The Return of the Photo Wall

Readers who have been around awhile may remember that not too long after moving in, we hung an art collage in the rec room. Then we reorganized around a new piece. And painted the rec room.

For the last year an a half, the art intended for this wall has sat in a pile on the floor. Because we are nothing if not timely. ; )

This weekend, I decided to Do Something about that and got the layout determined and the pieces hung. Total time? Less than 2 hours, which includes the time for the 3M adhesive to cure. I love, love, love the result.

They're Baaaaack

You know what's lots of fun? Washing dishes in the sink and seeing a scorpion under the dish drainer.

Yes.

A scorpion.

In my sink.

I squawked.

And then, like any good blogger I grabbed my camera and snapped some pictures for proof.


That particular fellow was washed down the drain (followed by lots of water, plus more for good measure). In the couple of weeks since there has not been a repeat. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Painting The Bedroom Green

Remember this green? It finally made it onto the walls this weekend courtesy of a dear friend who came into town and volunteered to help paint.

Ready to Sew

Last year we received some furniture from my grandmother. She was downsizing her house and was adamant that I be the one to receive her sewing machine and cabinet. So we hired a moving truck and last May, found ourselves with a whole lot of new-to-us furniture and one absolutely gorgeous sewing cabinet.

Well, what with studying for the PE exam and then catching up on the backlog that created, I haven't had a chance to touch it. Joining a local quilt guild has been a kick in the pants to make sewing a regular part of my life.

So, the other weekend, I finally fixed the cabinet (one of the stops had slipped forward and wasn't letting the shelf come fully forward), and got everything plugged in and set up.

Design Wall!

I've been pondering a larger design wall for ages. So when a guildmate offered me some white flannel at a very good price I said "Yes, Please!" and took myself off to Lowes to get some foam insulation boards. Some cutting and ironing and stapling and screwing into the wall later, I have a very nice, very large design wall!

As a comparison, here is the before with my old design "wall":

Scotland Isle

While at Home Depot this weekend, picking up stain for the deck, I took a detour to look at paint colors. Long story short, I think I have found the color for the guest room! Scotland Isle by Behr. It's a gorgeous light-but-not-pastel, olive-but-not-dreary green. Dreamy.

(Note: This photo was taken while wet, it actually dries up darker. More olive, less Easter.)

Feeding and Care of The Deck

Decks require lots of love. Pressure washing, sanding, staining. Goodbye leisurely weekend. Which is why, last year, while I was studying, the deck did not get refinished. Which was fine, a well treated deck should be able to go two years between finishings. However, that meant that the deck was looking pretty well beat up by this spring. The railings though, were still holding their own.

Triumphant

Three years ago, the hubby and I stood in our (soon to be) house with our Realtor, poking into closets and falling in love with the amazing kitchen and gorgeous trees. And when we got to the rec room I took one look at the teal and brown paint and said "That's got to go".

And yet, we never could quite decide what to replace it with. So it stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

The filing bench prompted us to pick a paint color. But still. No forward motion.

Enter A.

Patio Love

In June, we will have been in the house for 3 years. Every summer past, I've wished we had a patio set to read at, eat dinner at, grill on, and generally enjoy our awesome deck. This year, the hubby and I decided to finally go for it. I'm thrilled to have it arrive before Memorial Day (my goal) and tickled pink to have a spot for outdoor living. Between that and our sunroom, I'm all set for sunny places to work on my handwork or lounge with a book.

Southern Devil Scorpions

The other night I ran downstairs to get a refill on my water. Pitter patter over to the table to rifle through mail. Pitter patter over to the island to poke at dishes. Pitter patter over to the fri--wait, what?!

There, sitting at my feet, just in front of the fridge was yet. another. scorpion.

This time, however, I had a plan. So after yalping for the hubby, I grabbed a mason jar, hovered it in the air over the wee beastie, and then handed it off to my fearless hubby while I directed instead.

After a fearless jar capturing, cardboard flipping feat, we had one tiny scorpion in a jar.

Step two: find someone to ID the thing. Only, perhaps I should have actually researched this part in advance since the Department of Agriculture (my best guess) has a barely there web presence. Instead I turned to facebook where Rebecca of Resplendent Beauty pointed me towards our County Extension Office.

A very nice gentleman called in response to my email. Boiled down to essentials the call went something like this:

CE Man: Scorpions?
Me: Yes.
CE Man: Certain area of town?
Me: Yes.
CE Man: We see a lot of them there. They are called "Southern Devil" scorpions and are no more harmful than bees. Your cats will be fine.
Me: Um, but we still have scorpions. IN THE HOUSE.
CE Man: Oh, you want to get rid of them?
Me: ...Yes.
CE Man: Just pick up something with permetharin (p-e-r-m-e-t-h-a-r-i-n) in it and spray around your foundation. If you want to use it indoors, make sure to get something marked for indoor use.

I could have hugged him.

It's The Little Things That Make a House a Home

Years ago, when I was a broke grad student with an etsy shop and way too much free time on my hands, I would window shop on etsy and plan my dream house. I never picked out big things--furniture or bedding. It was always the details. Napkins, vases, artwork. Dishes and tablecloths were about as big as I ever dreamed. It was at that point, I think, when the seed of wanting to streamline was planted.

