Eastlake Lavender

Finally got around to painting the office. When we moved in this room had dingy walls with holes, rotten windows, old granny curtain rods and the nastiest carpet we'd ever seen.


I had originally intended on painting this room green. But I couldn't find a green I liked that wasn't too matchy-matchy with the bathroom, which is right next door. A trip to the Legion of Honor art museum inspired me to consider lavender.


DH did a lovely job installing some baseboard that matches what we've installed in the rest of the house. It sets off the wood floor beautifully.


I love the new color. It's perfect! I hung some linen curtains and the light filters through so nicely. I do plan on putting blinds underneath, but the lovely blinds I have now are just a tad too big...so I'll have to find something else.


There's a bit of thinking on furniture to be done in this room. I'm getting the corner table from my mom that goes with my grandpa's too-small desk which I'm going to refinish and re purpose into a sewing table. Either that or I'll make that my desk and use my current desk as the sewing table. Something. I need to find a way to store my enormous computer tower on the floor so it's not so in the way. And shelves...oh boy. I'm not sure what direction that will take, but a replacement of my mismatched particle board collection is in order. We need lots of storage, as we have lots of books and media that we like to store in this room.

This is the last room of the house that needed painting! I have some trim to finish, but other then that the painting of the interior is DONE!

More..and more.

It got cold! Or at least it did for a minute. Last night was the first night we didn't sleep with the windows open, and we were still chilly. This morning we turned on the heater for the first time since last winter. I was freezing!

But this morning as I sat on the front porch, drinking a piping hot cup of coffee, painting thoughtfully, as the breeze blew through to my bones...the wind chimes sang to me of autumn... and I decided that I minded not.

We are finished...with all but some touch-ups. The tape is off the windows. It looks gorgeous. I'm satisfied. Here are some more details:

Before:


After:


Before:


After:



And if you recall a previous post, you can see the porch is much improved...though the porch floor needs some work. We plan on tiling it with some nice rustic slate:



Finally some more time for gardening, and moving on to the next projects...of course! Stay tuned for our fall projects.

Ah fall....

Let there be light...

Some small details...

Before:

After:


Before:


After:

Another Busy Weekend

After a crazy week we departed into a crazy weekend. I came down with a nasty cold Thursday night and have been down with it all weekend. Unfortunately there was simply too much happening to really take any time to rest. I'm not sure if I just worked through it but I'm feeling a bit better today.

Saturday was my aunts memorial service and reception. That made for a busy day...sad too...but we tried to focus on celebrating her life. Hopefully the luck we've had as a family will turn now...just as summer is turning to fall.

Sunday we finished the second coat on the house. We are very close now...close to finishing that monstrous project! Only trim and touch-ups remain, which we will be working on over the next week and weekend. Finally! It looks great IMO. I'm in love with the new color.

Finally now that the painting is winding down I was able to spend a little time in the garden. I took a half day this morning to recover from seeing Gogol Bordello (my friends, if you are not yet in love with this band, then you simply must open your heart to them), which was FANTASTIC! The best show I've seen in ages. Anyhoo...this morning I felt better then I expected so got two of the beds planted. All the beds will get crops that will reportedly either produce in winter, or will overwinter nicely and produce in very early spring.

These beds got carrots, onions, sweet peas, beets and fava beans. I couldn't bear to rip out the snapdragons which I've read will overwinter.




Over the next week-ish, I'll be harvesting the peppers, tomatoes and sunflower seeds so that I can start working on the big beds which will get a bunch of cool crops.

I'm so pleased with the way the plants look against the new house color. This border bed is particularly pleasing to me right now with the mums coming into bloom. I just received about 100 bulbs which will be planted in various places, but several will go in this bed for some early spring color.



Anyways...this post is rather scattered in its stylings and its because I'm in a hurry...you see I only have a half day off and I must get to preparing to leave for work. Ick.

Cheers...

Before and After

I don't have the energy to say much. We painted our asses off this weekend, and even hired an out of work friend to help us yesterday (smartest thing we've done in a while). We finished all the priming and then did the entire first coat of paint. Unfortunately it will need a second coat, but such is life. That will go fast, and then we have to paint the trim and a few roof spots and we're done.

