True Colors (II)

As mentioned in previous posts, one of the first things we did after closing on the house was to repaint every room. In most cases, it was surprisingly easy to select just the right color for the room, and when we were done I only had misgivings about two rooms. The quest to select the perfect dining room color was chronicled in the last post, and here I want to talk about the sunroom/former office/sleeping porch. It was pretty clear that the room hadn't been used very much by the previous owner, and in fact some of our neighbors told us that the owners before them had used it only to store plants and books - for the entire 50 years they occupied the house! Other than the addition of windows at some point in the 1960s or so, not much had changed from its days as a sleeping porch.





The excessive amount of lead paint in the room made it fairly unusable at first, so Chris worked on ripping out the walls and putting in new drywall. He also refinished the painted floors, taking them back to bare wood and putting down 3 coats of poly. At that point, we painted the brand new walls a nice, sunny shade of yellow (B.Moore, Delilah) with bright white trim. For a while it seemed like a fairly happy room, but then the yellow started to fade and become more egg-like (similar to the dining room), and the utter lack of storage started to get to us. In addition, I had set up my sewing table in the corner and had a hard time keeping Sophie out of it and my craft cabinet.

At that point, we planned to simply mount the craft cabinet on the wall and maybe look into repainting the walls a different color. But then inspiration hit, and we pulled out some of the old kitchen wall cabinets from the basement, cleaned them up, painted them white, and mounted them on a footer to form customized, built-in base cabinets to store games, movies, and office supplies. Next, we built a deep storage unit behind the couch and under the south bank of windows that serves as a hidden closet to store a variety of random things. The table surface of the storage unit will house overwintering plants and maybe some winter lettuce and herbs later this year. We also installed a ceiling fan, which added a much-needed, hard-wired overhead light, and we put in a few new outlets. Chris also put up some beautiful crown molding that helped to finish off the room. Oh, and last but not least, we painted the walls a happy teal color

True colors (I)

It's amazing what a difference the right wall color will do for a room. When we bought the house, our dining room was a lovely shade of Cheap Bordeaux with tasteful greenish gray trim. I couldn't wait to paint over that heinous mess, and in my rush I chose the *wrong* color. Yes, I replaced that horrible dark purple with an equally horrible, yet historically accurate, chalky yellow - a color that Benjamin Moore calls Concord Ivory. After a few months, I felt like I was living inside an old, hard-boiled egg, and I just couldn't take it any more. So, back to good old Benny Moore for a new shade, this time a pale green named Nantucket Green. It was certainly an improvement, but again over time it just felt wrong.

After about a year, I came to loathe that pale, pepto-like green, and decided to try one last time to get the right wall color for one of the most often-used rooms in our house. This time, I decided to go to Lowes, since I'd already wasted a bundle on Benjamin Moore, and I was inspired by a dining room I'd seen in the fall Crate and Barrel catalogue that had lovely burnt orange walls. It seems that my persistence has won out, because the resulting "copper glow" walls are exactly the right color for this room,  and they look great with the paint colors in the neighboring kitchen and living room. Plus, they kind of make you hungry when you're sitting in here, which I guess is a good characteristic for a dining room!

How our garden grows...

So, after almost a year of neglect, I've decided to take over the blogging duties. It's more in line with my interests than Chris's anyway, and I find myself with a little more "free" time than him these days (can't imagine why!). We have completed a number of projects that I need to catch up on here, but I think I'll start with the outside, and especially our efforts to grow as much of our own food as we can.

Over the fall, we re-configured and expanded on our existing veggie garden to make better use of the space. Once the veggie beds were laid out, we tackled the last "wild" corner of our property by cutting down several trees, including all the Rose of Sharon, and eradicating the wintercreeper that had taken over every spare inch of ground space. We also pruned back the existing black raspberry canes and trained them into three hills.

In the spring, we added a rhubarb and asparagus bed along the back fence, a watermelon/melon and potato bed along the side fence, and a large strawberry bed in the central area. We've had quite a bit of fruit already from the strawberry plants, and the kids love to go out and pick fresh raspberries every afternoon.

