Let's Go Outside

A couple of months ago, I showed you some photos of our ivy-covered trees.  Quick reminder:

We didn't take any real "before" photos, and what you're looking at here is my husband after an hour of bushwhacking to get in there as far as he is.  To imagine a true "before," picture the ivy that's surrounding Ray coming all the way to the ground.  There are a couple of other things to which I'd like to draw your attention in this photo:  see all the small trees sprouting up to Ray's left?  The bald, grass-less patch (where a random clump of bamboo used to be) behind him?  And the branches popping out of the ivy at the top right?  How about all the ivy growing on the ground-- see that?  And that tiny sliver of red to Ray's right-- it's our neighbors' garage.


Okay, well here's a shot I took today after lunch of the same spot:

Yes, that is is the same view.

First things first: what we've done.  

Ray has spent every free minute attacking the ivy in what we thought might be a too-late attempt to save the trees.  Good news: they're both alive!  Bad news: they're really weirdly shaped because the ivy was strangling their trunks.  Good news: the one on the left appears to be a healthy cherry tree!  Bad news: mature fruit trees = rats.  More bad news: somebody limbed the tree a million years ago and the fruit will be way too high for us to reach.  Even more bad news: the neighbors' garage isn't fully painted.  We didn't know that before.  Because we literally couldn't see it.  Still more bad news: we're going to have to replace that fence.  Obviously.  

We've also uprooted all those saplings and spent hours of our lives pulling ivy roots out of the ground-- some of them were easily 15ft long.  

This picture (featuring the right-hand tree) was taken in the middle of the process, just to give you some idea of what we were up against:

We've also seeded the bald patch where the bamboo used to be, and it's filling in nicely.  Today we seeded the dirt you see in the second photo-- where before there was nothing but ivy, there will now be lush green grass.

Here's another view (taken from our covered patio two months ago):

And a view from the same vantage point this afternoon:

 

Here's another view from the covered patio today.  Behold our verdant kingdom!

 All the dirt you see there was covered with ivy in the very recent past.

And speaking of our covered patio, we're making lots of changes out there and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.  In the meantime, can I get some applause for my incredibly hardworking and handsome husband?

The Good, The Bad, The Bug-ly

This week has been a bit of a roller-coaster here in the mid-Willamette Valley.  Beautiful sunshine and temperatures in the high seventies have brought out both the best and the worst in all of us.  You see, we Oregonians (native and transplanted) are not used to seeing the sun until July-- last year on Memorial Day I was wearing a down coat and carrying an umbrella-- and we are not equipped to handle this unexpected gift.  Kind of like how lottery winners immediately go off the rails and wind up living alone in cheap motels and drowning their sorrows with over-the-counter cough syrup.*

So anyway, three things that happened this week:

THE GOOD:

Yesterday a pal and I took a quick road trip to Eugene, where we visited the Home Goods (I returned the navy rug I'd bought for the dining room-- more on that some other time), ate lunch at the Cornbread Café (vegan, delicious, this-could-only-happen-in-Eugene-Oregon diner), and checked out a place that'd been highly recommended by reviewers all over the internet: Oak Street Vintage.

If you live within driving distance, you absolutely MUST check out this tiny, flawlessly curated spot.  I've been in quite a few antique and vintage haunts in Oregon, and most of them are full of useless tchotchkes (think the 80's Coca-Cola glasses that came free with your Big Mac, etc.)  Oak Street Vintage, on the other hand, has a thoughtful collection of beautiful (and fairly priced) midcentury pieces.  I almost lost my head and whipped out my Visa card over the Edward Wormley console table (scroll down and click the photo.  Yeah.  It is amazing.  In person it is even more stunning) but for reasons that will soon become apparent to you, I resisted.  But I've been looking for just the right piece to go behind the couch, and I'm not saying I won't go back for it.  Actually, I might go back for it.

