Sleep Tight: The Bedrooms

While our style is a bit subdued in the rest of the house, we cut loose color-wise in the bedrooms. My husband picked the color for our bedroom walls . . . .

. . . .  and Will picked the color for his bedroom. And people think that I use color liberally! Ha! 

A funny story: When Bill suggested, one hot summer morning, that we should paint Will's bedroom, I went along with the idea; I was eager to check that task off our to-do list. The problem was, it was very hot that day. So While Bill went in to start painting, I had a brilliant idea: I would paint naked! It was that hot! So I took off all my clothes and sauntered into Will's room, where Bill was busily rolling paint onto the walls. And, guess what? Bill was naked! He had the same idea I had. Well, you know, people do say that Bill and I work well together!! They don't know the  half of it.....

Pallet Wood Redo In the Bathroom

When it came time to redo our bathroom floor and counter top, we turned to our tried-and-true material: wood. We chose pallet wood - hard wood from pallets. We covered the floor and counter top with beautiful, warm wood. We made our own wood putty by combining sawdust - from the same wood - and wood glue. For the finish, we used tung oil - another one of our favorites because it's a natural product and easy to use.

When it came time to sand the wood, we fired up two sanders and went at it in a marathon session! We were covered in sawdust!! 

These last two photos show Bill and I taking a breather - literally: we had to exit the bathroom to get our breath back! 

Daisy Border

My sewing room has been through m any changes in the past seven years. After we painted the walls two-toned green - with two colors of paint in the same roller pan - I wanted a trim  between the lateral green striped effect on the top part of the wall and the scumbled green on the bottom of the wall. I was not happy with my first attempt to create a border - see photo; that's orange paint applied with a sponge cut in a rough square. At least I had some sort of border, though, right? I eventually decided I wanted a more structured design for a border/trim. So I scanned a real flower from our garden, dropped the scan into a Word Doc, then added a black border around the flower. I printed up a batch of these so I could glue them on the wall....

Trouble was, I had to cover up those ugly orange squares first. For this, I turned to my trusty old friend, brown wrapping paper. I cut the brown paper into strips, then glued it on the wall where I wanted the border to be. Then I glued the flowery squares over the brown paper.

PS: I love working with wallpaper paste; it's fun and easy to use.

Let There Be Light

We bought and moved into this house in the winter. The yard and environs were as yet unexplored when we moved in because of the deep snow that fell the same week we signed papers to buy this house. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered there were windows on the north side of the basement one day when I could finally get out and walk the perimeter of the house.

I was very excited about this discovery and made immediate plans to uncover those windows.
The west  half of our basement was very dark; I knew those windows were invaluable in the scheme of things. 

So while my husband worked to cover the old paneling with barn wood, I took hammer in hand and . . . . . broke through to those heretofore hidden windows. 

As soon as I saw daylight streaming through the first hole I created I knew I was on the right track: 

Bill added some nice trim to our 'new' windows.

What a gift! The once-dark ping pong room was transformed by the uncovering of those two windows.

Partition Wall with a Secret

My husband Bill worked tirelessly to put barn wood up on the bottom half of the west side of our two-room basement - he garnered the wood from an old barn, brought it home in his truck, de-nailed it, planed it, and put it on the wall. 

The photo above shows the old paneling in the ping pong room, looking east into the other half of the basement.

Once the barn wood was installed in the  ping pong room, it was time for a less strenuous project, so we opted to put a partition wall in the other room of the basement, using wood left over from the wall project. The new wall hides the utilities - the water softener and the hot water tank, etc. 

The basement has gone through many changes. The photo above represents how the basement looks at this writing. The partition wall looks fabulous - a vast improvement over the view before we installed that wall. And, oh, did I mention that this half-wall holds a secret?

Ah! Storage!! We thought to add storage to the back of that wall. Whoo hoo! Storage!!!!

PS: Look for this area of the basement in future posts; I hope to share the different stages in the development of the east room of the basement. I'll give you a hint: I now refer to that half of the basement as 'my sewing room.

Good Morning, Glory

After Bill moved some mulch - at our last home, on Church Street - morning glories started to grow where he dumped that mulch. So I decided to move some of those new plants to various parts of the yard. I even put some wires on the utility pole out by the curb so the morning glory vines could climb it. We had morning-glory-filled trellises everywhere, too. 

Of course we had other flowers in our yard, too.....

But the morning glories were the show-stopper. Total strangers would round the corner in their car, stop and comment about our yard.

That's no stranger: That's Mike admiring the flowers with my husband Bill.in our side yard on Church Street.

And there are some more flowers - my parents, Bed and Etty, er, I mean Ed and Betty.

Yes, we were a bit crazed when it came to the whole morning glory thing. We had fun with it. 

And we're not the only ones who got into it: I mentioned, earlier in this post, that people would stop and comment about our yard. People would also ask me where I got those morning glory seeds, and I would assure them that they were normal, garden-variety (!) seeds. We even had one guy stop mid-corner to ask if he could have some of the seeds; so we gave him some. 

But here's the thing: It didn't occur to me to tell people that I put wires on the utility pole. In fact, it wasn't till some years after we moved from that Church Street home that I realized I should have told those people that - told them that those plants had help climbing that pole. Picture it: That poor man who got seeds from us goes home and plants those seeds . . . .  and they don't climb for him like they did for us. 

And one more story: The first year we had morning glories everywhere in that yard, I feared the electric company would have a problem with us growing vines up their pole. Well, I needn't have worried: The electric workers stopped by and complimented us on our garden, then asked if they could help us get the vines off the poles! God is good . . . . .

Photo Display

The library in our town used to allow us to make copies for free - up to 10 copies a day for free. We lived across from the library for six years. I would drop photos into a Word Doc,  then print them at the library. Dropping them into a Word doc allowed me to re-size and crop the photos. The copier at the library only made black and white prints, but that was OK with me; I like B&W photography. 

After I found some metal picture frames at a yard sale, I tried to find a way to display photos so that I could change them out willy-nilly when I tired of a set of photos.

I painted some 1x2 boards and we arranged them on the wall so that we could trap the picture frames between the boards. This worked really well . . . . except that the frames were hard to get in and out of their positions between the boards. The interchangeable aspect of this display became a moot point, though, when we opted to put a pass-through in this wall; I never did get the opportunity to change out the initial set of photos! I would definitely try something like this again. It is an effective way to display photos. But if I tried this again, I would find an easier way to attach the photos to the wall. I'm just sayin' . . . .

For newer versions of photo displays, click on the link below. 

A huge photo display