Back in the veggie garden, we got to work as soon as the ground was workable. We divided the three long beds up into smaller planting sections along the lines of the square-foot gardening plan. The south bed gets the most sun in early spring and becomes progressively shady as the trees fill out and summer comes on, so we focused on planting spring veggies here. We put in two sections of onion, some broccoli, lettuce, radish and two sections of peas. Things were looking really nice by mid-April, and we had our first home-grown salad by the end of the month.


We started on the rest of the garden in May, planting carrots, scallion, chard, bush and pole beans, daikon radish and two more rows of peas in the central bed, and potatoes, mid- and late-season corn, five varieties of tomatoes, red bell pepper and cucumbers in the north bed. Pumpkins, storage onions and indian corn went in the large west bed along the fence, as well as a few sunflowers and nasturium.





By June, most of the spring crops were harvested, and we prepped the bed for a second planting. We plan to put in a few bell pepper plants, and hopefully they'll get enough direct sun to flourish. All of our hot peppers are growing closer to the house, in one of the flower gardens along the driveway. We also have a couple of volunteer tomato plants from last year's volunteer tomato, some storage onions, and our herb garden planted up by the back door. Oh, and we discovered yet another volunteer tomato growing over by the new apple tree - we have no idea what kind it is, but it seems to be thriving! And speaking of apple, I forgot to mention that we put in a 5-year-old Macintosh along the north fence of our yard to replace an old, rotted pear tree that we'd had to cut down. We're planning to put in another tree, probably golden delicious, next spring. We'd also like to put in a few blueberry bushes, but we'll need to fiddle with soil acidity to get them to grow here. All in all, the edible portion of our landscape seems to be coming along nicely!

Summer is here...

Well, it took 8 months, but the 1st floor bathroom is fully functional. We have a shower (even the plumber said installing a "neo-angle" one-piece shower was tough). We have a toilet (the "superflush 3000"), sink, and yes, a heated tile floor. The color is called, no kidding, "funky fruit". Acknowledgements are in order...thanks Kev for the rough wiring, thanks dad for the source water plumbing... the plumber ran the drains, we did the rest--in spite of the plumber's misguided advice about how to run the fixture vents (yes, if in doubt, take them up to the attic, don't tie them into the main stack under the 2nd floor bathroom--good to know, now).

Of course, there's all of the outside stuff too. Stacey has some great flowers, and Henry has a new swingset. For those of you who ponder such things, putting one of those things together is much easier than it sounds.

A few new flower gardens and yes, tomatoes in pots adorn the back patio.

This time of year, the backyard is almost a green jungle tunnel. Note: the Oak-leaved hydrangea (foreground, right side) has to be ~35 years old...

Henry's new home away from home.

When we moved in, this monster grape-vine was eating the 50ft tall tree behind it. Now, it hasn't been "tamed", but it's growing at least a little less voraciously. Maybe next year we'll get grapes!

The new tree on the right is a crab-apple. This part of the yard was a funky smelling goldfish pond last summer.

The rasberry patch. If you like rasberry's, you'd better beat Henry to this corner otherwise you won't see any berries, let alone be able to pick any to eat.

Ho Ho Ho...

We have been home-owners 1 year and 8 days, but it feels like quite a bit more. There haven't been too many posts to this blog for the simple reason that every spare moment has been spent working on the house--and you know, it's starting to feel like home. 

Let's see...perhaps we should do this top to bottom. We tackled rewiring the SW quarter of the house, cutting into the old floor of the attic, getting rid of the old knob-and-tube and replacing it with new romex. 

On the second floor, we took the sunroom's walls back to studs, replaced with new drywall and new window trim. It took awhile to get the windows cleaned out and all the old paint sealed in...but it looks much better now--Henry's studio!

Back in September, Stacey took a 

few days off to scrape the hallway walls. Yes, I said scrape the walls! All of the old texture paint came off and was repainted...we have normal hall walls again...YAY! Both hall closets were also given a facelift and new shelf configurations. 