As the oft quoted phrase goes:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”
-- William Morris

Fail

So, child locks. Turns out they don't last forever. Especially not when you install them on a door that is just a wee bit too small for them to fit properly and you have to pull on the lock to get the door to close.

Still, two years isn't a bad run.

Happy Buds

This tree is always the first of our trees to bloom and, therefore, is one of my favorites. While winter is busy saying "YAY COLD!", this tree is busy thumbing its nose. I love it.

Still, it seemed like the buds opened earlier this year than they had before (which makes sense, this winter has been unseasonably warm), so I went back to check.

Taming the Paper Beast

Before we moved into this house, I took it upon myself to tackle our files. I shreded and sorted and organized and filed like there was no tomorrow. And what emerged was a two drawer filing cabinet and one wood crate filled very neatly with a rainbow of hanging file folders. A few months later we moved and the hubby and I talked about buying a real filing cabinet. One which would hold all of our paperwork. Only...the hubby didn't really want to spend the money. So we waited. And while we waited all of our files have been going into "The Box". As you can imagine, 2.5 years of bank statements, bills, and other miscellaneous "important should file" stuff makes quite a stack and our little banker's box was overflowing. (This is clearly a problem because it disturbs the all important geological layering method of sorting.)

Labeled (At Last)

So, sometime about eighteen months ago or so...I found some chalkboard label paper on super discount clearance at the local craft store. Two full sheets for a couple of dollars. This was when the internet (or my corners of it anyway) were absolutely drowning in chalkboard labels and paint. If it stood still, it should be chalkboarded. I bought the set with the idea of making labels for our kitchen canisters. I doodled all sorts of awesome shapes before I realized that our canisters have big. honking. latches. Which means that on the smallest canisters, you have very little or no room between the latch and the base of the canister.

Good-bye dreams of swhooping labels.

I set it aside figuring I would come up with something brilliant. (Cue the Jeopardy theme music)

I hadn't quite gotten back to it when I decided to pick up an additional canister for instant grits. Unfortunately, our canisters were no longer being sold individually, so to get more we ended up buying an entire second set. Which is fine as we were easily able to fill them, but now we actually needed labels to know what was in them. Labels which we could change since not everything might be an always and forever staple.

Over the weekend I broke out the label paper and got to work. And strangely enough, you know what worked best? Plain rectangles. No frills or echoing or fancy shapes. Le sigh.

18 months and way too much overthinking later, we have labeled canisters. Hooray!

Purple and Brown?

You may remember our quest for a color scheme for the rec room. It's still going strong (apparently I have no idea how to decorate around large patterned objects, lesson learned) but I think we may have turned a corner. I was recently turned on to a color palette generator tool which is absolutely brilliant and helped me realize that the couch is actually a very brown-y purple. And it's starting to pull together for me. I'm thinking more along the lines of the "dull" palette above. Maybe do a chair rail around the room with the lightest of the browns above, the second to darkest below, with plum on the accent wall. With sage green accents and tiny pops of oranges like the ones shown in the "vibrant" scheme.

This feels more "right" than anything we've dreamed up so far. : ) AND it answers the question of what to do for throw pillows on the couch--sage green!

So naturally, I've been poking around Etsy to see what sort of art would work with this scheme.

Sunny Days

It seems like everytime I post pictures of our sunroom I get at least one comment along the following lines:

If I had a room like that I would live in it.

When we put in the offer on the house we knew we loved it. We loved the kitchen. The trees. The gorgeous sun room. The "rural" feel of an undeveloped woods behind us and the suburban convenience of a grocery store just 2 miles up the road. The brick exterior. The lots and lots of windows. The whirpool tub in the master bath. But we also knew something else--the house was lots bigger than what we really needed (or truth be told had wanted).

Furniture Arranging

The hubby and I took advantage of the long weekend last weekend to rearrange our new furniture. We started in the living room. The picture above shows the view from the "study", looking into the living room. You can see the sunroom in the back.

The one below is looking back into the study, from about 2/3 of the way through the room and shows the very pink couch that was once at a sorority house. It needs covering. Badly. That pink squarish thing in the corner between the two couches is an ottoman.

It's Begun!

A few months ago, I told you about my grandmother's decision to sell her house and the plans for some of the furniture to come our way. Well the sale of her house closed last week and the furniture arrived here on Monday. It's a quite the hodge-podge because, as these things are wont to do, it grew. First it expanded to include additional furniture that no one else wanted/needed. Then, because some of my grandma's furniture was moving to my parents' house, they decided to add a few of their older items.

Long story short, the hubby and I feel like bandits. Furniture bandits with furry accomplices. (The cats, for the record, DID NOT LIKE the movers to the tune of opening a bathroom cabinet and staying in there shaking until they left. They did, however, like the new furniture and all the flies that came in with the furniture.)

Right now, things are just strewn here and there, roughly in the right rooms. We plan to spend some time this weekend to start unpacking, rearranging, and taking stock of which items need to be repaired. (There was pre-move damage to some things). So, let's start with some before pictures.

Spring Sprucing

I love our house this time of year. From March to the end of April we have Things That Bloom. Though certainly not due to our efforts, I still love to enjoy them. Angles like the one above make me feel like we live in some secluded garden.

And for a brief bit of time, even the side of the house gets it's turn in the spotlight.