For your viewing pleasure

I neglected to give you a "before" pic of the office.

The carpet must have been at least 40 years old (we're basing this on the rate at which the foam carpet padding under it had decayed).  The walls, trim, and ceiling were all painted in almond--like all the other rooms in this part of the house.  The paint was rather worn, and ready to be freshened up, so we replaced it with a crisp white for ceiling and trim.  Brightening up the whites really helped the room feel newer, fresher, and cleaner.

Front bedroom

When I last left you, we were agonizing over what color we should paint our front bedroom.  It's a fairly large room, with excellent light.  There are three windows--two south, and one west.  We were planning to use this as our bedroom for the next year, until we completed the renovations on the master bedroom. 

Then we had a crisis of confidence.  Which room should we sleep in?  Front bedroom pros: 1. it was nearly completed, and 2. it's crazy bright, and I like to wake up to morning light.  Front bedroom cons: those lovely south windows face the street, so 1. we'd have to keep them covered, thus reducing the light pro, and 2. there would be some traffic noise.  Master bedroom pros: 1. the bathroom is right there, 2. the walk-in closet is right there, 3. it's really quiet, and 4. it's an ugly dark cavern, and P will wake up with daybreak if given much light at all.  Master bedroom cons: 1. there's no floor right now or for the foreseeable future, and OSB subfloor is pretty impossible to keep clean, 2. when it's time to put in the floor, we'll have to move everything out, and 3. did I mention it's an ugly dark cavern?  It's a really large room, with only two windows--one north and one east.

Ultimately, it came down to the fact that P is a finicky sleeper, and he will sleep better in the master.  And I sleep better if he's also asleep.  And sleep seems like the most important part of a bedroom.  So we set up our furniture in the master, and will move it when it's finally time to put in flooring.

This meant that the front bedroom was open.  Being the gracious hostess I am, I declared that it would be a waste to use it as a guest bedroom.  It's the nicest bedroom in the house, and it would be a real shame if it were used only once a month, at best.  So it was decided that I would have a crazy nice office/craft room.

But we still needed to find a wall color.  I wanted something energetic; P wanted something that wouldn't make him crazy.  And I had to admit it seemed like a good idea for there to be some general cohesion in the house's color scheme. 

I had mentioned a plan to use this fabric to make curtains, and to draw the room's color scheme from it.

But then it arrived, and I panicked about the idea of using such a dramatic print on something so large as curtains, and whether I really wanted these colors, and would the curtain fabric be too dark on the windows I wanted to keep nice and bright....  So, there will be no curtains--but I still have several yards of fabric, so you will be seeing this pattern appear elsewhere in the house in future posts.

Yes, some of these are duplicates--I put samples up at different spots in the room to test them in a variety of lighting conditions.  The conclusion, after all of these samples, is that as much as I like the look of vibrant paint colors in magazine photos, I'm not so sure about them on my wall.  Maybe it's a commitment phobia, but I think it's taste: I like the idea of lighter paint colors paired with brighter accessories.

So we finally settled on Benjamin Moore's Patriotic White.  (As always, matched in Behr's paint and primer in one--in this case, in a flat finish, to minimize the unevenness in the walls caused by 60 years of paint vs. the smooth spots of newly repaired spackle.)  It's really a nice cool light blue--not white at all.

The final step after painting was to install the baseboard and quarter-round.  We used the cheap pre-primed MDF, rather than solid wood, since it was cheaper and we were just going to paint it anyway.  Once we got it home, we realized another surprising benefit--it's pretty flexible.  This turned out to be really helpful in maneuvering 12-foot lengths of board through the house--we could just bend it around corners and through doorways--and made installing it into tight corners easier.

P surprised me by installing the baseboard and quarter-round by himself while I was away for a weekend, attending a friend's wedding.  What a lovely surprise to come home and find that he had put the finishing touches on two rooms.  The office and guest bedroom were completed, and ready to have furniture moved in!

No longer an embarrassment to the neighborhood

Our lawnmower has been broken for 5 weeks now.  We're lucky that it hasn't rained much in those five weeks, so the lawn isn't as long as we might have expected.  Still, I come home from grocery shopping to find business cards on the door from people offering to mow it for us.  Apparently our failure to maintain a proper suburban lawn has been noticed.

Our mower is a very used commercial mower.  Replacement parts for a 20 year-old mower an not easy to find, and they're surprisingly expensive.  I'll spare you the blow by blow view, but to summarize, P has been diligently trying to locate the part we need, so far to no avail.  The search is also getting increasingly expensive, as we end up paying substantial, nonrefundable shipping fees on parts that turn out to be close but not quite right, and then restocking fees when we have to send them back.

Finally we stepped back and realized that, for less money than we were going to spend on the replacement part, we could just get a new push mower.  P had been window-shopping online, and was thrilled to learn that the mower he was drooling over turned out to also be a model that Consumer Reports recommended.

Our new Husqvarna 6120 arrived yesterday.  P was really excited to have his new toy, and immediately set it up and started mowing--despite the fact that it was a scorching hot day, and the forecasts said today would be much cooler. 