I did leave with one pretty amazing treasure.  Both my pal K and I were wild about two things: an unbelievable oversized teak ice bucket with brass bull-ring handles ($16) and a set of teak-handled fireplace tools with brass bands ($30).  We flipped a coin, and I won the fireplace tools!  They are SO. GORGEOUS:

This set replaces the cheap ones we bought from Target-- we paid $20ish for those and one of then handles fell off immediately upon use-- and I'm always thrilled when I can replace something generic from a big-box store with something unique and special.

THE BAD:

One or more dead rats somewhere under the house or in the walls + lovely warm temperatures = a smelly and fly-infested week at our place!  Our pest-control company came out to retrieve the rat at our request, but after halfheartedly sniffing around for like thirty seconds the tech announced that he had no idea where the rat was, and he didn't want to go into our super-narrow crawl-space, so he left without doing anything.  We pay $70/mo for their services, and I'm really unhappy with the quality we've gotten.  One of their techs is awesome (he's the one who immediately located and removed FOUR dead rats from the attic) but all the others are crap, and you don't get to pick who shows up.  Every tech that's been here has given us a different story on whether or not the company offers exclusion services and attic/crawlspace restoration.

So after the tech left on Wednesday, I finally broke down and called the pest-control company that everyone in our town fervently recommends.  Rather than poisoning the rats like our current company, they do complete exclusion work and then trap whatever rodents might still be left in the house.  They're coming on Wednesday to give us an estimate, and based on what others have told me, I expect this is going to cost me upwards of $2000.  Which explains why I didn't buy the Edward Wormley console yesterday, right?  But I don't even care about the money-- I'll charge it and pay it off forever if I have to.  I'm at the end of my rope here.  At this point I would give them WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT if it means we'll live in a rat-free house.  

THE BUG-LY:

Ants ants ants ants ants ants antsantsantsants.  ANTS!  Ants are everywhere.  Tiny little ants on my living room ceiling, crawling out from the gaps between my floors and my baseboards, hanging out in the bathtub, circling the toilet, chillaxing on the walls in my hallway, cruising up the windows in my guest room.  In fact, they are absolutely EVERYWHERE in the house except the kitchen (can someone please explain this to me?  I mean, we keep the food in the kitchen, not on the living room ceiling). 

I've had fresh Terro out for them morning and night for over a month, and they're still coming.  They show not the faintest sign of slowing down.  And our current pest-control people refused to spray even a drop of professional-grade ant bait unless we paid them $200 up front.  Yes-- that's on top of the $70 we pay them monthly to not do a goddamned thing.

So, quick recap: we're having lovely weather and I scored some awesome fireplace tools, but my house reeks of death and has been overrun by every gross thing you can think of.  On balance, I'd give this week a C.

 
*overly dramatic comparison

Half-RAST

I think my RAST makeover is about 40% done, and I need some advice.  

This is when I really, really hate living so far away from my friends and family-- especially my mom and sister.  They'd be able to tell me if I'm on the right track.  My husband, while being a truly wonderful person, is profoundly design-challenged (ask me about the time, perhaps a month into our relationship, that he picked out a black plastic TV stand from Wal-Mart and tried to convince me that it was "kind of Bauhaus.") and I think my friends here might be too kind to tell me when my taste level is what Zac Posen might politely call "questionable."

I started keeping this blog (and continue to maintain it) so our East Coast and Midwest loved ones could occasionally drop in on our West Coast life, but more and more I'm aware of the blog's limitations.  My photography skills are almost as terrible as my photography equipment, and I know the pictures I take and post aren't at all representative of what I see when I look around our little house.  And while I love having my own home to renovate and decorate as I please, sometimes it really makes me miss my family.

I texted my mom the following iPhone photo of an in-progress RAST to get her opinion, only later realizing that the color in the photo is CRAZY off:

I mean, it is SO CHARTREUSE in these photos.  It looks positively neon.  And the truth is, it's really nowhere near as bright as it looks in the above photo, or in this one (taken at the same time): 

It is, like, glowing in these pictures.  It looks like it just stepped off a spaceship.  And after I texted my mom and asked for her opinion, she said, "I like the color, but I'm not sure I could live with it."  I thought, "It's not THAT bright, is it?"  And then I looked at the photos and realized that the color she saw is totally radioactive.    

