Farmer Laura

Did the groundhog see his shadow this year? I think so and now six weeks later, Seattle is enjoying temperatures that are pretty ideal for kicking off the planting season. I should mention that I kicked off the planting season over a month ago indoors with grow light and heating pad and today, the seedlings are all of an inch tall and really spindly. Something is not right with my indoor garden. Let's hope the seeds I planted yesterday fair a little better. If so, I'll have baby lettuce, spinach, radishes, beets, kale, chard, peas and parsnips poking out in another week or so.

On to the fun part

Our heavily unused second bedroom on the second floor has undergone a bit of a makeover over the last few weeks. It started out as a playroom for the cats, complete with a shredded cat tree. Then, when Justin and I put the king-sized bed in our bedroom, we relocated our queen bed into this room and got rid of the mishmash of cat and craft and couch. But the room lacked trim and the closet was missing doors and an organization scheme. Now it has trim, new paint and a snazzy closet. We put the finishing touches on the paint this weekend and moved all of the furnishings back into the room today, freeing the hallway from the jumble.

Here is the closet, complete with our bargain bi-folds and a homemade closet system.

We have a table for sewing and crafts on the left side of the closet that I'm hoping to put to use soon for curtain and pillow making.

Here's a rare shot of me working. Seriously, I do stuff but I'm also the historian so I'm usually the one behind the camera capturing the moment.

I didn't get any action shots of us painting the walls but the room is small enough that the paint went on pretty quickly and we were done in a day. We've switched to Rodda paint from Valspar, mostly because I had a 2-for-1 coupon at Rodda. But after using it in the master bedroom, I was pleased enough with the coverage to go back. It's a little spendy (~$45/gal) without the coupon but very affordable at 1/2 price.

Here's the room all painted out and put back together:

From a different angle:

So, now we are onto the fun part of picking out some curtains and a duvet and some colorful accents. I think I am going to go with a dark blue and purple. The walls are a light gray that leans to the blue side of the spectrum. I had thought the walls would dry a little lighter but you get what you get. I like it though. I think it will make the room look brighter which is important since that window faces north. We're unlikely to have the blinds open much since the view is the house next door with its peeling paint and other maintenance issues.

Just for fun...

We've been working on finished the trim in the guest bedroom upstairs. We are rounding 3rd on that project. I don't have any photos for you of the trim, but I have been hard a work figuring out what the third bedroom should look like when we're finished with it. I've been playing around with Olioboard and here's what I've come up with (and don't worry, I don't love that curtain pattern...it's just all I could find in the approximately correct color) :

I'm really only set on the shag purple rug since I already own it. The bed, which I didn't feature in the montage is black and a bit contemporary. Everything else would be need to be acquired. I'm kind of excited about the plum-turquoise-lime green combination but I have some other ideas up my sleeve: red-pink-plum, orange-lime green-plum, and plum-navy. I'm thinking all of these would have a backdrop of white walls...and I'm leaning toward a white that has a drop of gray in it.

Anyway, let me know if you think this is too much or if you have any other great ideas for incorporating a purple shag rug into my decor.

Mr. P

It's been about 6 weeks now since P-Kitty moved in and he's starting to make himself at home. And Tink is starting to tolerate him. We've even seen them chase each other around a few time for play. Pongo doesn't like to be picked up or petted much but he's frequently up for chasing round and rolly objects from one end of the house to the other.

Here are our two cutie-pies almost snuggled up together. This is actually a huge improvement from the first three weeks of cohabitation.

In the Nook

Every time we get ready to wrap up a project, Justin and I love to indulge each other with our mental "to-do" list to try and come to an agreement on the next project. For the past 5 or 6 months, I've been saying my preferred next project is the shelving in the office. And, for the past 5 or 6 months, we've worked on something else. But this month, my project prevailed. I think 2011 is going to be a good year.

There were a few hitches to this seemingly simple project. First off, we had some dimensioning issues but those were luckily solved with 5'x5' pieces of plywood. Second off, our oven broke in the middle of this project. You don't need to use your oven for any part of this project, other than for fixing dinner. But, that is exactly what we were doing the evening that I applied the first coat of stain to the shelves. We didn't realize this at the time, but the petroleum fumes from the oil-based stain dispersed throughout the house and our gas range started combusting them. It didn't cause a fire or anything other than a noxious smell, but we did have to finish cooking our dinner in the microwave and we spent the next day puzzling over what went wrong with our oven. It wasn't until two days later when we called the appliance repairman that we got our first clue about the paint fumes. So, bottom line, don't use oil-based paints inside unless you can open all of the windows and ventilate the space well.

Okay, onto the shelves.

Here's an action shot of Justin installing the cleats.

I've been checking out office organizing systems here and there for the past few months, anticipating we'd be doing the project. It's really fun to get a bunch of boxes and move all of your disorganized stuff into its new home. The last time I got an organizational bee in my bonnet, it was 15 months ago so I haven't had this kind of fun for a while.

Here's the view of the new shelves holding up our important (and not so important) stuff.

We were able to get the printer off the counter and the bulletin board hung and all of the cords tacked up neatly under the counter. I'm going to keep my eye out for a nice large colorful print to frame and hang on the wall adjacent to these shelves...there's a nice big open wall to fill.

And a belated happy New Year!

We rang in 2011 with barely a jingle, sorry to say. I was laid up on the couch with a truly unpleasant cold. But, our 2011 has been pretty productive nonetheless. We have been working on a bunch of odds and ends. Starting off the new year, we got back into our painting clothes and finished installing and painting all of the trim in our master bedroom. Now our closet is really complete, with a door and molding and everything. This weekend I worked on a chore that I have been postponing for more than a year: touching up the wall paint. When we installed the new baseboards and door frames, we ended up with caulk and white paint on the walls. I pulled out 3 different colors of paint today and touched it all up. Sad to say, but I think the upstairs hallway is going to need a total repaint since the touch-ups seem to dry just a smidgen off the color on the walls. We'll probably save that project for another year.

The other super exciting thing that we worked on was building shelves for the office nook. We had some really unfortunate dimensions to work with: 49" x 13.5". Every commercially available shelf was 48" so just a bit short of the full span and when you look at making shelves out of sheet goods, you get really annoyed because everything is just a little too small to get an optimal cut from a 4'x8' piece of plywood. Lucky for us, our trusty lumberyard, Compton's, happened to sell 5'x5' pieces of 1/2" plywood. Eureka! We needed 4 pieces of 49"x12.75" plywood cuts and this did the trick with hardly any waste which made it a cheaper project in the end. Justin fabricated the shelves on Saturday afternoon and I stained them up. I'll get some polyurethane on them over the next week and then hopefully we'll get them hung before next weekend. The true fun starts when I can start filling them up with all of the office supplies and storage.