What is the sound of summer? Is it the song of birds singing early in the morning? Waves crashing on the shore? Wind rustling through ornamental grasses? For me, the sound of summer is the squeak of a tight spring followed by the slap of a screen door. I’m certain that it’s a sound that has probably driven many a ...
Although it was not intentional, this has become a very experimental year in the vegetable garden. First I tried out the potato towers. The jury is still out on those as I’m seeing the first potato shoots coming out now. And it turns out that the “straw” that I bought (where they guaranteed it was straw and not hay and ...
I’m declaring it here: Someday I will go to the Chelsea Flower Show. This annual event is a veritable utopia for gardeners who go to take in the show gardens (from large to small), and special booths often featuring specific plants. The only thing keeping me from booking a ticket for next year is the crowds. I’d have to figure ...
As you know, I love planting containers. Of the containers I plant I think I put the most emphasis on the window box. It is probably the first thing you see when you pull up to our house and it’s one of the few containers I can see (part of, anyway) from inside the house. So I spend a lot ...
Did you all have a great long weekend (at least my U.S. readers who celebrated Memorial Day)? I love long weekends (well, who doesn’t?) but my goodness, they are so exhausting. Saturday was our big master gardeners’ plant sale, so I took Friday off of work and spent nine hours helping set that up. Then it was back early Saturday ...
I can’t tell you how much I wish this post was showing you the new beds in the back/side yard, but I still haven’t finished pulling up the sod. Apparently I grossly underestimated how much sod there was to remove and just what a pain in the butt it is to remove. I think I can finish it up with ...
I’ve been so busy working on various projects around the garden that I’ve neglected showing you what the actual garden is looking like these days. As usual, there is good news and bad news in the garden. The bad news is that our cold, wet spring has really retarded the growth of many perennials. My hellebores are just showing buds ...
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I’m working on so many projects right now that sometimes I can’t remember which one is which, but I took a bit of time off this weekend to help Mr. Much More Patient with some leaf removal. It’s the least I can do seeing as how I have a very specific way in which I […]
We’re finally at the end of this rather prolonged house tour. `There are a couple rooms not worth sharing at this point, but maybe in the future if they get a little sprucing up I’ll share them with you. You’ve already seen the new bathroom, the kitchen, the living room and the master bedroom. Today […]
Fair warning: After writing this post I realized it has what we call a “niche” audience. So for those of you who don’t give a rip about shopping, or Ikea or what I did this weekend, allow me to summarize. We went to Ikea. It was a long drive. My husband got real cranky. I […]
I’m not a huge Halloween fanatic. In fact this year I didn’t even buy a gourd or two to stick on the front porch, much less carve a pumpkin or do any other fall-themed decorating. And since I don’t have kids, I don’t do any other kind of spooky decorating. But if I were to […]
I’ve been spending the past couple of weekends plugging away at the office project and I thought it was time to offer a bit of an update. Progress has been frustratingly slow because everything has to be cleaned up and able to be worked in during the day. So I found myself retaping frequently and […]
We’ll finish up the rest of the house tour this week (it’s a small house and I’m probably going to cheat and not show you the ugly rooms) now that I found the battery charger for the camera (whoops). So far we’ve toured the new upstairs bathroom, the kitchen and the living room. Today we […]
It’s been a wild and windy autumn here and as I write this we’re on Day 2 of a northeaster cranking down Lake Michigan and showing all signs of blowing whatever color might be left on the trees onto the ground. So I thought it would be a good time to just take a quick […]
Source: rareandbeautifultreasures.com via Erin on Pinterest When we were working on the renovation for the house, I spent inordinate amounts of time on Houzz.com. I would save any picture that I liked for any reason and then go back through all of them and see what they had in common. It was a great way […]
It’s funny how just a couple weeks ago when I shared what I’ve been listening to while I paint, sand, weed and drive, I mentioned that it would probably be my first and last post on books. And here we are again. But I had to share this book that I just listened to. It’s […]
After the bathroom and the kitchen, this is a somewhat unexciting stop in the house tour: the living room. This is pretty much our only living area in the house and I would say this is the room we spend most of our time in. Almost every blog post I’ve written has been composed on […]
From a room that didn’t even exist a year ago, our tour moves to the kitchen, which has had some modifications made over the years but is largely the same as it was when we bought the house. The cabinets, countertops (laminate, but not bad looking, and very easy to keep clean) and […]
I know I’ve show some (OK, a lot) of photos of the renovation here, but I thought I’d do a bit of a house tour now that I have some good photos of the rooms thanks to getting the photos from the article that was done on the house (a wide-angle lens is a beautiful […]
I’m showing you this not to show off my unbelievable cute and huggable dog, Hudson, (which he is, of course) but because I think this is a great birthday thing to do for both critters and kids. I’m totally embarrassed to admit that we only did this with our older dog. I don’t know why […]
Honey, does it seem drafty in here to you? This is the second part of a list on what you need to know before you renovate. If you haven’t read part Part 1, check it out here. And now, here’s the rest. 6. Have a friend who won’t get sick of talking to you about […]
