Scenes

Raspberry

 I knew those mid-seventies sunny days we had last week couldn't last. I'm almost relieved. I wasn't ready for lilacs in March.

The weather was perfect, really. Just enough to green up everyone's lawn and pop up snowdrops and crocuses, and get the daffodils well underway. Just enough to give us hope for the remaining few weeks of mid-forties/low-fifties we have left.

Crocus

Daffodils

See how green everything is? Yes. I like it this way. I have seedlings in my cold frame, and tomorrow Patrick and I are planning to cut some more sod off my garden. Last year, I planted an 18 x 20 square of it. This year, 24 x 40. Yee doggies.

Petecat

Never mind that it's supposed to snow, just, never mind.

Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!

Downstairs bathroom, after

I think I can finally declare this one done.

Well, done save for caulking and repainting the baseboards, which I honestly acknowledge may take until Christmas (possibly longer) and in the spirit of moving things along, I'll just share pictures now before the whole project fades into obscurity. (See that blue tape to the right of the sink? That's where I started taping off to caulk and paint and got wholly dispirited.) Seems logical.

For reference, the before:

Whoa, nelly. I'm so in love with this room now. I think it might be my favorite in the house. I like to sit in the dining room while I eat breakfast alone in the mornings and look at the sun beaming into the bathroom and smile. Hit's so purty.

I learned a good lesson with this one: a bathroom facelift is a good place to start, decorating-wise. There are fewer variables, and more direction than you have with most other rooms. All the characters-- shower, toilet, sink-- are set, you just have to pretty it up.

In the grand scheme of things, we didn't do much. We tiled, that was the biggest thing. We also moved the electrical box about eight inches up the wall (it was oddly low, since the previous medicine cabinet had come with a built-in light. Me, I wanted a nice, classy ceiling-scraping light fixture, to draw your eye up and sit pretty atop the mirror I scored at one of my new favorite antiquing haunts.

The price was marked $38, I said how about $25, and the guy says, "How about $20?" That, friends, is my kind of place! My dad repaired the mirror frame, and I painted it cream. (Behr Evening Sun, the same color as our headboard.) 

I chose to work with the vanity and sink we inherited-- they aren't bad, really, just generic. Generic can be upgraded, though. Pretty easily. I got a new faucet and cabinet hardware (from Home Depot) and primed (with Benjamin Moore's SmartPrime-- great stuff!) and painted it Valspar Woodlawn Music Room. I don't really know what that means, that color name, but I like the yellow a lot. It goes really nicely with the walls, which are Behr Baked Brie. 

Other things I did: painted the tile over the sink (quick, cheap fix), made curtains for the window and the shower, hung a new wooden blind, bought new towel bars, switchplates, and a new rug from Anthropologie thanks to a very awesome birthday present gift card. 

Eventually I'll hang those two yellow-flowered plates on the wall over the toilet, but I need to find something to hang in between them first. Eventually-eventually we'll swap out the ceiling fixture and move the whole electrical box to the center of the room... that's eventually-eventually because it will involve tearing out the floor above down to the studs. Fortunately, the room directly above this is our upstairs bathroom, and tearing that floor down to the studs is exactly what we plan on doing. Eventually-eventually.

So it goes.

Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!

The view from here

This is where I'm standing when I feel luckiest. It's the north-facing window in my second-floor office, and this is what I can see, this time of year, when I look out. 

Hello, heaven. Hello good neighbors and pretty forsythia bushes, hello brick pile and future shed foundation. Hello fence! Hello asparagus patch and raspberry patch and whole unbroken promise of this year's growing season. 

This time last year, we were nigh unto stripping and sanding floors. There was no garden, no chicken coop and yard, no orchard, no raspberries or asparagus. The house was just a house and a promise, nowhere near home, yet. Headed into this year's busy time, I feel so grateful for the infrastructure already established, all the things that won't need to be re-done now that they've been done once. Even better, I know some year in the future, spring will be easier still: just a till and a rake and some seeds is all it will take. Hopefully when we're at that point, the wonderful beautiful things I'm imagining now will all be reality. They'll be part of this view, too, and I'll probably feel even luckier, and even sappier, than I do now.

Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!

Yard projects

Just a note to say: YES, Genevieve is finally home! We searched high and low for two days, and saw not a trace-- and then our up-the-street neighbor heard from another neighbor who had a chicken roosting in his backyard... up the street we marched with a container of fresh-picked earthworms, and five minutes later we had our bird. Huzzah!