Before:


After:

Yay.

Priming and other endeavors

We had a 3 day weekend, with Friday off, so that we could join my family in sprinkling my dear Auntie's ashes. We embarked from Alameda and sprinkled her ashes just past the Golden Gate where her DH was laid to rest. Afterward we had a long and leisurely family dinner with drinks and it was a lovely day. Her official memorial is in two weeks.

Otherwise....we primed. Yes at long last some actual color is there to behold, albiet a couple of shades lighter then the topcoat will be. It looks lovely considering it's only prime....or maybe that's just because the surface it covered was so truly horrific.

We got the garage wall and half of the front of the house covered with the prime. It has to be cut in first of course, which is a bit time consuming. But we are JUICED now that the very slow and horrible parts of painting are over and we've reached the fun part! DH has band practice tonight so I will be finishing priming the windows and then tomorrow we'll try to knock out the rest of the house front...hopefully by midday saturday we'll be starting on the top coat. Could it be that we'd be done by the end of next weekend? (not counting the window trim /sigh)

We'd have gotten the entire front done had we not taken a much needed day off yesterday. I went to Faire as planned and it was quite fun as always. Great company and yummy beer, rum and foodies. I also scored some excellent loot - smelly soap, yummy teas, new perfume oils, a lovely picture for framing, and a new green ren skirt. I'd been eyeing green skirts for some time. I love my current costume which the lovely Seamstrix Art fashioned for me, but it's been some years now that I've been wearing it and I wanted to spice things up or have an alternative option to choose from, especially since in the last few years I attend more then one faire. The skirt I selected would look lovely as a new overskirt for my current costume, would work nicely as an underskirt for the belly dancing costume I'm putting together, and would also be versatile should I choose to create a new ren costume of a different flavor in the future - I've often thought of doing something either hunts-woman or celtic themed and the new skirt would work well for either.

I may attend again on the last weekend, depends on how things are going. But if I don't I cannot complain of being bereft of the joys of the shire.

Check!

Final coat on the eaves, gutters and roof of porch overhang - CHECK! We busted ass and got them finished over the last two days. There are some fascia that remains (easy compared to eaves) that requires being on the rooftop to do. So DH will be working on that tomorrow (I don't go on the roof, I don't like it). I'll be doing some touch ups today and believe it or not this means we can start with the house primer this weekend!! The house primer is tinted dark, just a shade or so lighter then the house paint, so even though it's primer, it will be a dramatic step. Overjoyed! The end almost seems in sight now. And of course I'm taking a day off this weekend...but whatever I deserve it, and I'm going to FAIRE! I *heart* faire. Huzzah!

Eave-il

Greetings bloglings...I'm afraid another weekend and come and gone. And what, you ask, do I have to show for it? Sadly, much less then I'd hoped. It does seem that everything takes quite longer then we plan for. The good news is that I've completed the first topcoat of paint on the eaves and gutters. The bad news is that the second coat is only about a quarter done, and we'd scheduled to have it done by the end of the weekend.

Further good news is that the second coat goes much faster then the first coat. Further bad news is that my right wrist has taken a large dump on me. It's been bothering me a little ever since last weekend when we used the sprayer. Something about holding the trigger constantly on that large vibrating tool (shuusshh...you guys are dirty, honestly) aggrivated my wrist. It hasn't been too bad over the last week, but Saturday after about 4 hours of painting I realized that I had a problem.

This latest development is very dissapointing. Not only did it slow my own progress significantly...the things I would normally do during "down time"...e.g. working on painting inside or playing video games...were off limits because they'd only aggrivate it further. After some resistance I went to the store and bought a carpal tunnel wrist brace so that I could try to get some more work done without making matters totally worse. I hate the idea of wearing the brace, I have this fear of becoming dependant on things like that...I know a certain someone like that. But enough of that, because no one really takes that kind of talk seriously anyhow.

It's still achey today and I'm a little worried about working (keyboard and mouse), but I've brought the darned brace to work and plan on treating it otherwise with advil and ice.

