 1 died in the process, perhaps my estimation that it would be simpler to spend $15 buying replacements was a better use of time and money. But Maggie survived the journey! Actually, until it bloomed I thought it was souvenir de la malmaison. Which means sdlm did not survive the journey!

I learned from the last house that I didn't want to put the vegetable garden at the back of the yard (especially now that our yard is so deep), because it's a pain to water and I'm so lazy I'd think "oh my god there is no way I can walk 50 feet to pick an eggplant." So this year it's right next to the back door! And much smaller, since my vegetable gardening skills are rather weak. Here is a before pic of the garden bed left by previous owners.

Actually, no, here is a super before pic, before we bought the house, featuring our real estate agent Casey:

And here are the afters!

I've got the following herbs:
lavendar
thyme
basil
lemongrass
oregano
rosemary (which I hate)
italian parsley


The following citrus trees:
mexican lime
mandarin orange
meyer lemon
kumquat

The following vegetables:
3 tomato plants (even though I generally have zero luck with tomatoes)
eggplant
jalapeno pepper

Wish me luck. Emmit and Ringo love to eat the lemongrass. That stuff has razor sharp blades, it's got to cut their tongues. I hope it gets a chance to get established before they go to town. Emmit's not so sure he can wait.

Vacation All I Ever Want Is Vacation!

Sorry I've been out of the blogisphere. I've been on vacation. Went to Spain for work and then to Germany for a quick vacation. We went to Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg. A highlight was the weekend market in St. Pauli in Hamburg. I scored an AWESOME pendant light for the kitchen.

It's going to hang over the kitchen sink, with an edison bulb! 10 euros!

And we scored some really cool hooks for 1 euro each. When we get the table and bathroom medical cabinet powder coated, we're going to through these in as well.

And the last market score was a 1 euro beer stein with an adorable deer and flowers painted on it!

Painting Update

The dormers are painted! Ready for the new roof. Too bad the roofers weren't. The new roof was supposed to be installed this past weekend. But alas, it wasn't.

Hey our grass looks great, doesn't it? Oh wait, it still looks awful.
While my husband painted and avoided falling off the roof (steep pitch), I painted the trim on the back bay windows. At very long last, that project is finished.

Before: awful windows that went down to the ground and let water into the house when it rained. Many panes were taped together and others had been replaced with plastic.

During:

After:

There is so much hardy board, caulk, tyvec that NOTHING is getting through those bay windows. Unless it's fresh air from an open (double hung) window.

I also finished the kitchen roman shade (which was tricky bc it's 72 inches wide) and a little roman shade for the back door.

Curtains for Little Girls' Rooms

Last night I installed some balloon shades and a London shade I made for a friend. The balloon shade project was actually a retooling of curtains I made for her about 7 years ago. She's since moved twice. The new windows are smaller and so the curtains have become much poofier and very cute. I was also very glad to see how well they have held up. As I told my friend, I was so impressed by the quality of my initial workmanship.

Here is the new London shade for her other daughter's room.

Gardening

We haven't been up to that much worth photographing. I've been working on a roman shade for the kitchen. The third fabric with birds on it for this new place. Clearly birds are the theme. Speaking of birds we hung the owl house and a new (second) birdfeeder!

We also got a hammock! This required 230942309482 trips to Academy. First price hammock, then buy hammock, then realize hanging between two trees won't work. Then buy hammock stand, find out hammock stand that reputes to fit most hammocks does not. Return small hammock stand. Buy larger hammock stand. Return large hammock stand because it is missing a part. Get another hammock stand and open the box in the parking lot to ensure all parts are there. I hope to not go back to Academy for like 4 years. I've over that store.

I also finished painting the kitchen wall. I'll have to wait until the weekend to hang the new roman shade because I have to take down the mini blinds and paint over the dark maroon paint (currently covered by the mini blinds) that was in the kitchen when we moved in and let it dry and then hang the shade!

Gosh you are probably wondering why I'd want to change this. It's so light and airy!
Barring rain, we are getting a new roof this weekend! Hip hip hooray. And they will be installing two tube skylights. One in the kitchen and one in the guest bath. Which is so hideous we don't go in there. (That renovation will start after the kitchen is done).

Hmmm dark peach tile with light pink tile floor. Lovely.

So I was complimenting my neighbor on her gorgeous camillas and she started picking flowers like crazy and also gave me like 12 geranium stems to repot. The camillas are so beautiful! I took cuttings and used my rooting hormone. I hope hope hope they take!

 These are my herbs!

 This is where my vegetables will go this year. I'm going to keep it small year 1.

That's the double kitchen window!

Exterior Update!

Here is a photograph of the exterior, with one dormer painted and one column painted (both to the right).

The plan will be to add trim out the bottom where the dormer meets the roof.

I also finally ordered a sink! After another viewing of the Ikea sink, we decided to go with a single bowl stainless sink. It gets great reviews and I think stainless is a better option (durability-wise). Also my DREAM is for a cookie sheet to fit flat in the bottom of the sink and it will come true. Now we have to pick a faucet!

Exterior

You know your house looks bad when a neighbor (and I don't mean your next door neighbor, I mean like a guy who lives down the street) stops by and tells your husband that he has 5 gallons of paint leftover from his house (it's flat, he ending up using semi gloss on his house) that you can have.
That kicked off "weekend work on exterior of the house." The exterior has many issues and like so many of the renovations, everything is inextricably linked. You need a new driveway, well first you need to get the roof done, so you don't have a dumpster on your new driveway. You want a new roof, well first you need to order one more skylight and also paint the dormers. Because if you get paint on the roof shingles, you will apparently NEVER get it off. But before you can paint, you actually need to repair/replace the rotting wood and prime. My husband got started on the last task this weekend. Scraping, sanding, and using some wood restorative on Dormer #1! Only 2 more to go!
He also wire brushed one of the old metal support columns for the porch and did a test of high gloss black paint. It looks much better! Hopefully the next 5 will follow shortly.
As he noted, the last paint job was inspired by zero creativity. Everything was painted dusty blue. Dormers, Trim, Metal Columns, Door, Shutters. Here's a picture from Christmas. At this point we had replaced the door with our mahogany door from the old house.

The plan: keep the brick as is. Paint the shutters flat black, paint the metal columns, gloss black, paint the dormers dark gray, paint the trim cream, paint an accent trim piece at the top of each window deep red.
We also got a new bid for the driveway. As far as I'm concerned it's the most boring way to spend thousands of dollars, but we have to do it. The approach to our house (over a culvert) is really narrow and the driveway has about 2039482930482 cracks and looks awful. We are going to replace most of the concrete with crushed limestone to improve drainage and generally decrease the amount of concrete in this world.
The most exciting part of the exterior renovations (well painting is exciting) is the landscaping. I'm accepting all offers of (especially shade tolerant) plants! I still need to figure out how much sunlight will get through once spring/summer hit and all the leaves grow back in the trees. As the grass doesn't seem to want to grow near the house, we're planning on doing some large plant beds. This should be an improvement on the NOTHING that is there now. My mother in law gave us those netting lights for Christmas and noted we just had to throw them over the bushes. I said "We have no bushes." So needless to say, those boxes didn't get opened this year. This weekend I focused on busting up a large circular planting bed that you can't see in the photo. It was so close to the driveway that at least once I opened my car door and hit brick, a 17,000 square foot yard and someone has to build the ONE raised plant bed RIGHT next to the driveway? Anyway it was kind of cool, but it had to go to make way for a wider driveway. I got to pick-ax my way through plant roots. Fun stuff! I'll take some progress pictures and post soon!