Q: What project did we start four months ago that was just completed?

A: Painting the patio railing.

We went for four months with half of the railing & the gates only being primed. We had good weather over the Labor Day weekend (I know, delayed post. Sorry.) and we got it all done then along with a bonus project I've had my eye on since moving day.

I'm so proud of that railing. Even if it does not do its primary job of keeping chickens off of the patio...

We need to buy or borrow a pressure washer and go over pretty much the whole outside of the house, but the metal patio roof is definitely one of the places that needs it most. We also plan to plant hydrangea bushes in the flower beds on either side of the stairs and we are thinking about removing one step leading to the patio in the hopes that perhaps that will deter the chickens from roosting on the patio railing.

The bonus project that got done over the Labor Day weekend along with the railing was the mailbox. When we moved in the mailbox was pretty ugly:

We kept the post, bought a $7 plain metal mailbox, and used some paint and primer we already had to paint the post and the numbers. For an almost free project, I think it made a huge difference:

A couple of numbers were blurred out for privacy.

I am in love with my new mailbox.

P.S. I just realized that I have never posted any photos of our dog, Harley on here. We got him in July. Shame on me. Here he is:

This is the day we got him:

 This was a few days ago:

They grow up so fast...

Breakfast is Covered for a While

I forgot to mention yesterday that we also bought a new knob for the hall bathroom to replace the blue one and to go with our more modern theme. Here it is:

We also found clear drawer pulls to go with the clear acrylic knobs we purchased for the master bathroom. I looked around online and couldn't find any clear drawer pulls for less than about $25 each. The thought of spending $75 on three little drawer pulls was rather upsetting but I had more or less resigned myself to it when I happened to spot an endcap at Lowes with their specialty knobs and pulls. This was after several trips to multiple locations of both Home Depot and Lowes trying to get the right size and amount of hinges for all the doors and cabinets. You would really think I would have noticed them before, but while frantically rushing down the hinge aisle 10 minutes before closing, I saw them. The Hallelujah Chorus played in my head when I saw that they were less than half the price of the online ones and we managed to snag them and the hinges we needed before the store closed. Yay!

I think the clear hardware will look very snazzy once we fill in the old knob holes and paint the cabinets. Those glorious drawer pulls are the first thing I see when I step into the bathroom these days. I am in love with them.

Another minor project I tackled Friday was unpacking all of our art/picture frames which we've been putting off until the house is painted. I just couldn't stand it any longer so I unpacked everything and arranged the built ins in the living room, which until Friday were pretty much books on one side and nothing on the other. Here is the finished arrangement. Alton and I both reacted by saying that it looks more like people live here now. That's always a good thing to have going on in your house!

Another thing I'm in love with besides my drawer pulls are my Jonathan Adler cat bookends. My mom bought them for me at Barnes and Noble for a housewarming gift. They are on the right above the TV.



We actually are waiting until the walls are painted before hanging up our art, which is why some of it is currently just chilling on the mantle. I painted the orange Matisse copy and the other two are originals by my friend Beth.

And in other news, the chickens have all started laying eggs now! RZR has been laying for a few weeks now and the other two caught up a few days ago.

Our egg holder is overflowing! Aren't Rickshaw's green eggs so cool??



Hardware

We finally got rid of all the ugly, brassy gold hardware in the house! It took a while to get every single hinge and doorknob replaced, but we now have a house full of brushed nickel hardware.



Before:

 After:

 In progress:

 After:

We also replaced all the fleur de lis knobs and pulls in the kitchen with brushed nickel knobs and cup pulls. We are still working on getting all the hinges replaced in there.

Before:

After:

Replacing hardware isn't an expensive project, but it makes a huge impact and really helps update the whole house.

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. :)







In the Meantime...

No, we still have not finished the patio railing. We are about 90% there, but the gates need to be tweaked a bit and about half of the railing still only has primer and no paint on it. We have been waiting for a day that Alton is off and it is not raining, but that just hasn't happened recently. In the meantime, we have done a few more projects around the house. We've been sitting on a $30 Target gift card since Christmas and finally used it to buy a soap pump, tissue cover, towel ring, and toilet paper roll holder for the hall bathroom. (We've changed our vision for that bathroom since the previous post I wrote about it, but more on that later.)

 T.P. holder and towel ring before:

...and after:

 The whole shebang:



As you may be able to tell from our accessory selection, we've decided to step away from the coastal vibe we were leaning toward and go with a more modern one. We think it will tie in to the rest of the house better that way. We moved the old towel holder from this bathroom into the master because the previous owners had a towel ring on one side of the vanity in there and a fleur de lis hook on the other side, which we removed. So Alton's side has been towel ring-less for a while and the one we replaced in the hall bath was exactly the same as the one in the master on my side of the vanity.

No towel ring = sad, droopy countertop towel:

Towel ring = happy wall towel.

Ah, bathroom harmony.

There just so happens to be a Lowe's next to the Target we went to for our new bathroom accessories, so we stopped by there to look for something completely different (I'm sure you know how that goes) and walked out with a new pendant light to go above the kitchen sink.

The old fixture:

Here's the new one with the light off:

                                                                           light on:



I love the stripey pattern when the light is on.

So those are the small, indoor projects we've been working on while waiting to finish the railing. Also, my aunt sent me home with a set of wicker furniture when I went over there for the 4th, so here is a shot of our new, free (!) furniture with a sneak peek of the railing in the background:



You can see what I was talking about with all the rain lately in that rather gloomy photo...I'll be back soon with details of the recent eco-friendly project Alton did and hopefully a completed railing. In the meantime we will be choosing the perfect shade of grey for our living room, kitchen, and dining room. Stay tuned!

Baby Steps

While we were building up the funds to purchase patio railing materials, we made a few small changes around the yard and house, so I figured I would share those changes.

First, we just happened to glance at the price of new doorstops while at Home Depot a few weeks ago. They were around $1.75 or so. We thought about buying some because our current ones were (like all the other hardware in the house) brassy gold. Except the ones in the bathroom. Those were...rust colored. Ew. Anyway, we needed to run by the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store later that day, so we held off on buying the ones at Home Depot just in case they had some at the Re-Store. To our delight, they not only had new shiny silver doorstops, but they were only $0.30 a pop! So we now have all new shiny doorstops for only a few bucks. Woo!

Next, we decided that we wanted to get rid of the jellybean shaped flowerbed in the corner of the front yard and replace it with the weeping willow tree from the backyard. We haven't transplanted the tree yet, but we did pull up the concrete pavers that were outlining the jellybean bed and put down a circle of bricks to go around the tree, which matches the brick circles around the four Bradford Pear trees in the front yard. We're on the corner, so there are two in front of the house and two on the side. The jellybean bed was in the corner.

We also still need to get as much of that extra mulch up as possible and plant some grass seeds in the old jellybean shape.

Lastly, we decided that our old living room light fixture (from our old apartment, which weirdly didn't have any overhead lighting) would look best over my laptopping/reading chair in my craft room, so we hung that up. Here are some photos of that.

 Before

After

We still have lots to do in there. Soon, actually, because I volunteered to show it off in a studio tour hosted by the local art league. Gulp. If a bunch of strangers coming to view your space isn't motivation to get it finished, I don't know what is...

And in closing, here are some photos of flowers that recently bloomed in the yard:

 I pruned this rosebush back A LOT recently. I'm pretty sure I got rid of more of it than I kept, but it looks a lot less wild and mangy now.

I got four of these hanging baskets and four kinds of flower seeds to put on the existing hooks on the fence in the backyard. I'll post more photos when (and if) they bloom.