Got your new issue of This Old House?

The July/August reader created one?

Crack it open and turn to page 22. There we are, on the Plant Tags story! (In the middle, the stamped concrete marker stones).

Funny thing is, this is probably the ONE thing we've done at the house that has been a kit, not an insane custom, handbuilt thing. Ha!

There are other cool plant tag ideas on the 'bonus' page online - I LOVE the license plate one.

You call that a score? THIS is a score!

So if that blanket from the last post was a great deal, today I got a tremendous deal. The yard sale gods were smiling.



That's right, that's a box of un-used electrical supplies - enough for a whole basement, we think. The yard sale proprietors had bought it all to re-do a cottage then didn't do the work.

All sorted out, this is what we got for $7.50 (thanks to my hard and fast rule that one simply MUST haggle - it was originally $10, which was just as great a price).



With this find and the sink and three boxes of tile Susie (over at Bangor Foursquare) traded us, the basement project (probably slated for next summer) is coming together well, all by itself.

A blanket on a hot day

Score! I just stopped by the antique/vintage store in downtown Bangor for an iced coffee and a browse after getting out of a meeting, and I found this little FLW treasure for $27! Looking forward to a cool winter day to use it - but not yet.

It's in *pristine* condition (though we'll gently wash it anyways).

Almost as cool as the never-opened Scrabble game we got at a yard sale this weekend for $1...but not quite.

Since it won't be this tidy ever again...

OK, so we never posted any "afters" of the bedroom. We still have about 3 tiny punch list jobs to do (Ken is doing one this very moment - sweet!), and I didn't have my camera for a while, but we actually did take some photos before I loaned it out that I never posted.

We never posted because we thought we'd do another round of fully-staged "afters", but this is a tough one: because we live (messily) in it, I'm not sure it'll ever be much tidier than in these first excited "It's almost done!" shots. So without further ado...

Before:

After-ish:

Yeah, that's an IKEA bed in a bungalow. The room is a bit more modern, but we didn't destroy any of the vintage stuff. Just sassed it up.

Go Bangor!

Still cleaning gardens and mulching. Still waiting for my camera back.

But - I was pleased to find that our little metropolis of Bangor was just listed in the Top 100 places to Live by RelocateAmerica.com.

They didn't include "has awesome bungalows" as one of the criteria, but we do! Of about 5,000 single-unit detached homes, some 285 or more are bungalows. And a whole bunch more are foursquares - so ubiquitous they call them Bangor Boxes. So - we've got character!

And a giant 1950s fiberglass statue of Paul Bunyan. Wow.

Greening up

Spring fever has set in. We've been totally busy at work and spending every sunny moment we can trying to whip the yard into shape. The goal was to get an early start this year - and we're doing OK. There's a big pile of mulch in the driveway, and about half the beds have been cleaned, pruned, and mulched. Now we're just waiting for these babies to really fill in...

Lady's mantle (geranium-looking guys) in front, snowberry hedge, white astilbes (left front), white dome hydrangea along the porch wall, and a variety of bulbs, daisies, and artemisia in front of the fence. Everything's basically supposed to be green and white. More importantly, they all made it through the winter!


And from the front, the two wraparound beds (the left one was in the other photo; it's mirrored on the right). Our baby snowberries (future hedge across the front of the porch) are doing very well - they'll just take a while to fill in. Not bad for bareroot starts (or as Ken said, we bought some dead twigs and they came in the mail?!).

Great friends, old wood, summer projects

We visited great friends this weekend down on the coast. Got to audition a new cocktail with Caribbean rum, and had a fantastic time in general.

And there was a bonus for all of us - as we stood on their newly-enlarged deck, they noted that some old deck railings were needing to go to the dump. Glancing over, Ken & I saw that they were actually in great shape and were pretty new treated lumber. Light bulb! Our first project this summer is going to be building piers on both sides of the front steps, and we need to start amassing some supplies (cheap!), so we loaded it into the truck (yay truck!) and hauled it on home.



A win-win, for sure. Not to mention the fabulous weather this weekend!