Getting our hands dirty

This past weekend we tackled the backyard.  Brian worked really hard to remove most of the weeds from the flower beds and I mowed down the weeds around the garden.  So things went from this:

 

To this:

We can actually see the bricks around the flower bed!  

Now we need to get busy planting flowers!

Our garden is starting to look exciting.  The strawberries are flowering and beginning to fruit:

While trimming the artichokes plants back I noticed we had actual artichokes!  (There's two in this picture, if you look close you can see one tucked away on the bottom right).

And the apricots are growing!

 

We do have some flowers growing around the yard.  There are a few late blooming daffodils:

The bearded iris are about ready to pop:

 

And I love the fan-shaped leaves of our ginkgo tree!

I even was able to pick flowers to fill some vases on our kitchen windowsill :o)

So that's the yard progress from the weekend.  Now we just have to start filling in the empty spaces and wait for things to grow!

My big yard sale find

"Big" find is a bit of an exaggeration.  This weekend the weather was beautiful so we decided to spend Saturday morning yard saling.  We made a list of the most interesting yard sales around town that we found on Craigslist and then Brian made a map of the best route to take.  I was really excited before we set out.  I was going to find some neat furniture to spend the weekend painting ..................... but all I found was a $3 mirror:

I had hopes for it even though at first glance it sorta made me grimace.  Here you can see the details a bit more ................. and the dust :o):

So when we made it home I got to work giving the mirror a couple coats of spray paint in "Heirloom White".  And it turned out looking really good, even Brian approved ......... although he didn't think of it as much of a find when I first showed it to him! :o)  Here's the after:

And a bit closer:

I decided to hang it in our front bedroom so guests staying over will have a mirror to use.  I think it works pretty well with the room color.  I would show a larger view of the room but it is a mess right now.  Brian is working on shelves for the closet so all the stuff we usually have hidden away is strewn about the bedroom ...... and I'm also working on re-painting the bookcases so books are everywhere too!  A bit of a disaster zone :o)

So even something that starts off looking a bit grungy can be made into something beautiful with a few layers of paint :o)

The Creation of a Backyard

I thought today would be a good time to talk about our yard since we have been trying to tackle the weeds there this week.  When we moved into our house the backyard was pretty much non-existent.  The previous owners had fenced a smaller area of the property to reduce the amount of yard work they had to do.  Therefore, one of our first major projects was to move the fence back to enclose our entire property. This would give us a large yard and garden area, especially since we wanted to have our wedding in the backyard!

Here you can see the small "backyard" area that we started off with.  The house has a decent size side yard around the corner of the house to the left, so the previous owners had some yard but not very much:

Last spring we got to work first mowing down the wild grass (i.e. weeds) and planting a few trees.  Here you can see where our property ends (where the tall weeds begin).  Those tall weeds are what our yard initially looked like!

 

Here you can see Brian working hard with his gigantic roto-tiller we rented:

 

And another view looking back towards the house from where our property ends.  You can see the old position of the fence.

Here's a picture of the beginnings of our garden.  We made frames for the beds from 1"x12" redwood boards.  We dug them most of the way into the ground to help keep the plants somewhat contained.  That's part of our plan to keep the raspberries in their beds :o)

And here's a picture of the yard when the garden beds were all in the ground and the grass began to grow:

Next we had to tackle the fence.  We ended up using pieces from the old fence for the new fence.  We put in all new posts and rails but re-used the fence boards from the old sections.  We had to buy a few new boards because some of the old boards were warped or cracked but it saved us a lot of money overall.  Here you can see  the first few fence posts being cemented into the ground.  (Don't worry, the last few posts are not cemented into place in this picture.....we made sure to level everything first!):

The most difficult part of the job was removing the old fence posts from the ground as they were held in pretty securely with cement.  My dad and brothers helped us out a lot to get it done!

So even though our yard looks a bit of a disaster to us now because of the weeds in the flower beds:

 

And around the garden:

But it is a major improvement from where we started!  We'll publish more pictures soon as we get the yard more under control :o)

House plants

I had a small table that had been in our bedroom acting as a stand for the cake tree that I had painted red a while ago.  You can see it here in the corner:

 

When I replaced the stand with my black trunk (more about that in this post) I decided to move it into the dining room to set one of my house plants on.  I primed it to cover up the red, then painted it a cheerful yellow.   My plant was also in need of a larger pot so I transplanted the plant and added a bit of new soil.  And here you can see how everything looks:

My poor "Angel Wing" begonia looks a bit scrawny but hopefully now that it's roots have room to grow it will be much happier and flower again.  It has the prettiest leaves, they are a dark green with silver spots on the top side and a pinkish underside.  Here you can see a closer picture of the "angel wing" leaves:

It's really lovely, I've never seen the silver pigment before on a plant!

And here's a closer picture of my new pot and the painted stand:

So that's all I've had time to fit in so far this week.  Brian and I have tried to tackle the yard some too but I will wait until we have better progress pictures to show before I post about that :o)

Adding some style with shelf paper

When I was working on the nightstand I bought some striped shelf paper to line the drawers with but in the end I decided against using it because the colors wouldn't work together.  I had eyed the same shelf paper a while ago for lining the back of the corner cabinet in our dining room (posted about here and here) but never got around to it.  So now that I had the paper I thought I'd test out a section and see how it looked.

I first started out with the drawer because if I didn't like how it looked I could just shut the drawer and ignore that it was there.  (After working with it some it is really easy to remove, not like wallpaper so if I had changed my mind it wouldn't have been difficult to remove.)  Here you can see a picture of the drawer:

The shelf paper is a ticking stripe pattern in a turquoisey-grey with thinner white and green stripes.  The green is pretty close in color to the green paint of our walls so it ties everything together pretty nicely.

