The Semi-Reveal: New Windows!

So a few weeks ago, this happened:

In the rest of the house, we now have new windows! In case you're blind or not particularly observant, the left one is new and the right one is old. Little bit of a difference, huh?

Dining room, obviously not finished and the shot's pretty blown out.

Same, but you can see the muntins better. House looks much cuter from the outside (or it will when the siding is fixed).

The living room is AMAZING. We left the shade down all the time because the window was so gross and etched, which made it even darker than that room is already prone to be. It's nice having it up. I have to figure out how to trim the shade because it fit the six-foot height of the old window. The new living and dining room ones are more like four and a half feet tall.

And of course, my favorite: the office. I love looking out the window at the trees up the street while I'm working on the couch in the afternoon.

These are also triple-pane windows, which should be extremely energy efficient and (we're hoping) cut some of the road noise when they're all sealed in and finished.

Salvaged Wood Delivery

It's not every day that your contractor delivers a trailer full of wood for your salvaging, reclaiming, pilfering convenience. Or that he helps you pick through the wood (which was on its way to the dump in his trash trailer). I think he thinks I'm crazy, though he did note that replacing this redwood deck cost over $400 in lumber, which means I hit the jackpot: A ton of 2x6 redwood that's mostly in pretty good and perfectly weathered condition.

 Also salvaged the same weekend from a local lumber yard (where I know the guy on duty did think I was nuts for fishing out scraps and asking how much they were). I think he felt sorry for me on account of my evident mental instability and gave them to me for free. That piece of true 4x4 is for my kitchen table (currently in development).

 He saw scrap lumber, I saw lamps. Potentially very bug-infested lamps, so Todd bug bombed them in the pool shack to ensure no creepy-crawlies came to make their home in my guest room. The texture on these is super rough and really awesome.

 I've made it as far as removing a ton of old rusty nails and screws from the wood and giving it a good scrubbing to remove loose dirt, moss and other substances of which I have no need to know the nature.

 One other suuuuper exciting thing about the above picture: SAWHORSES!! I bought some folding aluminum sawhorses at Lowe's a few weeks ago and LOVE them. I'd been needing sawhorses for a long time and decided that this was a good time to make the investment of $34, knowing there was a lot of baseboard painting in my near future. It was a good call.

OMG we have a garage door

On the spectrum of posts that I put on this blog, there are some pretty piddly ones. I painted something, I screwed a vent cover into the wall (wait, there's one of those in this post...), I planted tomatoes that are producing the most miniature of all pink brandywines ever seen on planet earth (this is actually happening and it's super sad). 

This is not one of those posts. No, my friends, this is the post where I tell you that WE FINALLY GOT A GARAGE DOOR!!!! GAH. It was installed today and it opens and it closes and we have garage door clickers for our cars. It's also super smooth and quiet.

If you have been reading for a very long time and have a questionable level of confidence in our abilities to finish what we started, you might remember that our garage hole looked like this when we bought our house. Well, technically the people who lost the house took their tarp with them, so we just had a big hole. NOT ANYMORE!!

Here's another big accomplishment. We had this attic access in the upstairs bathroom and mulled over for months how to fill the hole. Finally, I measured and ordered a big cabinet from Home Depot (which repaid all my spending over the years by giving my credit card to criminals...thanks a lot, guys. I digress.) Then I spent a few months mulling over how to secure it while leaving the attic semi-accessible. So, a semi-permanent installation. Sometimes I work slowly.

Two weekends ago, I cobbled something together using a few leftover hunks of 2x12 I've had for about two and a half years, just waiting for the right project (packratting pays off) and a lot of 3-inch screws. A lot. It is fairly level, but since the walls are kind of goofy, a lot of caulk is also going to be required to finish this one off. 

Here it is trimmed out. I primed it this evening but my phone died so I didn't take any pictures of the primed door. It's ok; not perfect but decidedly better than a gaping hole into the untamed frontier of the attic. After much consideration, I decided it'd be better to just frame the whole thing with casing instead of trying to do baseboard around the bottom. I'm not a great finish carpenter.

