Keeping My Cool

It's a hot one out there. Low 90's for our part of the world. A bit too hot to finish the exterior of the door... too hot for this gal and too hot for the paint. I am thinking I am going to have to wait until early Monday morning to get the final coat of paint on. In the meantime, I will sit inside the air conditioned house and update the blog.

This morning I slept in, and then the girls and I went blueberry picking. We only picked 4lbs. before everyone was too hot to go much further. I am thinking that an apple blueberry pie is in order this weekend! Thankfully, blueberry season will go for a few more weeks at least. We hope to get out and pick quite a few more pounds. Last year we picked 14 pounds, froze most of it, and it still only lasted us 4 months!

My 9 year old pops blueberries into her mouth like they are candy. I can always count on finding her with her hand in the freezer and pulling a few berries out of a Ziploc bag. Needless to say, blueberries are her favorite fruit.

I drug the girls to only 2 garage sales today. They were being a bit non-compliant. I spent a whopping $.50 on a simple peg board/coat rack and $2.00 on this serving tray.

I was drawn to the detail in the wood. I have grand plans for it. They of course involve a can of Kilz primer, some paint, fabric, and decoupage. It is always nice to have a small project like this that can be completed in a day. Instant gratification.

Off topic...

I am the second oldest of 6 children. I have two sisters and three brothers. My youngest sister, Tiffany, is 10 years younger than I am. Tiffany has a product review site called "Babes and Kids."  You may have noticed the button on my sidebar. Occasionally Tiffany shoots me an email and asks if I would be interested in reviewing a product for her website. Today I am guest blogging over at Babes and Kids.  You can check out my latest review of Fibers.com,  at Babes and Kids Review , here.

Music Studio

While I am in the process of trying to finish up other projects, I thought I would share with you one of my favorite rooms in my house, my music studio.  I am a musician with a degree in piano pedagogy and a music degree in harp performance. I freelance and play for weddings, open houses, memorial services - whatever! I also teach privately at home, and am the harp instructor at a Community College and at a Community Music School.

For 14 years of our marriage, we lived in either a small condo or a tiny apartment. For the most part, my instruments were shoved up against the wall, covered until I needed to practice, or pull the harps out for teaching.

My husband and I were finally able to purchase our first home a little over 2 years ago. It has been heaven tweaking the home to our liking, and of course a constant evolving process.

When we started looking for homes a couple of years ago, we had two major criteria.

1. It had to have a space that I could convert into a teaching/music studio.

2. It had to be harp friendly. Concert grand pedal harps are big. They weigh around 90lbs and are a touch over 6 feet tall. When you have to haul one in and out of the house for gigs, stairs are your nemesis. I use a special harp dolly, but still - the less stairs the better.

Our current home fit the bill. It had but two steps into the house, and a formal living room off of the front entry that could be converted into my music studio.

This is what it looked like before:

We hired a contractor to frame in the wall and separate the dining area from the living area with some french doors.

 I also put french doors off of the entry. The doors allows me to close them when I am teaching, so the kids can wander the house. I also wanted the option to be able to lock the doors when we have tiny little visitors at our house. Small children don't know that it is not o.k. to climb on a harp, and often parents aren't always good about watching their kiddos. My girls grew up around the instruments, so we have never had issues and they are always very respectful in the studio.

And this is where it is today:

The paint color is called "Butterfly Wing"  by FreshAire Paint from The Home Depot.

The floor is a Pergo laminate that was already there. It works perfectly with hauling the harps in and out of the house, because it is easy to maneuver across and it can take a beating.

This is an older picture when I had the harps on the other side of the room.

View from the dining room. The semi circle window at the top was hard to find something to filter out the sun. Direct sunlight and heat are not good for the instruments. Right now I have some cellular blinds up there. I am not crazy about them, but they work for the time being. The curtains came from JCPenney. The black troubadour harp is not mine, and one that I am basically just babysitting for a friend. I took it from her about 18 months ago to restring it. It is a harp she rents out to students. Well, no one is renting it right now, and I have asked her if she wants me to bring it back to her. She doesn't have the space, so it stays with me for the time being. The other two harps, the concert grand pedal harp and the small lever harp are both mine. My 10 year old daughter plays the smaller harp and that is also the harp that my students play on when they come for lessons. My 9 year old plays violin and has the cutest 1/4 size violin.

The corner bookshelf houses all of my music and teaching material. I eventually would like to put in something a bit nicer than the press board bookcase. It has also been nice to have my CD collection there and to be able to pull something out for a student to listen to.

I am still on the lookout for the perfect little round table to go between the two chairs I refurbished, that are in front of the window.

At any rate, it is a wonderfully cheery room especially in the winter when the days here in the Pacific NW can be a bit gray and rainy.