Next I decided to tackle a bit larger of an area, the back of the cubby in the middle of the cabinet.  Working with the shelf paper was a bit frustrating although I think the stripe pattern did make it a little easier for lining things up and matching edges of side by side sections.  I began at the center edge of the cabinet back, aligning the paper and then working out from there.  The part that tends to be a bit tricky is smoothing out all the air bubbles.  I kept having to pull the paper back and work out the bubbles before moving on to the next section.  If the bubble is relatively small you can use a needle to prick the paper and release the air.

I left a little overhang at the bottom and top of the section I was working on, rather than try to cut everything perfectly before applying the shelf paper as you can see here:

I then used an exacto knife to trim the paper at the top and bottom edges for a nice clean edge:

And here you can see the finished cubby and drawer:

And finally I worked on the larger compartment on top:

Here it is with all our dishes loaded back in:

 

And a closer view with the light on:

Now we really need to replace the cabinet window with plain glass!:

 

One of the added benefits of the darker color of the shelf paper is that it makes the cabinet appear deeper than when the back was a plain white.  Not only is it cuter it also seems larger and makes our white dishes stand out more!

For comparisons sake, here is a before picture:

And an after picture:

 

So that concludes my adventure with shelf paper, there are a lot of cute styles of shelf paper out there, I had no idea!  There are some really cool patterns at Chic Shelf Paper ............ or they have some nice patterns that are less expensive at Orchard Supply Hardware where I found mine :o)

The living room

I realized looking through the "Our Bungalow" page on our blog that the picture of the living room was quite out of date.  We haven't finished everything we would like to in the room but we've made some progress.  So here's the previous picture we had posted of our living room:

And here's a more current picture:

The main changes to the room are the couch and artwork.  The couch was a Craigslist find that we got a good deal on.  We don't have a lot of extra money to spend on buying all new items for our house so we end up doing a lot of refurbishing of things we already have or buying things cheaply that with a little TLC can be brought back to life (as you might have noticed from previous posts!).  Overall, we want things that are functional but also that make our home comfortable and fun.

The painting was a birthday gift from my Grandma a few years back that we finally hung up.  We plan to put something more on the wall flanking the painting but we aren't sure what yet.  I'm also hoping to reupholster or make a slip cover for the chair in the center of the picture, right now it is covered with a blanket.  The golden arm that you can see in the bottom right of the picture is Brian's recliner that I really want to get rid of, but until we find a new one, we're stuck with it.  I also hope to eventually find a new area rug and a cabinet that we can hide all our dvd's in to help alleviate the clutter.

Here's a picture of the opposite wall of the living room:

You can see this is where we have the blue dresser from a previous post and the chairs also from a previous post.  I'm hoping to hang either the mirror resting on the dresser or something else on the wall one of these days.

So that's how are living room is looking, we will keep you posted as we make any changes.

A numbered nightstand

For some reason I'm attracted to old apothecary type items ........ maybe it's the scientist in me.   Things like a wall full of numbered drawers filled with all sorts of ingredients and shelves of bottles with neat old labels.  "Let me just get the eye of newt from drawer number 47, it will cure all your ailments!"  Maybe that's more from witches in movies :o)

Anyway, the reason for the post.  I can't remember where but sometime in the past week or so browsing the internet I came across a blog where someone had painted numbers on the drawers to a dresser.  I tried to find the blog again this weekend but couldn't so I tried to do as best I could from what I remembered.

Brian had a small nightstand that I had painted black because a while back I thought black furniture might look nice.  But hidden away in the corner, the nightstand just looked dreary.  So I decided maybe a fresh coat of paint and some new handles might bring it back to life.  Here's a before picture:

Here's another picture of the nightstand outside in better light:

So first I had to remove the old handles from the drawers.  They were actually just wine cork size pieces of wood that had been nailed to the drawers so I had to work at driving them out with a nail set:

And then prying them off with a hammer and driving the nails back through the inside (why couldn't they have just been simple screw on handles?!).

Once I had all the handles off I filled in the nail holes with wood filler and then gave the whole nightstand a light sanding to rough up the surface a bit.  Then I applied a coat of primer.  This time I tried an oil-based primer which was quite odorous even working outside (the weather has been nice!) and stickier it seemed than the water-based primer.  Therefore, I would recommend the water-based primer unless your task calls for the oil-based (the can states use for water, smoke, or tannin stains, sealing odors .... maybe it masks the odor with it's own!).

Next I applied two coats of Martha Stewart Paints' "Nimbus Cloud", a very light grey color.  After I let that dry for a while I got down to drilling the holes for the handles.  I bought cup-shaped pulls in a pewter finish that I thought would work nicely with the brushed nickel finish of the curtain rods and the lamp on the nightstand in our bedroom.  So I first measured and marked where I wanted the pulls to go and then got to drilling:

My first two drilling attempts were not quite successful (the holes being too small) but once I chose the correct drill bit I was good to go.  Here you can see the nightstand with it's new coat of paint and handles:

And now for where the numbered drawers, apothecary-style comes in.  I found a font online that I liked then enlarged it to the size I wanted and printed it out onto thick photo paper.  I then used an exacto knife to cut out the letters and numbers (I left off the curlique of the "N" just out of personal preference):

 

I then traced the letters onto the drawers and filled them in with black paint:

And here is a picture of the finished product:

Isn't it cute!  Here is a picture of it back in the bedroom performing it's duty as a nightstand:

 

And a bit of a closer view:

I'm loving it!  I wish it wasn't hidden-off in the corner of the room but was on full display.  Now I want to paint numbers on everything!