This is one of the many reasons why P is in charge of mowing the lawn, and I am not.  If it were up to me, the lawn would probably go unmowed June-August, and not because the mower was broken.  Hey, we'd be providing native meadowland habitat, right?

Anyway, P was so delighted with his new mower, that he skipped dinner to mow the entire lawn.  (He had originally planned to do just the small portion in front.)  So far, we have nothing but good things to say about the mower.  There was virtually no assembly required, and it even came with its own bottle of motor oil--so the true mower enthusiast can get straight out to the lawn without having to run by the store first.  Starts right up when you pull the cord.  And my favorite part is that the mulching feature works really well.  We thought we'd have to rake the grass clippings this time, since we'd let it get so long.  But the mower properly pulverized them, and no work for us!  (Plus it makes the lawn virtually self-fertilizing.)

P hasn't entirely given up on getting the big mower fixed.  With it, he can mow the lawn in less than a third of the time it takes him with this little guy.  The push mower is cheaper than a gym membership, and a good way for him to work off the stresses of the day, but sometimes it's nice to just get the lawn done fast.  So we'll see how things develop on that front....

With a little help from our friends (part III)

A final update on what we accomplished with my parents' help in May.  It's a long time coming, but at least you get really good "after" pics.

If you don't already think that we're abusing our guests, you will after hearing this next one.

It wasn't enough for my parents to completely transform two rooms with paint in the two and a half days they were here.  I decided we also needed to do a complete makeover of the exterior, as well.

I don't have any good "before" pictures here, since I was busy trying to disguise the sad state of our landscaping.  Our house has the standard long, narrow foundation beds extending along the entire front of the house.  The weeds there were getting out of control--one particularly notable one was taller than me!  The previous owners had planted azaleas in these beds.  For some reason, most of the azaleas in the west bed were doing well, but the ones in the east bed were on their last legs.

You can get a hint of what we were dealing with in the background of this cute picture of my nephew.  He's enjoying that moving day means furniture is on the lawn--who needs playground equipment when you have bookcases!  But back to what we were supposed to be focusing on: the azaleas have more dead sticks than leaves, and the weeds are taking over.

While my mother and I painted, my father went out and dug up the dead and dying azaleas (and the massive weeds, while he was at it).  Then Mom and I came in, and planted some herbs she'd been kind enough to pick up for me, plus some other herbs and cosmos I had started from seed.  And three pepper plants for good measure.  I'm totally a function over form person, plus I think a pepper plant, with nice ripening fruit, looks lovely in its own right.

Here's the bed about a week after planting:

And here it is today:

Our landscaping is a little lopsided right now--to the east of the front door, there are all these nice small annuals and herbs, and to the west, a few monstrous azaleas.  I'm okay with that for this summer.  I think I'll wait until fall to even it out, when the weather is better for both gardeners and for young plants.  Maybe remove a few shrubs from the west, and add a few to the east.  Or maybe just get rid of the azaleas altogether.

We also have a long, narrow bed bordering our driveway (no before pics here).  The last 10' or so of the bed was completely full of weeds--no plants at all.  It also gets as much sun as anywhere else in the yard, so I decided this was the perfect place for our tomatoes and the rest of our pepper plants.  Again, Dad pulled all the weeds and tilled the impenetrable soil, and then Mom and I swooped in and took all the glory by planting the plants.

Here they are a week after installation:

And again today:

Between the poor soil and the mushroom compost we mulched with (and the great prep work Dad did), I hardly have to do any weeding back here.  Except where the weeds trail through the fence from the neighbor's yard.  My father removed some old, crumbling pieces of plastic border fencing from the property line--I'm thinking I might need to put something like that back in.

I'm not quite sure why the pepper plants are so short.  I think it's some combination of: 1. late planting and too long spent in cells may have stunted their growth, 2. the soil is not very good, and 3. our neighborhood deer came by a few weeks back, and had to taste each plant to realize he didn't like them, and clipped off all the leaders.  Perhaps this pruning explains why they're so full!  They're starting to bloom now (the plants in the front have peppers that are coming along nicely), and our summers are nice and long here, so they should have plenty of time to recover and have nice full yields.

Back in action (sort of)

To make a long story short, Lenovo decided that since they weren't sure when they were going to be able to repair my laptop, they'd just send me a new one.  While the process has been pretty frustrating, I'm definitely happy with the outcome--I get to replace my increasingly buggy 3.25 year old laptop with a brand new one at no cost to me.  It will have several upgrades I'm excited about, including Windows 7, which P uses at work and says is a vast improvement on Vista.

So I'm eagerly awaiting the laptop's arrival--but first the factory has to make it.  In the meantime, Lenovo sent my old unit back to me so I could transfer the files off of it.  I was a little shocked to open the box and discover why they thought it was necessary to replace the LCD screen:

Seems the screen was broken in transit.  Luckily, we have an extra monitor, so I'm able to use that for now.  (Sorry I tried to convince you to get rid of this when we moved, P.)

Anyway, there's much interesting stuff to fill you in on.  Just to give you a taste: we have finished work on two rooms, and actually moved some furniture into them and unpacked some boxes!  Pictures to come...