Garden success!

We just love it when the garden is our grocery store. Good shopping this week - beans are in full swing!

Design coming together...

The basement is sort of a modern look, and the furniture is going to be all of my mid-century modern collection. I've always loved mid-century, and we've had my pieces stashed all around the house. Now they're going to come together - soon - in the basement.

One thing I didn't already have was a mid-century dresser, so I began looking around a couple of months ago and found this beauty, from the 60s by Bassett. Love the pulls! It was missing one pull and two knobs. Through an odd stroke of luck, I saw a crapped-out dresser on the side of the road that had perfect replacement knobs, and found two coordinating pulls, so it's now all bejeweled again.


I then stumbled upon a matching (slightly different style, but also Bassett) bedside table at the thrift shop, so viola! Instant Bedroom!

Both have been cleaned up and I'll post after pix when we move everything in...soon...Wait, I already said soon. But soon. Really, we'll get there.

Thanks, Mrs. Wheat (wherever you are)

We picked up 5 boxes of octagonal white tiles at the Restore last year, thinking we'd use them in the basement bathroom. They're thick (1/2") and appear handmade. A bunch were broken, but we have just enough for the lower half of the walls.

Each box was carefully marked "Mrs. Wheat's Bath". The image of Mrs. Wheat that immediately popped into my head is a proper little old lady at tea - I think my grandmother knew someone with a name like that - and the "Mrs.", the proper salutation, on each box just seems so perfectly old fashioned. I felt so fancy finally installing it this week.

So I began installing Mrs. Wheat's tile on Friday. After grinding my knee into the floor and thinset a bunch, I was pleased to find these knee pads at a yard sale on Saturday - Saturday's tiling was much more pleasant.

We've been waiting to tile until we got the shower panels in - so we would know where to stop tiling, of course. So, here's the shower, and the beginning of tiling from Friday night.

The shower is a homemade, found objects deal. We found two end walls from a fiberglass shower at the big box store for $17 (for both!). We got a couple of pieces of Hinoki wood - our go-to miracle material - to fill in the edges and make a surface we can screw a glass panel (still to come) and shower curtain rod to. More details once the shower is totally done...

And here's the largest of the three walls that needed tile - I've now got all three walls done, just waiting for the few tiles that need special cuts, etc. We're installing leftover 2x2 off-white tiles from the upstairs bath in the spaces, plus an occasional dark teal accent tile that we specially ordered. Luckily our local tile shop was able to order us a single sheet of them, so it was only $9 for the accents.


Hopefully we'll finish up the rest of the tile shortly - then we can install the toilet and washer-dryer!!! Oh, and more trimwork...it's never-ending, isn't it? Getting so close to functional.

You've come a long way, tapey

Remember the creepy taped-up skin quilt door? Well, it's re-done. We just need to add hardware.

We planned to frost the glass since it will be a bathroom door; I wanted to leave a little non-frosted frame around the edge. Luckily they make stuff called artist's tape in all different widths, so I didn't have to painstakingly slice masking tape into thinner strips. This was 1/2" tape.

We originally wanted to use that cool vinyl window stuff that looks like frosted glass, but it's kind of ridiculously priced (and this basement is meant to be super-inexpensive), so we're using the spray paint frosted glass stuff, which I happened to find for only $3 at the overstock store in town. Looks pretty good, we think.

During the past couple of weeks, we've really been cruising on the trim and other major parts of the bedroom in the basement - it's now really close to done! Here's what the door looks like leaned in the jamb:

I'm so behind on the blog, we didn't get to tell you about the flall (that's "floor-wall") yet - we made the bottom half of the walls from laminate flooring in a whitewash, bamboo-esque pattern. It was cheaper and quicker than drywall and we think it will be more durable. It was great to install and we like the look - what do you think? (Yes, we know it's not bungalow - we're going modern in the basement).

And here's a corner of the room - just needing paint on the chair rail and some touch up. Note that Ken has finished all the wiring and lighting in this and in the bathroom - it's awesome to have light and power down there again!

And here's the view from the bathroom into the bedroom. We had a piece of granite left over from the upstairs bath, and it just happened to fit perfectly on the half wall.

Tomorrow we hope to start figuring out how to make a shower stall from a random bunch of glass and shower wall panels we've accumulated. Wish us luck!