I wish I could explain this, but I know less than nothing about photography.  The horrible photo that follows is somehow a much more accurate depiction of the RAST color, but everything else looks much darker than it really is, and I really need to remember to turn off my lamps before taking pictures in my bedroom:

And you don't have to tell me how awful the orange flame-stitched pillows look.  I know.  I'm on it.

Even crazier are the photos I took with our actual (ancient, crappy) camera.  Here's one:

In the iPhone photos it appears neon yellow; in the camera photos it's grasshopper green.  I took both sets at the same time, by the way.  Here's a side-by-side of the birds' eye views:

In reality it is neither this yellow nor this green.  

So this is just a long way of telling you that I need someone's opinion on the color (is it too bright?  Too light?  Not brown enough?), but I can't get it.  Because the only way to show anyone the color is via photograph.  And I can't photograph the color.

Since I'm pretty much stuck floating out here in this cold design wasteland all by myself, I guess I'll go ahead and order the fretwork.  After doing some research, I realized that it'll be much cheaper for me to order two kits from myoverlays.com than to buy all the tools I'd need to cut my own fretwork, so I'm going to admit DIY defeat and go with the premade option.  I'm debating between these two designs:

 

I'm leaning towards the second one, which means it's probably hideous because every time I offer anyone an option like this she always picks the one I wasn't favoring.  Sigh.

Me: 1; Orange Peel: 0

I have battled the orange peel texture on my bathroom walls, and I have won.  I WIN I WIN I WIN!  It wasn't as hard as I thought, either.  I'll show you some photos of the process.  We started here:

  

Do you see it?  Look at the texture of the walls over the vanity.  It's pretty aggressive.  I thought I could live with it, but the more I lived with it, the more I hated it-- it made wall repairs difficult and muddied up the wall color.  Plus it looked dated.  Like, majorly dated.

I did some research and I thought I'd wind up skim-coating via the squeegee method, in which you roll slightly thinned drywall mud onto the walls with a 3/4 nap roller and then smooth it with a squeegee (hence the name).  But I kept thinking about a conversation I'd had with my mom when I first moved in.  She'd wondered if maybe I could just apply mud to the walls and then scrape it with a taping knife, thereby filling in the gaps in the orange peel without having to really resurface the walls.  And I started thinking, why not?  I decided to try a little patch just to see how it worked.  

And it worked great.

Here's a close-up of the original texture:

Oof, that shit is UGLY.  This is what we were working with after one coat of mud:

And after the second coat:

And a wide shot of the second coat:

I sanded between the first and second coats.  It was awful.  But when I finished, I primed and applied two coats of very pale blue-gray paint, and I'm so happy with the results:

 

And your close-up:

Nothin' but roller texture.  

SUCCESS!

Side-by-sides for ya:

August 2012 to April 2013:

Boo-yah.

And also, the antique nightstand that got bounced from my bedroom in favor of a RAST has found a new home in my hallway.  How darling is this?

 

I'm going to hang King Charles above it.

This weekend I tackle the RASTs-- updates to come!

New. And Improved?

I pulled the trigger on the RASTs I've been wanting.  Yesterday I made the endless one-and-a-half-hour trip to the IKEA in Portland all by myself (sigh-- when you live 3000 miles from most of your friends and all of your family, you have to go to IKEA by yourself sometimes), and I almost came home with three things: two RASTs and the perfect ceiling fixture for my guest room.  Flush-mounted so tall people can walk under it without whacking their heads, not boob-shaped, no weird glass, nice textured shade, etc.  And also, it costs $30.  I didn't leave with it, though, because they wouldn't sell it to me.  Apparently it's been recalled?  Which isn't mentioned on the website.  And it was on the shelf, available for sale, in the store.  Anyway.