On with the show, then. It has been a very busy two days, project-wise. It has been so incredibly unbelievably warm and sunny, and it is that time of year when it's near-unbearable to spend time inside. By July I'll get all jaded and start taking the greenness for granted, but right now I can't do anything but drink it in. I built a gate for my fence. That felt good. Today I marked off all the new ground to be broken inside the garden, and soon, I hope, we'll borrow the sod-cutter and make it reality. Only then can I plant, and boy, let me tell you, I am itching to plant.


I went to visit a friend in Binghamton on Tuesday, and her peas are already in the ground. I suffered a faltering of garden self-esteem. Thank goodness I already have spinach and arugula seedlings in my cold frame. At least I can beat her at the salad game, right? (Hi Kate :))

Also getting underway is a perhaps overly ambitious but anticipated shed-moving adventure. We want to take this shed, as shown:

... and relocate it to this improvised foundation closer to the garden, as shown:

(It actually looks way more official than that now, since I've dug out the grass and made everything level and trimmed the board-ends and screwed it all together.) I'm going to fill in the foundation with concrete and a motley assortment of rocks, rubble, broken bricks and clay flowerpots, and whatever else I can haul out of our weedrow in the intervening eight days.

Where the shed used to stand, out under the hickories just outside our kitchen window, we are going to build a patio. There are eight giant bluestone pavers reposing in the weeds in the back corner of our land... left there like beached whales when the town replaced all the sidewalks sometime ago... and, well, YES, as a matter of fact a reclaimed bluestone patio DOES seem like a very good idea under those hickories just outside the kitchen window. Like, one of the best ideas I've heard this century.

Oh, and please don't be impressed by any of this. My sweet salt-of-the-earth neighbor (he of the cookies, the Santa Claus, the constant lending of tools and time and guidance and porch hospitality) came over and pronounced me "pioneer woman" after I hung up the gate. Even that was over the top. I had help, see. I had assistance. I owe a good measure of the credit for the success of these endeavors to Pete. As shown.

It was really nice to watch and listen to the robins this evening, sitting on the porch with Patrick and a beer. He sighed and said, "The family's back together."

Yes indeed. Tomorrow, we reinforce the chicken yard!

Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!

Genevieve, come home!

I didn't expect this at all! I took these pictures of Genevieve "helping" me turn the compost a few days ago, with no inkling at all of any encroaching avian malcontent.

I got home from a day in Binghamton yesterday, and she was gone. Genevieve, honey, we could have negotiated. Better feed, better lodging? A once-weekly chicken spa with earthworm scampi for lunch?

She has done this before. She is an escape artist. I'm optimistic, but also starting to worry-- we left her coop open with the light on, and she didn't come home last night. She could easily have roosted up in one of our neighbor's pine trees, or... 

I've looked all around, I've told the neighbors. She will come home, in time, or she won't. Sniffle. Oh, the unpredictabilities of livestock.

Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!

Fence!

So, I hadn't planned on asking Patrick for help with this. I try to limit the things for which I request his help to things wayyy beyond my ken. And, though I'd never fenced before, I assumed I could handle it. I knew how to use a circular saw, and a drill. How hard could it be?

Patrick must've been watching from a window when I attempted to attach the first board. With my right hand, I attempted to hold the end of a 12-foot-long piece of lumber in place on the fence post. With my left, I tried to simultaneously hold the screw in place, keep it upright, and pull the trigger on the cordless drill.

The screw slipped, the bit fell out, the end of the board came down on my foot. I may have said a bad word.

Patrick came out, took over the drill, and two and a half hours later, we had our fence. I took a picture this morning, with that gorgeous early spring morning sun struggling up over the sugar maples in bud:

(The shadow person is me.) I'm in love with this fence! It might not be everybody's idea of beauty, but it measures up to mine. The beauty of rustic vernacular architecture combined with the beauty of a secure and productive garden? Yes please. 

We ran 4-foot-high welded wire all around the square before attaching the boards, because, let's face it, the boards aren't really there to keep anything out. They're there to make it look pretty. I can't wait for my potatoes to get here so I can put them in the ground.

My north-facing office window looks directly out onto this slice of heaven. It's a sight that makes deadline logjams (like the one I have right now) so hard to commit to. I try to write, I get frustrated, I get up and pace and stand at my window. I look at that greening yard, and those emerging daffodils (and weeds) and I decide I can spare an hour. Just an hour. So it goes. 

Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!

Charmed

I got to spend part of my day with these guys yesterday. Two week old baby goats. For a couple of years I've been thinking progressively more and more seriously about having goats here, someday. For milk and cheese. I have a feeling yesterday may have sealed the deal...

At Painted Goat, in Garratsville.

Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!