The acoustics are marvelous as well.

The Front Door Saga...

I've been busy... working on that blasted front door. It hasn't been all that fun, I must tell you. Sanding, sanding and you guessed it - MORE SANDING. I am a bit  frustrated with the gouges in the wood and the dry rot. In the past week, I would work on it for a couple of hours each day, just until I had sawdust coming out of my hair, eyes and nose and was about ready to torch the thing!  Saturday, I found myself at the home improvement store pricing out doors, that is how close I was to giving up on this project.

Then reality hit... $$$... and I went back to working on the door. I have learned that when I get really frustrated, that is when it is time to take a break and walk away.

 I tried a wood filler epoxy over the weekend. Famowood Instant Wood Repair

Gotta say, it was a huge 'ole mess. Or rather I made a big mess of it! I managed to mess up the wood on the sidelight even more, and ended up with my right hand almost completely covered, on the palm side in this epoxy wood filler. I was finally able to get the stuff off of my hand today - several days later. Of course a normal patient person would have used some kind of protective glove when working with this goop. But I am impatient and not always the brightest bulb in the box.

Well, after that fiasco, the next day I got back to sanding again. At this point my palm sander has been going on overdrive and I have gone through 60 grit sandpaper like it is going out of style!  The Dremel has been very useful in getting into the grooves and cracks of the door, where it is almost impossible to do with sandpaper alone. This morning, I taped and prepped the area and spent 3.5 HOURS priming that blasted door, sidelight, frame and trim. The silver lining is that it was quite cool this morning, so it wasn't unbearably hot painting outside.

I used Sherwin William's Exterior Oil-Based Wood Primer.

Overall it is a good product, but it is oil, which means two things:

1. The door seemed to takes FOREVER to dry.

2. Oil based products are always  a pain to clean out of brushes, paint pans and other items.

I put the primer on a bit thick, so there are some goopy spots, but that is o.k. with me. My 9 year old also arrived home from summer school around noon, and decided to slam the door shut. There are some paint smears around the frame now. *sigh*  Oh well, nothing that sandpaper can't fix.

 I still have to fill in more spots with some painter's caulk and sand the heck out of it...again.

Already though, just being primed - the door looks so much better and my front entry looks a lot more inviting and cheerful. I stood back and admired it, and then admired it again when I was coming around the block in my car from being out an about.

I hope to have it done by Friday to reveal to you!

Here is the before picture again.

And here is what it looked like on Saturday after I had done some sanding.

At this point, I was only HALF way through with sanding it, if you can believe it! I was also starting to fill in some of the gouges and holes in the wood when this picture was taken. The door itself hasn't been too bad, but the wood on the sidelight is in pretty bad shape.

The brass kick plate will be getting spray painted some form of silver/ brushed nickel, to match the other hardware on the door.  So when I am ready to paint, the door will be painted white. The exterior of our house is a light pink, with white trim - think 1993 and the colors that were in style back then - country blues, mauves, pink and hunter green.

It's not my favorite color in the world for the house, but the paint is still in good condition and we will eventually get it painted - professionally.

On a side note, here is a vintage dresser that I picked up on Craigslist last week for $30.00.

I am guessing 1940's??? Any other guesses?

It has original casters on the bottom. The veneer is peeling off, so I took a heat gun to it and have already removed the veneer from two of the drawers. It was super easy and went quite quickly with the putty knife and heat gun.

When I am done with the front door, I will probably work on it some more.

Garden Glimpses

I spent a good chunk of Friday afternoon weeding, edging, moving plants around and fertilizing.

Here are some snippets of things growing around my yard.

This is Blue Star Creeper, and comes from the company Stepables. It is growing at the base of one of my rhododendron plants and I just love it. I have another rhody bush on the other side of the sidewalk that also has blue star creeper growing around the base.

This is a raised bed that I put in the previous year.

Daylilies, Irises ( from mom's house), Campanulas, some ground cover, asters, and a columbine plant fill this space.  The columbine has already bloomed and gone, so you can't see it. It sits between the bulbs and the daylily.

The former owners had a beautiful Japanese Maple tree that was planted in that spot that was at least 10 years old. We had to rip it out. They had planted it less than a foot away from the house and one side was mangled and shoved up against the wall. There were also two cypress trees that we had to rip out in the front yard, for the same reason. They were right up against the house.

This is how I grow my herbs, in a giant pot. The slugs don't usually get to them since it is so far off the ground. The Italian oregano and the Spearmint always take over, those pot hogs. They always grow more than I can use. We also have some cilantro hidden in there, it's not doing so well, and some basil. We all love omelets with fresh chopped basil in them.

