Artsy Fartsy

What a weekend. I want to go back and live it all over again, it was just too perfect. It was one of those weekends where I was having too much fun to remember to take pictures. Now that’s something. I took Friday off to go to Sturbridge and shop with my mom. The weather was fantastic, we had lunch, we bought shoes, it was the most wonderful day.

Saturday we worked on the deck and in the yard. We went for a motorcycle ride and to a picnic with friends. Sunday we had a repeat of Saturday, complete with a picnic in the evening and a relaxing afternoon of sitting on the deck with our neighbors, enjoying the fact that we were SITTING ON THE DECK! Woo-hoo!  Monday we finished up a few things in the yard and I planted some new things in the garden. Luke put up a screen door off the kitchen so I can leave the door to the deck open and not have to chase wasps and flies out of the house.

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect weekend. Oh wait, yes I could. Yesterday we went across the yard to our neighbor’s house so Luke could help our neighbor uncover his camper. We were sitting in his driveway on the side of the house facing our house, but now that the leaves are on the trees, we can’t see our house from our neighbor’s anymore. We were there for maybe a half hour, then we walked home and saw a note written in the dirt just off the deck left by Paula and Karlo! I can’t believe we missed that. I’m sorry Paula! That surprise visit would have really topped off the weekend.

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S’Mores Bites Update: I took them to two picnics this weekend and was frankly shocked at the response they got. People were coming up to me and thanking me personally for bringing them. They were a huge hit! I still think I’ll make the again with Fluff and see if I like them better, but apparently I’m in the minority. Everyone else seemed to think they were pretty yummy as they were.

I was just looking through the set of pictures I have on Flickr of our deck construction. Here’s the progress from one vantage point throughout the project:

OK, so in the last two I slacked in my consistent picture-taking position, but it’s from the same general area. The change is amazing to me. The stairs should be finished today, and this weekend the railing should be finished. We have 845 feet of cable to lace through the posts and supports… ug. It’s almost party time!

Remember my completely lame post about my new lamp wherein I forgot to take a picture of my lamp?  Well here it is.  So what do you think?  I think I’m getting used to the size of it and I like it again.

And while we’re talking about the past, look!

On Friday our deck railing was delivered.  Yay!  Somehow I expected the railing for a 40′ x 14′ deck to be in a bigger box.  It’s really only 33 lengths of cable and some hardware. See?

The posts have been ordered and if all goes well, Luke might start putting it together this weekend!

On Friday we also had to say good-bye to our good friend Megan (the shorter one with the glasses) as she ventures off to a wonderful new adventure as Programming Queen of Philly, or whatever her new title is.  It was bittersweet seeing her go but knowing how awesome this new job will be for her.  What made it a little easier was the always adorable Miss Jane.  And of course, it was nice to see her mommy, too.

On Saturday I was taking pictures of the wildflowers growing in the yard.  I am obsessed with the native woodland plants and flowers in our yard and I am determined to one day find a Ladyslipper.   No Ladyslippers spotted Saturday, but I did see one giant dog.  Oh, wait, I recognize those ears.

She’s so nosy.  And the Toad Lilys are a-sprouting everywhere, they’re so pretty.

And now we’re back at the present where it’s raining and it’s cold and it’s raining some more.  Boo.  Looking ahead…  I can’t believe it’s almost May.  Exactly a month until my birthday!  Hint, hint!

I was going to ask you all for your opinion of my new lamp today but SOMEONE forgot to take a picture of it this morning.  Who could that be?

I bought a big, beautiful lamp last night for one of our bedside tables and I was completely in love with it at the store.  Then I got it home, within the scale of our home, I looked at it and thought, “holy crap that’s a big lamp”.  Then Luke woke up, sneered at the lamp and said “where’s THAT going?”  Now I’m doubting my purchase.

I really wish I had a picture, that would make this all make much more sense…  This lamp is exactly the style, but my lamp has a clear glass base.

I’m unsure.  I’m usually 100% sure of everything I pick out but this time I don’t know.  Considering the fact that my lamp cost exactly $100 less that that lamp I linked to, I probably shouldn’t even bother doubting it.  This morning I kind of liked it, maybe tomorrow I’ll love it again.  I’ll take a picture tonight so you all can see what I’m talking about.

In other house news, are you considering painting a room in your house?  Not sure what color to choose?  Check this link out (thanks to Design*Sponge for pointing it out):  Domino’s 50 Painted Rooms.  Fifty pictures of painted, decorated rooms with the paint source noted for each picture.  I’m in love with 32, I’m totally painting my kitchen that color.

So several of my real and internet (also known as NOT REAL) friends have been a little lax with the posting and updating over the past week.  Amanda even called a few of us out on it.  I managed to post once when Molly was considering running off and joining the Village People reunion, but really, I had a good excuse.  I was busy.