RASTs!  Behold them in their pre-makeover state:

They look pretty sad, no?  But they will be beautiful when I finish with them.  And I think they make the room look bigger since they're so shallow-- there's much more floor space than there was with my previous mismatched nightstands.  Here's the view from the doorway:

 

So what will I do with them?  Here's my inspiration photo (from here):

 Mine are already the proper height for the bed, so they won't be getting legs like the one in the inspiration photo, and I'm probably not going to bother adding the false drawer front to the bottom-- though I may decide to put a faux-legs-looking panel across the front at the bottom.  I haven't yet decided how to apply the fretwork; that'll take a trip to the Home Depot to see what they've got and how much it will cost me to do the work myself versus ordering pre-cut fretwork from myoverlays.com.  As for the color, check out this detail shot of my rug:

 

Hey box fan!  Anyway, if you count the bands of color on the rug from the outside in, when you get to the fifth band, you'll see the bright chartreuse-y green I'm thinking I'll use.  I'm also attracted to the slightly-less-chartruese version in the second band.  Here's another view that might help you see both options more clearly:

Of course, this will mean finding a new home for my orange flame-stitched pillows.  Right now I'm totally feeling this fabric for their replacements:

Or similar.  Or not similar at all.  I love fabric-hunting and I can't wait to see what I can find.

After I left the IKEA yesterday I couldn't help wandering into the Home Goods that's conveniently located right next door to it.  I left with two things.  First, a dining room rug:

Please pardon the fact that it's currently sitting on top of the old dining room rug.  Right now we're in a trial-run type of situation.  I like the navy, and I think it makes the dining room feel a lot younger and brighter, but it's the same size as the old rug and I really think it's just too small.  I really need a 7' square.  What do you think?  Too small?

And then I couldn't resist a navy-and-white ikat flatweave for $14.99.  It's chilling in my bathroom, where it covers a significant chunk of the pink Marmoleum floor:

Yeah, just noticed that blue painter's tape stuck to the wall above the window.  I'm a mess.  

While we're in the bathroom, see that light-blue stripe painted under the window?  I was going to paint the bathroom this weekend.  Here's another shot that shows a few more patches of what will be the color:

But this morning I decided I'm going to do something just a little more drastic than paint.  I've been fighting with the orange-peel texture ever since we moved in.  I just don't like it.  And every time I have to do anything in there, it means buying a can of orange-peel spray and trying to blend the patch.  Which never works.  So why am I going out of my way to maintain it when I could just do this instead?

Yes, that's right.  I'm going to skim-coat the walls and ceiling using the squeegee method.  And then I'm going to paint them blue.  And then I'm going to order some flooring samples.  And then and then andthenandthenandthen!  [Name that movie?  Anyone?]

I Want, I Need, I Have To Have

I'm aware it's not good to covet, but I'm a covet-er.  The following is a list of five things I'm dying for right now:

1.  New Sofa:

I've shown you this sofa before, I know.  And really, I'm about to pull the trigger.  Thing is, it costs about $2000, and I'm cheap.  I'm a cheap covet-er.  I mean, I don't know why $2K seems like such a big deal-- I've had my current sofa for 11 years and I spend as much time as possible sitting on the couch, so it's not like I won't get my money's worth out of the thing.  I'd pay that for a laptop that would only last two years.  Can you tell I'm trying really hard to talk myself into this?

2.  Jens Quistgaard Lovig Desk:

I've been lusting after one of these babies for ages.  It would look SO pretty behind my new sofa, and it's so big that Ray and I could both work there; it's even big enough to serve as a secondary dining table.  It was designed by Jens Quistgaard (as you may have guessed from its name) in the 70's.  I love its skinny inset legs, narrow drawers, and broad work surface.  Even better, that top hutch flips down to give you 10" more desk.  Unfortunately, they generally sell for somewhere between $2000 and $5000.  I happened across one (slightly damaged) on Craigslist for $650 last week, but (for obvious reasons, ie, it is gorgeous, that's a great price for it, and it's an iconic piece) it had already sold when I emailed the seller  [swears under breath].  Oh well.  I'll just keep coveting.

3.  A New Dining-Room Rug

No photo-- I have no idea what I want in there.  I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it.