My hydrangeas are starting to bloom! Hydrangeas are one of my favorite flowers/bushes. I have 4 plants on the North side of my house. This plant I bought 2 years ago and it was a lovely shade of purple. Last year it decided to be pink. This year, the acidity, pH in the soil must be right on, because it is back to lovely shades of lavender.

This is our modest vegetable garden...

I have a lot more of the stone retaining wall blocks sitting on pallets waiting for me to use them. I was initially going to do another raised bed like the one in the above picture as this area of our yard is clay soil. The water sits and it is almost impossible to grow anything in it. Well, I decided I couldn't really put in all of that work on a retaining wall raised bed, up against a fence that desperately needed to be replaced. I also knew that it was highly unlikely that the fence would get done this summer, so it was onto plan "B".

 I kindly asked my husband to make me a raised garden bed out of cedar, and he obliged. He placed it on top of a sprinkler head, and put the sprinkler head on a riser so it waters the plants. So far things seem to be doing well. I planted two tomato plants, a pepper plant and a crookneck squash plant. So far so good, and the slugs have yet to discover the bed... Mwahaha!!!

This is another pot by my front door.  Each day, the flowers get just a bit bigger. I can't wait until it is all filled in. I walk out my front door and it just always smells soo good.

I think a combination of the lavender, the honeysuckle and the verbena that are growing around the yard, help it smell just fantastic! 

This area used to be sod.

I had my husband dig it up so I could put in more plants and flowers. There are some petunias, irises, Lady's Mantle, some feverfew, Provence lavender, and the big bush at the end next to the lavender is Lemon Balm. The leaves on those smell so good!   I imagine as the years go by, I will have less and less lawn, and more flowers in the front yard.

This next patch of plants is in the corner of the front yard.

Lots of stuff going on here. Canna lilies, Bloody Cranesbill Geranium, Alyssum, wave petunia - which was ONE plant, Salvia, an aster, and a white lilac bush in the corner! So basically the plants in the front are annuals, the ones in the back are perennials. This is the second year I have tried to work with Salvia flowers. I have to say, that I am not a big fan and I don't think I will be planting them again. They have a hard, hard time. In that location, I eventually want to plant a climbing rose bush, or some wisteria to climb up over an arbor.

This is one of my rose bushes. I was just about ready to rip it out. It is highly susceptible to black spot mildew. We had an incredibly wet, wet spring, and it just looked so sick for quite awhile.

I went to town hacking it and pruned a lot of it off, sprayed fungicide every few days, removed all of the infected leaves, and waited for the hot weather...and tried to ignore it.

The hot weather is here, and it is doing much better. I am not so ready to rip it out now. :-)

So that is just a tiny glimpse into some of the things growing around my place. I hope I inspired you to get out and work in your yard!

Behind Door #1...

As promises, here is a glimpse of what lies behind the newly painted white door which I showcased in my previous post.

This is what my half bath looked like 2 years ago. The wallpaper had been applied directly to the dry wall... no priming nothing... I hate wallpaper. It was a ton of work to get it to come off. There was also a lovely pink linoleum that I somehow didn't get pictures of.

Well, we gutted it and replaced the floor in the hallway, front entry and kitchen with 18" porcelain tiles from Daltile. I have really liked the floor, with the exception of the many dishes that have had an untimely death due to hitting that hard floor.

Such is life.

So back to the bathroom.

After retexturing it, and putting in new flooring, the walls were painted kind of a light yellow color. The color was from Benjamin Moore and called "harp strings." I'm a harpist, so a sucker for any paint that supposedly looks like harp strings.

It most certainly DID NOT look like harp strings when I saw the mixed color. In fact, it was so bright, I ended up mixing in a lot of white to tone it down.

Much better!

I love the ocean and am fortunate to live a mere 65 miles away from the Pacific Ocean... just an hour's drive away. I decided to decorate my 1/2 bath downstairs in a beach/ocean theme.

I apologize for the lighting and color. It is difficult to capture things in a small, small space without a cool camera and the perfect lighting.

The photographs on the wall are of some that I took while on a day trip to the coast a few years ago.

And that spindle post in one of the pictures is of my  not-so-pretty stair railing, that is on my to-do list to paint white.

I actually really like the bathroom. The other two bathrooms in my house are a bit dated and need some work, but they are far down on the list for renovations.

As for projects this week,  I have started working on my front door.

It's a lot of work. Years of deferred maintenance from the previous owners, a door that faces west and with almost no shade in the hot afternoon.... oh and there may have been that time a couple of years ago when I was power washing and had the nozzle set on the fine stream setting.

It may have, just may have................... carved some notches into the wood.  And as we would say around here, that's "No Bueno." 

