Dirt Under Our Nails and Paint In Our Hair

There are several projects we still want to tackle in the backyard, one of which is growing a vegetable garden. We still have a lot of work to do to actually set the garden up, but we took a couple of small steps last month when Alton bought two 55 gallon barrels (originally used to ship olives) for only $16 each and turned one into a composter and one into a rain barrel. The composter is complete and has been accumulating our plant and paper waste for a while now, as you can see.

Alton spray painted it black so that it would get hotter and break everything down faster. He built a base for it and the whole thing is on a pipe so we can easily flip it over to mix the compost up.

The rain barrel is not yet hooked up because we actually need to have gutters installed to direct rainwater into the barrel. This is it currently. We plan to spray paint it white as a base color to eventually paint some sort of fun design on it.

And in other backyard news, look how big the chickens are! They should be laying eggs any day now.

So that about covers the first half of this post's title. As for the paint in our hair, well our ceilings are not white. They are very light beige, which won't match at all once we paint the walls grey. So we decided to paint the ceilings white. All of them. So far we have only done the craft room because it was completely painted the day before the Art League came to see it. (Yay procrastination!)

Painting ceilings is not fun. Just FYI.



So the ceilings of the craft room were painted as well as the walls. I also painted a couple of cabinets that the previous owners left in the attic. Here they are before:

During:

And after:

And here is the entire room, all painted and neat:

Yes, the cat has an entire wall for her stuff.

Looking good, eh? We still need crown molding, a new fan/light, new blinds (the ones in there are yellowed and brittle), and new door hardware (which we need throughout the whole house). I also plan to get some curtains and to put up a big, custom bulletin board on one wall and a shelf on the other, over the L shaped desk. The craft room is really coming together. I even cleaned out the closet. :)







Office, Revisited

We finished painting Alton's office last week and put chair railing up and moved his desk in yesterday. We still need to put a new fan and a rug in there, but for now we're finished.

The spots in the photos are a result of my camera being screwy - there aren't actually random spots in the room. This goes for the weird shape on the wall in the first photo. I think that is a reflection off of the computer monitor. Rest assured, the paint job is much smoother than that.

Here is a close-up of just the paint colors:

The most exiting part of getting this room done (for me) is that my craft room is no longer the inaccessible junk room. Huzzah! Just as a preview, here is a photo I found of the color inspiration for my craft room:

We probably won't be painting in there for a while. In fact, our next project is going to be the hall bathroom. I will try to find some inspiration photos for that room to post while we are gathering the funds to actually do it.