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!

From doorway to shoe rack

So - the long-awaited shoe rack. You might recall that Ken, during demo phase, found an old, covered-up doorway hiding under wallboard on the right wall of our closet. Since our closet is small (by modern standards, but large for an old house), we were thrilled to find about 7" more depth on that wall. We had planned to install some IKEA shoe bins on that wall; they would have stuck out into the closet but would have worked fine.

Instead, Ken had a brainstorm - why not put in a kind of louvered shelf system that could be a recessed shoe rack? Brilliant, says I. And I got to work planning and scrounging wood to build it out.

First, we clad the back wall with cedar planks - they are thin (only about 1/4", so they take up less depth than drywall and they smell pretty too!), inexpensive, and easy to install. Because the studs for the wall of the abutting room were laid flat, we could liquid nails & solid nail the panels right on and not lose much depth. First we ripped out a useless stud that was just a nailer, running down the center of the doorway. If you wanted to, you could simply tear a hole in a wall and leave the studs, and just have 16" wide bays to store shoes.

This was an easy project (for a change!) - simply think of framing a door. Instead of putting solid 5/4 lumber to case the two tall sides (inside the jamb), we cut 45 degree, 3/4" grooves every 10-12" (wider spacing at the bottom for boots). Cutting the angled grooves was the hardest part of the project. We used the dado blade and it was a bit scary on the old Shopsmith.

We then trimmed out the doorway just like every other door in the house - 1-bys for the side trim, and a thicker board (we actually used a scrap old piece of window jamb that came with the house) for the header. Painted it and we were ready for Ken's louvers.

We planned to use some scrap flooring that we had in the garage, but after I goofed cutting the first piece, and then realized that we didn't have enough anyway, I took a trip to the handy-dandy ReStore to find 'anything 1 by'. And House Karma was with me - I found scraps of some Brazilian flooring out front - pre-finished even! - and then scrounged around to find more of it until I had 16 pieces that were 31" long, what I needed.

At home, we simply cut them all to length and popped them in - 2 per shelf, with the beads butting together and with a screw as a stop to keep them spaced off the back wall about 1-1/2". They are not attached, so they can be removed for cleaning or any other thing you might want to remove them for.

And voila - storage for about 30 pair of shoes! We were able to get rid of a horrid back-of-the-door shoe rack and a big box-cubby thing. And I still have more room for shoes - time for a shopping trip!

We DO have something to wear!

We've had a tough time finding things to wear lately, because our clothes have been crammed in a variety of nooks and hung on backs of doors all over the house (and in bags, and baskets, and on floors...you get the picture). Last night, the paint was dry and all the parts were together in the closet - so we were able to move clothes back in! And today I'm wearing a shirt I haven't worn a hundred times over the last few weeks.

A shout-out to Ken, who successfully hung all the new hardware and fittings. It's an irritating job and he tackled it with gusto.

Before, the shrimpy (my) end of the closet:

After (note that, unlike previous - dare I say, lazy - painters, we actually painted all the baseboard and didn't just quit when we got to the part you can't see from the bedroom):

Before, view into the closet from the room (it all looks so grubby now, ick):

And after. Stay tuned to see how the newly-discovered door jamb, now cedar-clad, will become a shoe rack, next weekend...

And the middle part of the closet:

By the way, if you live in the Bangor area and plan to re-do a closet anytime soon, get thee to Marden's - they have a gigantic assortment of ClosetMaid stuff right now (all the fixtures & fittings you see here cost us a whopping $32, which is a total steal). It's all a bit dirty - like it sat in a wet warehouse too long - but it's brand new and cleans up easily. The corner shelf piece was about $10, and normally is $20 or more if not from a salvage store!

Not our own guests anymore

We've been sleeping in the guest room (and making a giant mess of it with our piles of dirty clothes and junk, by the way) while we re-do the master bedroom. We're happy to report that we slept in our own room last night! Yes, the bedroom is done enough to inhabit. Just a hundred punch list jobs and it'll be done-done. Oh, and finishing out the closet so we can get our clothes back in there - I'm getting tired of the 5 shirts I can find.

More & photos later...

Blue-green or green-blue?

Remember all those crazy multi-color names in the crayola box? Our bedroom is now one of them. It's blue-green, for sure - more green than blue. Even though I kept thinking about it as more blue all year.

Anyways, we love the color so far, despite the first-coat second guessing that happens every single time. The finish on these Sherwin Williams colors (eggshell, Harmony paint) turns out like old leather, and it really makes the color work, no matter what crayon you picked.

So - our painting fiesta is almost complete - we primed yesterday and did the ceiling and one coat of color today. One more coat on Sunday (I have a silly meeting all day tomorrow), then trim later next week and we're almost done!

Oh, by the way, we were lying when we said we went on hiatus to work for a couple of days - we actually snuck off to a secret vacation at Sugarloaf and didn't want to tell y'all we were gone. If you came over and stole my blue-green, I'd be pissed. The weather and snow were absolutely PERFECT, by the way. Divine.

That's a wrap

Today's goal was to finish all the JC, sand everything, clean EVERYTHING, and paint the radiator. Oh, but first the disgusting job of 'flossing' the radiator to rid 40 years of dust bunnies and goo. I have a few super-long bottle brushes and a spray bottle of water to do this. It's still a totally nasty job.

Anyways, everything is done for today:

And now, we need to take a couple of days to do work stuff, so we'll be priming the (now perfectly clean!) room then. In the home stretch!