Ok, now, about that vent I screwed into the wall. This was actually kind of a pain and I felt pretty clever after I was successful. In the guest room, the drywall doesn't extend enough around the vent cover to give much to sink a screw into, so I had to drill through what I believe to be a flange around the register behind the drywall. I tested my little theory and was met with (rare) success. Now we don't have to warn guests anymore that if they hear a loud crash right next to their heads at night, don't worry, it was probably just the vent cover falling off.

The other attic door that'd been haunting me is also headed toward being finished. I added the decorative shaker-style trim to this door and have been slowly working on the mud to finish the drywall patch we added above it. You may remember before that it looked like this. I primed this tonight too but it needs more wood filler and sanding before I can paint it. The mud needs to be finished before priming, painting and then installing casing.

And now for fun, a few shots from Dancin near Jacksonville.  

Pretty decent wine and great flatbreads. Nice way to spend a Friday night.

Tune in next time to hear about the other REALLY BIG project that we're finishing!

My nemesis, the staircase

Once upon a time there was a dreadful old house with a hideous staircase (in a house purchased by two 20-somethings who probably should have run screaming from it).

It had weird, western-themed wallpaper, a sturdy but utilitarian railing and carpet that looked like someone had cruelly skinned a muppet turtle and glued it to the floor. There really are no words to describe whatever that thing is hanging from the ceiling (and may still be there but under a giant and temporary paper lantern).

But we primed and painted and ripped out the turtle muppet carpet. Several years later, we ripped out the primed and painted walls, had the floors finished and had drywall put in, and last week I sanded, primed and painted the railing.

 SOO much better! (These are just the primed pictures; the paint looks a lot smoother and more consistent.)

Sprinklers and some fun stuff inside

Sprinklers are officially a go! Please note the 300-some feet of pipe strapped to the top of my car. The Home Depot guy was not confident about our use of ratchet straps, but those things are the greatest. 

So now our front yard looks like this. Back yard is similar. Lots of small trenches. Todd's dad (who's heading up the project) used a Ditch Witch to dice up what remains of our pathetic lawn. (Also I recently got an iPhone 5 and am working on mastering the panorama shot.)

Inside, I hung the floating terrariums I bought a couple months ago. My air plants arrived earlier this week and will be living in them, hanging in the kitchen window for now.

This one has three: it's a 6-inch diameter bubble and has a big plant and two small ones, one at 4 o'clock and one at 7-8 o'clock.

 This one just has one; it's only a 4-inch diameter.

Cool, huh?

I also (slightly intoxicatedly) did this to the powder room trashcan. The idea was devised while fully sober, but Todd pointed out that I might regret executing a drink and a half in. He was sort of right, although I could also argue it adds to the desired irregular nature of the pattern. Anyway...this bathroom is slowly getting a little more personality. (And it was really good gin from Bendistillery.)

And this variety of asparagus fern is living in the back entry. Seems happy so far. It's so fluffy!

And lastly, I painted the artichoke lamp in our bedroom a lovely glossy white from the tan-with-gold-glaze it came as. I'm still working on finishing up the plan for our bedroom. Missing art, bedside lamps and possibly a couple accessories, depending on how the lamps turn out. Something about this still seems a little disjointed to me, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

The saga of the kitchen trim

Yesterday afternoon, it was broiling and humid outside so I decided to work on something inside. The kitchen trim has been grating on me for a while, so I grabbed my caulk gun and went to work. I dislike this project because it's multi-step and the parts that need to be done first aren't very gratifying, like caulking unprimed wood. Anyway, here's the window over the sink before. 

Before from straight on...you can see the wood on the sides and top. 

And here's the icky shape the trim was in. Now unfortunately, because we are suspicious that we likely have some lead-based paint somewhere in the 72 years of layers of paint on this casing, I wasn't going to sand it. I used a lint roller (you laugh, but it works!) to remove any loose paint and gave it a wipe with a damp paper towel before Kilz-ing it. 

This is after I primed. I told you it wasn't very gratifying. It does look better in person, and there's a nice crisp caulk line along the counter all the way around that painter's tape. That is gratifying. 

The trim around the kitchen window is now primed, which is a wild improvement that's hardly visible on camera. The rest of the trim is either primed or painted. What's annoying about that project is that it doesn't really look significantly better, it just doesn't look crappy anymore. That's what nobody tells you (ok, my parents both warned me) about renovating old houses. So much of it is just bringing it up to a certain baseline of acceptability before you can start improving on anything. 