I'd like to close this morning with a wee poem:

Ode to my Stalker

Oh stalker, I hear of your passing by
I blame you not for your curiosity
I'm told of your waving and smiling
Enjoying the sight of our monstrosity

Why do you not stop for tea?
Your driving on I can't understand
Could it be that you truly fear
We'd put a paintbrush in your hand?

Realism bites

Okay, so I have created a schedule. Not my usual one where I assume we can get 5 times more stuff done then we actually can. This one is realistic, accounting for other things that are going on and how we never do anything as fast as I'd like. This schedule shows us finishing painting the house around October 12th.

I suppose that's okay, it's on the two of us and we only have weekends plus about 1.5hours to work most weeknights. But it's kind of discouraging. I'd hoped to get more done this year. I haven't even started my winter seedlings or prepped my beds for the winter crops. At this rate we won't get the front yard done this year for sure. Or the fence. Or most of the things on the list. So I'm trying to let go.

If we finish the paining by mid October, then I'm hoping we can handle the Master "suite" (for lack of a better word) by year end. That's the next most important section to be done. And if we can finish that, then I suppose I'll be satisfied and leave the other projects for another time.

Welcome to the Maskerade

So last weekend I woke up bright and early Saturday morning and masked everything. All the windows and doors. We had (as planned) purchased a small paint sprayer to prime the eaves with. We had to exchange it (not as planned) because apparantly we bought a model that will not spray latex paint. We also didn't get any further work done on Saturday mostly because I was trying to figure out how to use the damned thing and besides, poor DH was down for the count with food poisoning all that day (also not as planned).

Sunday he felt slightly better and we used the new sprayer to prime all the eaves and the ceiling of the porch. It worked quite well, contrary to horrific reviews we'd read on it. The thing with this little sprayer is that you MUST follow the directions and you MUST clean it periodically or no dice. It's pretty tiring to use however, my arms started to get very sore, and my right wrist hasn't felt quite right since, especially when using a computer mouse.

As you can see above, even the prime is an improvement over the horrific, peeling, rotten mauve that was accosting my eye-balls previously. I don't believe we'll use the sprayer to to the top coat however. Despite the success of the priming experience, the extensive masking and cleaning that is involved with using the sprayer is almost not worth it IMO. It served its purpose and the coat of prime got up in all the little cracks of the eaves where the oreo cookies were coming out.

I've already begun on the top coat as well...by hand. We're going with white at DH's insistance, though I kind of think that a dark chocolate brown on the gutters would be nicer. We'll see how it goes. Unfortunately it is clear already that we'll need two coats of the paint despite the prime underneath. /sigh. I swear to you this paint job will never be done. Ever.

In other fronts: last week on vacation Gypsy Junk and I canned something like 9 pounds of my fresh grown tomatoes from my garden. We came out with just under 6 jars (see above) and it was good fun.

It's not fun to be back at work. I have a new project which will be very challenging and we are going through the usual (for this year) shakeups with the latest development being a new CEO.

The worst of all news, which most of you who read here already know, is that my darling Auntie died Sunday from brain/lung cancer. I've been terribly sad, and now I'm feeling rather numb. Oh yes, another funeral to plan for our family. Far more then our fair share IMO. She was such a really neat person too...tons of class and compassion and intelligence and strength. She had a very interesting history, perhaps I'll speak more of it here later. I hope that somewhere in the great beyond she and my dad are sharing a bottle of port together.

Ouchie

I'm sore from all this painty work. The rule of painting the outside of a house is: soffets and facia (eaves and the little strips along the roof) first, then cut in the house color (around the windows, base and eaves), then paint the house color, then do the rest of the trim last. So we started with priming the eaves, with the plan of following that with painting the eaves with the top coat, then moving on. However I'm running into an issue already. Some of our eaves are rotten in places that you replace when you replace the roof, which we aren't doing until after Uncle Sam pays us next year. And our roof is okay for now but was laid improperly on top of several old layers of rotten roof. So where the edge of the eave meets the gutter is an ugly dirty gap that isn't supposed to be there, and the back of the gutter and the front of the eave needs to be painted there. And when you run the brush along it, lots of junk that looks like Oreo cookies falls out...gets in your hair, your freshly spread paint, and on the brush. It's super icky and not at all good.