Luke took this picture of me and I’ve already looked at it a few times without realizing it was me.  I’m always on the other side of the camera, I’m not used to looking at me.  I look backwards.  But anyhow, I was busy helping Luke BUILD A DECK!  Check it out…

Last weekend we had this:

And then there was this:

We added a few (hundred) of these:

And about a million screws (that was my job) and one short week after we started, we were able to do this:

That’s Luke’s cousin and his wife along with Luke dangling their legs off of our deck on Saturday afternoon.  We were shooting at cans with pellet guns and enjoying the sunset.  I still can’t believe that there’s a deck out there.  The danger door is no longer dangerous.  It’s just beautiful.  It’s even pretty underneath:

Luke did an amazing job.   He took this past week off from work and spent his vacation busting his butt.  Some folks, I’ve heard, take vacations and RELAX.  Not my hubby.  He even dodged serious injury when the nail gun fired two nails at once and one nail tumbled out of the gun and hit Luke in the eyebrow and then the wrist.  The EYEBROW.  Which is located just above THE EYE.  He’s so lucky.  He had just taken his safety glasses off and was heading in the house for something when he turned around quick to help our neighbor, Roland, who was nailing in the joists.  That could have been so much worse.  He ended up with a small cut on his eyebrow and one on his wrist, and a new respect for the nail gun.  Now the injuries have healed, the biggest area of deck is finished, and the small side of the “L” shape has to be framed and decked, maybe next weekend.  We also have a beautiful cable railing on order, that should be in next week, and then the patio furniture can come up on the deck and deck-warming party planning can begin.  Sigh..

One of the best things so far about the deck, aside from dangling my legs off the end, enjoying a margarita and watching the sunset, has been (I can’t believe that I’m admitting this) for the first time in five years I fulfilled my dream and washed the outside of the kitchen window.  It used to be too high up to wash myself and since it’s the window look out of all the time, I have been DYING to wash it.  Tonight I did, and I was so happy, I wanted to cry.  I walked out onto my deck in my bare feet and washed a window.  Life is good.

So will you forgive me for being gone so long?  Come dangle your feet off the back of the deck and I’ll make you a margarita, I bet you’ll forgive me.

And this is what I saw when I came out of the house.

(Sorry, I’m having some trouble embedding the YouTube video, follow this link to watch.)

We spent the entire weekend outside, it was wonderful. It wasn’t exactly warm and springy, but it was warmish and we’re so desperate for spring that warmish will do.

The lilies are starting to pop up and the pesky pup likes to get in on all the action. Raking out the garden beds and seeing the sprouts of plants-to-be makes me excited to garden. I have a vision for the yard, I can’t wait to work on it.

I started to put in two new garden beds while Luke worked on the deck. The beds further beyond the trellis used to extend all the way to that pine tree off in the distance, but a few years ago we decided to mow them down to make a whiffle ball field instead of have an unruly weed-infested garden, and the good plants were moved and condensed into the two beds you see. Now those beds are looking lame and most of the good plants have been moved to other places, so the last of the good stuff will come closer to the house and go into the two new beds and the last of the weeds will become more outfield. Except for the yucca. Do not plant yucca. They are all over my yard and I hate them with a passion. They are hardy and invasive and I swear they’d survive nuclear attack. A neighbor had them planted near her driveway and they spread and broke through the asphalt. They are evil. I have dug them up, yanked them out, and mowed them down but still they come back every year. I asked Luke to pull them out one more time before the warm spring weather wakes them up, so he decided to do it his way, as you saw. It worked. They came up, but I guarantee they’ll grow back next year.

Work on the deck continued this weekend. Some seriously confusing math and geometrical calculations went on all weekend as Luke decided where exactly to dig the holes and set the posts for the deck. The Sonotubes are in and, if all goes well, the building inspector should be at the house right now signing off on the depth of the holes. Once that’s done, the concrete can be poured and then the real fun begins. I can’t wait.

I recently started to repaint my living room/dining room area.  A few years of woodsmoke had done a number on the walls, and a couple of cracks from the house settling needed to be fixed, so we decided to repaint.  Or rather, we decided that I would repaint.  I started on Sunday and it’s looking great, but as with any other time I take everything off the walls to repaint, I want to buy all new things to hang back on the freshly painted walls.  Rather than buy new artwork, I decided to create some out of cheap stuff I found at the Salvation Army and a little junk mail.

Here’s a piece of art I found at the Salvation Army for $4.99.  It’s square, which I like, and it has a mat.  Two good things.  Also it was only $4.99, three good things.  The picture inside was a bit lame, (although love really IS all we need), and it looked like someone’s dog had been chewing on the frame.  Minor issues.  This frame and mat had a bigger destiny to fulfill.

