Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Summer Scrapin'

Stairs. This is one of our last interior projects; one that I have been really successful in procrastinating. (there are a few more that I'm earning gold stars in the procrastination category too but those are for another blog post) Sometime last summer, I thought, why don't I hire someone to deal with the stairs and painting them? But then we looked at them a little closer and figured we needed to do some work like attach some trim, fill in some holes and gaps before we could have someone paint things. We didn't (don't) want to get carried away and pay someone to caulk. The only reason I'm entertaining the idea of hiring a painter at all is that this is really detailed work and I don't think I have the patience nor tenacity to do this project.

So, that brings us to today-well--really this past weekend. Justin got super into the idea of scraping off old paint from the stringers on Saturday morning. I could have helped but I didn't. On Sunday, he picked up where he left off and then sanded down the stringers and risers to prep for paint. I did my part by contacting a painter for an estimate. We still have a few more things to sand down and are waiting for a new tool that Justin procured from the internet to help him get into the corners. Once the wood is prepped, we have to add some new trim to some areas and caulk and fill all of the holes (my job).

Here are the stairs with the stringers scraped of paint:

Justin sands the risers:

Oh, and another project that we did about a month ago that I never reported on: tool organization in the garage. In the spirit of reorganization and making more room for an automobile to fit in this garage, we abandoned the can-o-tools for this homemade hanging rack.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Gardening News

Justin and I have been busy in the garden, taking advantage of our warm summery weekends and not-so-warm, dreary weekdays. We've nearly planted all of our crops and have been harvesting assorted greens (chard, spinach & lettuce) and radishes for about a month now. This is the first year I've successfully planted multiple rotations of radishes. We're on our third rotation and I'm out of seeds so I guess that's all until fall.

Peas, tomatoes and peppers (and some sad looking garlic that wintered over). We each ate a single pea pod this evening--they are just coming in. These babies aren't very tall but they have quite a batch of incoming pods.

My grove of greens: spinach and lettuce. Behind are the sprouts of pickling cukes and squash. In between is the third crop of radishes, just peaking through.

Here's the health-food section: chard, kale, beets and parsnips. Only the parsnips have a ways to go. Everything else is ready to go. Believe it or not, we've probably had a half-dozen salads with the chard already. The beans in the background are just getting their second leaves.

Here's a sweet little pocket of the garden: poppy and lupine

Lots of stuff is in bloom and we're starting to get little vignettes of plants and flowers coming in. It's fun to watch and rearrange certain items in my head (and some day in the yard as well).