So the solution? I told DH that I want to spray the eaves instead of hand painting them. We were leaning away from spraying because we've been told by experts that it's not the best method for stucco (doesn't get the paint in the texture well enough), plus you have to worry about masking things better, getting paint on your roof, your car, your neighbor's car etc. So our plan is to borrow a paint sprayer this weekend from a friend, and spray the eaves and the eaves only. We will still handpaint the gutters (to save the roof from overspray) and the trim, and will still roll the house. I think this will solve the icky oreo cookie gutter problem.

I'm a little nervous about using the sprayer. I have a feeling this is going to be something that I make DH do...don't look at me that way, he'll enjoy it! I'll take care of the masking of the windows and maybe start cutting in or priming trim while he's busy spraying. :D

Is it ever gonna be done? Like, ever? Ever?

"I'm not dead yet!....

...I think I'll go for a walk!" That's the story with this plant, if you recall from a previous post, we had cut down this diseased bush with the intention of figuring out a way to remove it's stump so we could plant something different there. However, the plant feels happy and has other ideas. It is bringing forth new life from the wreckage. Who am I to argue with mother nature? The new growth is healthy and non-diseased thus far.



The camellia stump has shown no such come back, which is good because I have plans for that spot, so that spot is still coming out. And when I get bids for some random things I'd like done in the yard, removing that stump will be one of the things.

The other thing (or shall I say person) that is not dead yet is, well, me. I'm exhausted! We are both feeling it, but mostly me ;). We have finished most of the prep: Sprayed, scraped and sanded the entire house; washed the whole house down and painted it with peel stop primer. Now we are doing the last of the prep. Sanding here and there, restoring rotten window trim, fixing the broken porch railing, removing fixtures...etc. before we start priming. We bought the paint and primer today. The paint store guy tinted our primer dark enough that we'll only have to do one coat of paint over it (hopefully). Here's a little picture of the front as of today. Note the color patch where I 'marked my territory', since another neighbor is painting and I didn't feel like doing the color waiting game again.

Numerous neighbors have come up to tell us how rad we are and how they've been watching us work our asses off and are very impressed. Everyone so far loves the color choice. I got into a long conversation with one neighbor about how ugly the house is during the prep phase and it led to a discussion of yards wherein I apologized for how hideous our yard is and explained that we'll be ripping it out and replacing it with a garden soon. The lady got all excited and actually high-fived me and said they were planning to do the same, which was kind of nice to hear.

Anyhoo - I suppose I should be doing stuff...so off I go!

Cheerio mateys, happy Labor Day!

Progress

We've been working our little asses off prepping the house. We've finally finished the scraping and sanding which is the hardest work. So of course it finally cooled off today! I must say, DH is a mad dog! He barely takes breaks even when working in the hot sun. What a stud! I'm lucky to have such a hard workin' hubby. Today should be easier...caulking, patching and painting peel stop primer. A nice rest from the back breaking work of scraping and sanding peeling eaves!

So I decided since we won't be working as hard today, that I might as well add another project. We moved half the furniture out of our bedroom last night and I've already patched and sanded everything in there. I need to finish ripping out the baseboard, wash the walls, and then prime with mildew resistant primer (this is where we had the mold problems in the winter time!). I figure on doing that over the next couple of evenings, after which I can paint that room. So outside during the days, and bedroom at night. Projects! Once that's all done we'll only have the office, the hallway and the two little bathrooms to be painted and we'll be DONE painting! I wonder if I can finish it all in the next couple of months? That would be nice.

Okay, enough dallying...off to work!

Post 2 - "The Bad and the Ugly"

I thought I'd share a little taste of the pain of prepping our house to paint. This doesn't even show the walls! It's pretty brutal. Suffice it to say, none of the previous paint jobs were done properly and we are paying for it...especially in this heat.






But when all is said and done, hopefully we'll have a nice little green cottage...a non-craftsman version of this beauty. (BTW the neighbor's went with light green, the SAME light green as our light green patch that I showed in a previous post in fact! It looks fabulous, but we are happy just the same as we kinda like the loden green better).