Here’s a postcard I got in the mail at work.  Isn’t it lovely?  It’s announcing the opening of a show at the Danese Gallery of works by  Julian Stanczak.  We get mail every day from galleries announcing shows and they’re usually put right in the garbage, but this one I liked.  I thought I might be able to make something of it.  Amazingly, I measured the postcard and I measured the opening of the mat I bought at the Salvation Army and they matched perfectly!  The DIY gods were smiling down on me.

So let’s begin turning a trite piece of beat-up art from the thrift store, and a destined-for-the-trash piece of junk mail into a work of art, shall we?

First I had to cut the paper off the back of the frame (and think Happy Thoughts).  Depending on the frame you find, you may or may not have to do this.

Then pry up the staples all around so you can remove the mat and the glass inside.

Sand down the scratches and tooth marks (geeze, my hand looks enormous from this angle).

And then give it a few good coats of spray paint.  I used a white gloss enamel.  I like white frames with white mats.  It looks very clean, I think.

Now at this point, while the paint dries, I should be showing you a photo of me putting the postcard into the mat.  Unfortunately, I’m not very good at this step-by-step thing, and I completely forgot to take pictures.  It turned out that the heart picture was fused with the mat and I couldn’t remove it without ruining the mat.  Disappointing, but not the end of the world.  Instead of attaching the postcard to the back of the mat like I wanted to, I cut he postcard to size and attached it to the front of the heart picture just inside the opening of the mat.  No one will ever know the difference.  Except for you. but you won’t give away my secrets, right?

Next I gave the glass a good scrub, buffed the frame with some steel wool to remove a little of the gloss, (it was a bit too shiny for me), put the matted postcard in and sealed it back up.  And ta-da!  Fancy artwork for $4.99.

And yes, if you noticed, the postcard I framed isn’t the view you saw at the top of this post.  The card was two-sided and I ended up liking this side better.  Maybe I’ll go back to the Salvation Army and get another one of these frames and frame the other side.  Now everyone, go forth and make recycled art!

For almost five years now we’ve been dreaming of our deck. Our house was built with the intention of a deck, there’s even a dangerous door in the kitchen (this door) that leads to one big surprise and two broken legs, but which was meant to lead out to the deck. The people who built the house just never got around to building the deck and this oversight has driven Luke mad. We’ve talked and dreamed and looked through catalogs and torn out pages from magazines and we knew exactly what we wanted for a deck but we just never had the cash. This year we’re going for it.

Last Friday, two giant piles of lumber and Trex decking were dropped in our yard, a little too close to my garden, but that’s OK. Luke is planning to begin soon, very soon, like before the ground even thaws. We have the building permit and he has plans to rent some sort of monster machine that will drill holes for the concrete tubes through the frosty frozen ground. He’s one motivated man. If all goes well, when the warm, deck-sitting weather arrives, the work will be finished and we can christen it with a proper deck-warming party. I can’t wait.

Early Sunday afternoon, Luke and I went for a walk down by the river to see how much the recent rains had changed things. It was beautiful and stark and everything was bright and icy, it was a nice time for a walk. Today, I’m sure it’s all different.

We got pounded last night with another big rain storm and another several inches of the wet stuff. Around 1:30am I woke up because I thought I heard something. Usually I just ignore what I thought I heard and go back to bed, but this time I just felt uneasy and I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I rolled over and looked at the clock, then realized that the house was really dark. You don’t realize how much light all of your various electronic things put out until you lose power. The alarm clock face wasn’t lit, the glowing power button on the computer in the office wasn’t casting a glow into the hallway. The light from the answering machine and the clock on the stove weren’t lit. The power was out AGAIN and the house was pitch dark.

I looked out toward the closest neighbor’s house and it looked like his power was out, too. Up on the street, I can usually see a streetlight or two through the trees - nothing. Even the lights on route 6, which you can usually make out in the dark during the winter with no leaves on the trees, they were out, too.  I grabbed my cell phone, threw a log on the fire, found a flashlight and climbed back into bed.  Then I started thinking.  What are the chances that anyone else is up at 1:30am to notice that the power is out and call the power company?  If I wait until the neighbors call, it could be morning before it’s fixed.  So I called.  Connecticut Light & Power has an automated hotline where you can call and report an outage or check the status of one.  I entered my information, they told me I was the first one to report the outage, thank you for calling, I hung up and went back to sleep.

An hour later I woke up to Molly barking her head off at the gigantic CL&P truck coming up our driveway.  I grabbed her and we watched to see what in the world this guy was doing.  He put his ridiculous strobe lights on (because, you know there’s a lot of traffic to watch for when you’re parked a quarter mile down a private dirt driveway) and he came to the side of the house to look at our meter.  He looked up in the woods with his flashlight (our power lines are underground, by the way) then came to the door and - at 2:30am - knocked.  I opened the door and appeared in all the glory you’d expect for someone who should have been asleep at this time, I said hello, he looked at me and said, I kid you not, “you’ve got no power here.”  Ya think??  He asked for help locating our transformer, then asked if he could drive over our flooded, muddy lawn.  I was too tired to complain and I really wanted to get the power back on so I said fine.