For those of you following the progression of things...you've seen Henry's room and the Playroom. Here is a picture of our room--finally finished.

Now we will proceed down stairs...and my what nice stairs they are! Stacey spent a few weeks stripping, then sanding, then staining, shellac-ing and waxing the stairs and landing this fall. See the finished project with my toes in it.

On the first floor, we re-painted the dining room "Nantucket" green. It looks good with a Christmas tree!

The first floor bathroom is still our largest "outstanding" project. The walls are back to lath and the floor is down wood--layers of vinyl are gone. Thanks to "Papa" Widga and Uncle Kevin for spending their Turkey day weekend running water lines and electrical! I met with the plumber yesterday and found that we'll probably need to "widen" the hole for the main waste stack in the foundation. That means cutting through two courses of brick around the old cast iron pipe--ouch. Stay tuned for how that works.

Finally, we head to the basement. First thing we notice is...MORE NEW STAIRS! Yep, the old ones had termite damage and some structural issues. The upper stairs were covered by vinyl-over-cracked-lead-paint. So we replaced all of them. That meant Chris spent an afternoon scratching his head over how to cut stringers--and surprisingly enough--got it right on the second try!

There is also a new door. The old one developed new cracks every time we opened and closed it. It also had this crazy steel strut that held the whole thing together--not ideal. For that matter, we also have new storm doors on both front and back. 

While the main punch of the stair project was to remove/replace the stairs, we also took the opportunity to tear out the old coal room. See how open the basement is now! The fewer the dark corners the better. 

I'll close out this blog entry with a tribute to the season. Like I said, we're settling in and the house is starting to feel like not just any home, but OUR home. The fireplace is warm, the kitchen welcoming, and (someday) the Sunday mornings lazy (waffle day as Henry would call it). 

...over the long summer

Soooo, it's been awhile since the blog has been updated. The reason for this is very simple...it has been a very busy summer.

As the summer warmed up, there were daily discoveries in the backyard. In addition to goldfish in the pond, we found that it was also irresistible to mating toads. Every night for a week the toads were chirping as loud as they could...at one point we counted 10 toads, each one was paired up. The squirrels are also entertaining--as long as we can keep them out of the bird feeders...










As for Henry...he's been going through a bit of a train phase...What started out as a fascination with one wagon, grew into multiples as we did more and more yardwork. Finally, he started stringing things together...up to five at a time with bungee cords!




















As for the house, we've chipping away at things.

On the inside, we have new curtains in Henry's room and playroom, new doors on the fireplace and a nicely finished mantle. The office has made it to the "damned close to being done" phase. We added some anti-heat film to the windows and have actually cleaned four! A bit more trim and 3 more windows...and it will be done!



Stacey has been working night and day to refinish the stairs, and both hall closets are "works in progress".












I have been up to the roof...seems that someone had the bright idea that the chimney was a good place to lash down a TV aerial--not so on a breezy day!









We've also been trying to get a handle on the yard...chopping out forests, hacking at stumps, digging holes...but now if you take a stroll--things look a little more tame.
The first obvious difference is that there are flowers EVERYWHERE! Then Stacey put in more! We've also started the process of reclaiming of the garden. Of course we had to remove the 3 story pile of brush first, but we've managed to put in a few tomatoes and peppers--and they're doing great.






















Stacey has built not one, but two brick patios. One behind the garage and the other near the back door. The one near the back door is really a piece of work...complete with "stub" for the grill, it wraps around a couple of flower beds and is an awfully nice place to enjoy a burger after the sun has sunk behind the trees.









While we haven't made it too far on painting the rest of the house, we have re-painted the front porch. New paint over the flaking leaded paint...and a bright green floor. It's nice to spend some evenings in the cool air on the swing.












And...I finally tackled the garage. We dusted off a bunch of old storm windows, dead gutters, and spiders...and sent a few hundred pounds of debris to the dump. After "lightly" power washing down the inside, it looks much better...but we still can't park the car inside. That will have to wait until we can move the mitre saw somewhere else.