OMG - I don't think we're ever gonna finish. And when we're done, moving on to the front yard before the rains start. I've got a good game plan in mind and have been googe-image searching cottage gardens and xerioscaping and driving/walking around looking at other yards. I have it pretty figured out. I think I'm gonna hire someone to do some of this shit though. We have so much to do! I don't feel like digging up the lawn myself, or having poor Joe replace the water main with copper (we figure, while the yard is dug up, might as well). So much work!

Hmmmmm.....

Which green to pick? We've determined either option is sufficiently different from our neighbors' greens to go with. Right now we are leaning towards the darker color "Villita" which is kind of a loden green. Keep in mind all trim will be white. The other color, "Lemongrass" is lovely but I'm concerned it might look a little washed out once it's on the whole house. DH actually likes the darker one too and is happy to go with it...we are just a little nervous I guess! It's pretty dark...though I know outdoor paint looks lighter once its all on there. My friend suggested, and I agree, that the darker color is very Oakland/Berkeley cottage...and would go nicely with the type of garden we are planning for the front. Any and all opinions are welcome.

Vacation begins on Friday! I swear that I'm as excited for this vacation as I have been for either of our European jaunts. We are starting off with a weekend of camping with friends (many thanks to the beauteous Gypsy Junk for watching my doggie doos). Then we return for a day, then we are off to Monterey and Carmel for a two day anniversary trip (thanks here to the beauteous Jenny for the doggie duty). Other then that we plan on working on the house. A Stay-cation. I'm sooooo excited. Did I mention I was excited? If we manage to get all the prep and priming done by the end of our vacation I'll be pleased. Then we can paint the following weekend.

In closing, here's a lovely shot of my hubby-kins with miss Bendeja, looking proper.

Bloom Sequence

I love sunflowers! Next year I'm gonna plant way more of them, and this time in places that get more sun. I have quite a few more that are blooming in slow motion because they don't get enough. Not much else to report. Very tired this week. I've been staying up later then normal getting my Olympics fix. I'm a "Phelps Phan" like the chick on the stupid wireless phone commercial! Anyhoo....this weekend will be devoted mostly to prepping the house for painting. We are back on the green tip...despite it all. Our next door neighbor told us he was planning on re-painting his house soon and I put up a bunch of color chips and Joe still likes the two green options best - even better then tan, which is what I expected him to like! So now it's between a nice Loden green and a lightish green called "lemongrass". White trim...despite some rather vocal advice we've had to the contrary. We like the clean and crisp look of white trim.

Maybe I'll have an official color decision to report next week. Or pictures of paint swatches or something. Until then...

Best Laid Plans

Our best laid plans for the outside paint color on our house have gone awry, I'm afraid. I was so pleased that we'd arrived at the conclusion of sagey-green with white trim...something we could actually both agree on! (he likes grey, I like red, or chocolate brown or yellowy-beige). Anyhoo, we were in the market yesterday when we heard a chipper "hullo, neighbor" and thus we met Michelle. Neighbor of two doors down, wife to Jason (who happens to be the guitarist for the Dance-Hall Crashers) and mother to two lovely tow-head girls. She was quite nice but in the course of our conversation we learned that she too was planning on house-painting, and that she too had sagey-green in mind. I suppose it wouldn't matter so much if the house in between us wasn't already green with white trim (a spearaminty-green). Three houses in a row painted green with white trim might just be too much. /sigh.

So now we are trying to think of other options that we'll find mutually pleasing. The current winner is a rich tan with white trim. We both like it...it would look good. The only problem is, it would totally match our living room! Would that be wierd, to have the outside of the house and the living area matching? Heh. Almost like an optical illusion! We must choose soon...because the windows are in (most of them). And they draw attention to the fact that our house is a dirty peach with peeling mauve trim (UGH, wtf was grandma thinking??).

The picture at the top of this post is the before of the front window. Here is the after. I must say I'm pretty pleased.

I'm taking a week off in August for camping, and then working on the house. Perhaps we'll accomplish the painting that week? In the meantime there's plenty to do inside.