I also did some more serious work styling the shelves that flank the windows. I had some random stuff there, but that's pretty much what it looked like: random. stuff. 

 Still a work in progress...

 And we'll see how far I get not killing the succulents I've started collecting. TBD.

I love this. That aged french florist pot and little Delft creamer pitcher. It has a small tray and a sugar pot that it goes with. Maybe I'll pull the other pieces out and put them on a shelf too. They're in my china cab right now. They were my grandmother's pieces.

 I'm becoming a bigger fan of identifying what I love in decor and filling spaces with that. It's evolving, but I find myself drawn to rustic wood, aged terra cotta pots (shocker), blue and white pieces, anything cobalt blue, crisp white finishes against dark wood especially with green plants...

One of the decor blogs I follow posted a palette of her colors throughout her house, and I like that idea. Given the moment of crystalizing my own tastes I'm having right now, I created my own whole house palette:

It's a lot, I know. But somehow it's working, I think because it's usually offset with some metallic (gold or mercury balls) and a "big" texture: jute, woven baskets, wood. I usually don't go with all the colors in one room; our bedroom is cobalt, yellow and tangerine with lots of white. The living room is red with cobalt and navy accents and a heavily textured jute rug. The dining room is navy, white, moss green (literally, moss...) and a little orange, again with heavy texture from the grasscloth wallpaper. 

The guest room, kitchen, entry and powder have had me stumped for a while because they're like the inverse of the other rooms: where I've had major color backdrops to work with, this is white, with white cabs and dark floors. Pulling in the pots and the greenery is helping me crystalize. I've been trying to figure out how to pull in cobalt and orange or possibly lime for the downstairs rooms, but haven't gotten there yet. 

Upstairs I'm still stumped, but that's ok. It's a process, and I finally feel like I have some kind of framework after this weekend, when I spent hours on Pinterest distilling what I was drawn to in certain images. It was a good and productive exercise for a groggy Saturday. It's weird, turning it into more of a science. Everything I've done with this house so far has been freehand and by some combination of chance and my eye for things, it's worked together. I think this is a good move and will help me start finishing rooms so I can stop thinking about them and just enjoy being in them. What a concept...just living in a house :)

And lastly, our most expensive investment in a while. Here's our lovely new roof. We opted for a lighter color for better energy efficiency. I'm working on adjusting to it. Kind of wish it was a little darker, but I'll get over it. I just realized how actually horrific our back yard looks here. I've gotten used to it (a particular type of coping us renovators develop) but wow...what a mess. That's going to change soon though. 

P.S. Have you ever seen a bluer sky than that? That's Oregon in the summer, folks. It's so blue you can't even look at it. You just can't beat it. 

That time we tried to turn our pool into an infinity pool

And other bedtime stories. Kind of. First, let's start with a picture from a couple of weekends ago of the Wood River, our favorite canoe trip. Gorgeous day, hot and sunny with perfectly clear water. Super fun time with Alyssa and Mike.

Next, I finally finished our master bedroom headboard that I started last summer. It was pretty much finished, but the screws and washers in the tuft holes (technical term) were still visible.

 

They don't really look very obvious until you compare to the "after"...

And now, the part where we address the title of this post. We kind of left the faucet running on the pool all afternoon. Until 8:30. 

When I went out and discovered this water totally overflowing out of this filter thing, into and under the pool shack and out into the garden. 

Next! We're having the roof done. This is not a very fun way to spend a very lot of money, but we had perhaps another year or so before it really needed it, and we figured it'd be better to get it done before things start leaking (like our garage did during an extended spring rainstorm).

Thought it was kind of funny the guys left all their stuff on the roof to come back tomorrow. Water, nail guns, etc.

They also left their truck in the front yard. Now that we don't look like total bumpkins all the time, it's more amusing to do it occasionally.

Oh, right...here's the reason the dang thing was so expensive. That's one of the layers of old shake roof. Under which there was no plywood. Do you hear that noise? That's the cash register, adding zeros. Ka-ching, ka-ching...