I went back and laid in bed and started to think… why is he looking at my transformer?  Was it not obvious that the entire western side of Andover is dark.  Now I understand that it’s 2:30 in the morning, but there are streetlights and glowing doorbell buttons, and no house is truly ever dark.  So why is he checking MY transformer?  Shouldn’t he be looking at the lines on the street?  Whatever, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  Another while later the big truck comes backing toward the house and attempts to back up next to my little car and I get to see strobe lights in my bedroom, hear Molly barking like an idiot, and listen to reverse beepers for the next five minutes of the 27-point turn it took him to turn around.   Then he left, it was 3am, the power was still off, but at least it was quiet and I could fall back to sleep.

A short while later I heard the delightful beep of the answering machine and the microwave as the power miraculously came back on.  I was happy, I set my alarm clock from the time on my cell phone and fell back to sleep smiling.  And then the strobe lights were back.   What the??  Mr. CL&P was back in the driveway, but was nice enough not to drive over the lawn again, instead he walked back to the transformer, for what reason I do not know, then got in his truck and left once again.  It’s now 4am.

I fell back to sleep and woke up at 6am.  I turned the TV on and figured I’d relax for another hour before my alarm went off at 7.  Not really paying much attention to the TV, the weather came on just before my alarm was set to go off and the weather guy said it was 7:56am.  WHAT?  It’s supposed to be 6:56, not 7:56.  I’m an hour late!

So needless to say, I’m not in the best shape today.  It’s taken a while just to type this because I can’t seem to spell or focus for more than a few minutes in a row.  I left the house without my glasses on, but luckily remembered before I got too far from home (no wonder everything looked blurry).  I seriously need some more sleep.  How do you new moms do it?  One night of getting up every couple of hours and I can barely manage to breathe and blink at the same time.  I have big hopes of getting more than two consecutive hours of sleep tonight, I might just get them here at my desk today the way things are going.

Driving home from Christmas dinner at Luke’s cousin’s house this year, Luke and I found and rescued a small wooden table that had been tossed out into a snowbank and left for the trash collection.  I have a soft spot in my heart for old wooden furniture and have had a lot of luck in the past refinishing the junk I pull out of the bulky waste bin at the dump.  This little table nearly beat that soft spot out of my heart and made me never want to look at old wooden furniture ever again.

Several weekends in a row I worked on this rickety little table.  The legs were uneven, the drawer was sealed shut, there were repairs made with bandage tape under layers of paint… it wasn’t pretty.  This is what it looked like when we brought it home.

There was even a dime stuck to the top in the area of the peeled paint.  (???)   Luckily, Luke is used to my wooden furniture love and he humored me.  He pulled it out of the snowbank, he gave me space in the shop to work, and he even offered to tighten the legs for me.  I started by attempting to strip the paint.  Well… I really wish I had taken pictures of that process because it was pretty nasty.  Stripping paint is usually tedious, oh, and toxic, but I love to take away the layers of paint and reveal the true beauty of the wood underneath.  Let me tell you, this little table had no inner beauty.  Just layers of paint over stain over paint on top of some soft, crappy wood.  The paint stripper reacted oddly with the ancient finishes and I ended up with what looked like furniture leprosy.  There were clear patches of wood next to rock-hard patches of peeling paint that would not come off no mater how hard I tried.  I knew then that I would never get to the point of seeing the wood’s beauty and giving it a natural finish, I admitted defeat and decided I’d have to paint it.

Before I could paint it, though, I had to smooth it’s scales.  That meant sanding and scraping and sanding and coughing and YUCK!  I’d rather risk chemical burns and potentially lost fingernails with paint stripper, than lead poisining and black lung from the sanding.  It was disgusting and I finally made the decision last weekend that it was “good enough”.  It was never going to be perfect, in fact it was inches from being kindling, I was so sick of working on it.  I declared that I was done (six weeks after taking it home) and told Luke it was all his to clamp and glue and tighten up before painting.  He did his job (which made it even more tippy - although very sturdy) and I slapped some paint on it.  Being fairly ambivalent at this point, I’m not exaggerating to say I slapped it on.  Four coats of the same Java I put on my door, an antique knob that used to belonged to a piece of my grandmother’s furniture, and it’s done.

It nearly beat me, but I think I may have won this battle.  It’s now my bedside table, but every time I look at it I think about how insanely hard I worked at this “free” table and how I probably should have just saved myself the trouble and bought one at Target.