 Well, that door has taken a beating, and any protective finish that was there before, was GONE in spots. Dry rot in several areas.

 I would love to have a new door, but there is just not the funds for it, so I am sanding it, filling in the wood, priming and painting it.

I am still in the sanding portion of it. Nothing like getting bits of dust up your nose and in your eyes.

Hmmm.... protective gear might be a good idea.

 Already it is starting to look better, but it will  probably be a week before it is completely ready for a grand reveal in the Blog World.

My lame-brain neighbor walked by yesterday while I was sanding and said, "We painted our door a couple of years ago. It works really well if you take the door off."

Thank you Captain Obvious.

What a novel idea. Too bad I NEED the front door on. Taking it off for a few days is not an option. We don't live out in the sticks where I don't have to worry about things like people waltzing in and helping themselves to my belongings... or walking off with one of my kids...

So on the frame the door will stay and I will sit out there and sand and paint it.

And you know what? It will all work out in the end.

Yep. It's a Door.

We have been in our house now for 2 years. It was built in 1993, and so the color scheme reflected as much when we purchased it. Think mauve and pinks EVERYWHERE.

The stain color on the kitchen cabinets, stair railing, doors is all one color, and this is what it looks like.

The door color doesn't quite go with the white trim.

I was feeling ambitious on Friday night, so I pulled out some Kilz latex primer and went to work.

Then Saturday I finished it by lightly sanding and painting the door with  some Benjamin Moore Satin Impervo

that I had on hand from a project 2 years ago.  Very nice paint, but very expensive. I think it averages $50 for a gallon and that is what I painted my French doors with, per my contractor's suggestions. But it is a nice paint to work with.

 Anyway... so here it is!

Huge improvement I think... It would be nice to have doors with some panels in them, but for now this works. To the right, you can get a tiny glimpse of my kitchen cabinet color... not my fave, but once it's not so hot and I can stomach working out in the garage in this heat wave, I may tackle the daunting task.

 Perhaps tomorrow I will reveal what is behind that door - if you don't already know. O.K.... no big secret. It's my half bath. I suppose if I lived in the South, we would call it a powder room?  In my neck of the woods, we just call it a half bath.  Anyway, it might be fun to show you what it look like before and what I have done with it so far.

So..........

One door down, 7  doors, 3 closet doors, 2 bathroom vanities and about 20 kitchen cabinets left to go.

The Evolution of a Little Table

Remember the little pink table I picked up about a month ago at a garage sale for $4.00?

I finally finished it.

It was a pain in the butt.

I spent WAAAAAAAAAAY more time on it than I should have.

First I decided to strip it... don't ask me why. The brush strokes were awful and it was sloppily put together. There was no way I could get the little crystal knobs off of the drawer, so I had to get creative.

So I spent a lot of time stripping the paint of first the pink, then grey, then blue - green layers, and finally a thick layer of shellac came off last.

I sanded it and  pulled out my Dremel to get in the grooves, all for a clean finish. I should have just primed the whole thing, did some light sanding, painted it and called it good.

But I didn't.

My obsessive nature kicked into overdrive... in a big way.

This is what it looked like all stripped down to the bare wood.

Nothing overly special.

This is what the little drawer looked like before it was cleaned up and primed.

The screws at the end of the knobs had been flattened and as hard as I tried, there was no way to cut them off , or undo them since the center of the knob was similar to a nail.  So I clean them up as well as I could and taped them off with painter's tape so I could work on the rest and paint around thm.

Here it is primed... ah, that's a bit better.

I might mention that this drawer is unique in that it goes all the way through and you can open it from either side.

Then the table was primed with Kilz primer.

Then spray painted with Heirloom white, a piece of scrap book paper was decoupaged on top, but not without ruining another piece of paper first. Something was missing, so I distressed the edges a bit.

It sat like that for a day or two. I didn't like it. Something was missing.

So I grabbed some Krylon Blue Ocean Breeze and spray painted it another color.

Then I put yet another piece of paper on top to decoupage, and added a rub on detail to the front beneath the door.  It was something that I picked up at the thrift store.

Only  now the paper was bubbling and not sticking and it was just generally having lots of issues. So it was ripped off and painted over again and a few more embellishments were added to the plain blue  top.

It's finally done enough that I can leave it alone.

I call it my Tiffany table because between the crystal knobs and the color of blue, it reminds me of the signature colors of the famed jewelry store, Tiffany & Co.

Here is a close up of the drawer and the detail.

Fun little table, but I spent way too much time on this one. Obviously, the blue looks different indoors as opposed to the outdoors.

This will go in my oldest daughter's bedroom for a little nightstand.

I do have to say that it was fun painting a piece of furniture without using a shade of white in the final finish!

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