4.  Two Rast Dressers That Will Be Remade Into Gorgeous Nightstands Inspired By This One:

Found here.

Yes, that is a Rast.  I'm obsessed with it.  When I close my eyes at night, I dream of Rasts.  Since they're only $35 a pop, this one's just a matter of driving to Portland and picking up a pair.  Even a cheap covet-er can afford that.  I'll paint mine chartreuse (it's a dominant color in the maybe-priceless-maybe-came-from-a-yard-sale Persian in my bedroom).  I'll follow the tutorial provided at the link above or maybe I'll order some molding from O'verlays to make the process a little simpler.  In any case, these'll provide more storage in the bedroom and give us more nightstand surface to work with.  Perhaps for a new pair of awesome lamps?

5.  A Big White Ceramic Dog For The Hearth:

 

Because isn't that awesome?  I've wanted them ever since I was like eight and I read that Anne of Green Gables had two china dogs named Gog and Magog (one facing east, one facing west) on either side of her hearth.  Or maybe I'd take a set of really cool peacock-blue antique Foo dogs:

Full disclosure: there are a million other things I want too (hello, everything for the guest room), but I think it's best not to appear too greedy on one's blog, right?

Linen Closet For The Win!

My quick linen-closet makeover is pretty much done and I'm so happy.  Though it's a much larger space, it took half the time that the entry closet did.  Fortunately. 

Here are a few "before" photos to remind you what exactly we were workin' with:

Check out the holes in the walls in between the weird wooden slats of that weird wooden slat-thing on the left.  And please admire all the crap jammed in there too.

The bare light bulb really shows off the awesome condition of the walls in here, right?

I have nothing to say for myself.

So, as I mentioned in the last post, I'd planned to 1) repair, prime, and paint the walls and trim (you can't see the trim in any of these photos, but like all the other closets in the house, the back of the door and the door molding were painted a gross barf color); 2) install 5 stained wooden shelves with shelf paper; 3) find a small dresser with a few drawers to hold miscellaneous crap; 4) re-home linens into the closet and find other homes for stuff that doesn't belong in a linen closet; and 5) replace the bare bulb with a sconce.

I didn't accomplish anywhere near all of that, but as it happens, I didn't need to.

Here's a shot I took last night of the fresh, clean linen closet (don't mind the glaring light please):

So here's what I DID do:

1) First I demo'ed the old gross shelves and the strange wooden rack-type-thing.  Then I spent a full day filling holes in the walls and huge cracks in the corners. 

Then I primed (two coats--these walls were really thirsty and covered with epic stains), then painted the walls with Behr's Reflecting Pool.  It looks a little purpley in this shot, but it's actually a really pale blue-gray.  My camera is crap.

2) Instead of going with wooden shelves, which would have looked beautiful and been cheaper, we opted for these wire ones.  We chose them for a bunch of reasons: first, they're lightweight; second, they'll permit airflow (very important when you live in the perpetually damp Pacific Northwest);  third, they're adjustable; and fourth, they're really really ridiculously easy to install.  We just bought two 60" tracks and two eight-foot lengths of shelf, which we cut to size with our handy-dandy hacksaws (we have two, I don't know why).  

3) I haven't found the little dresser yet-- I looked all over the used furniture and antique joints in town, but I couldn't find anything worthy of my fresh clean new closet.  Still looking.

4) The linens are in the closet and I love it.  Also, a bunch of stuff has found new lodging in the tool closet or the master closet or the built-in in the bathroom.

5  Now that the walls are freshly painted and the back of the door isn't puke-colored, the bare lightbulb doesn't bother me.  Maybe I'll change it out someday when we're done with everything else.  In the meantime, please enjoy this side-by-side comparison of my closet before and after:

I still need to hang my gift-wrap organizer and my cleaning-supplies organizer and my broom-and-mop hanger (those'll go in the nook where the slat-things were) and I'll be on the lookout for the small dresser to hold my picture-hanging supplies, etc. 

But for now, yeah-- I'm happy.