Birthday Excitement

Last Friday was Adrian's birthday (the BIG 30!) As I pulled up to the intersection just before my house my quandary over what kind of cake to get him was quickly snuffed and my heart plunged into my shoes. I tend to be a "glass is mostly empty" type of person and often when I approach that intersection I half expect to see emergency vehicles in front of our burning house with our animals trapped inside. Sounds morbid, but this is seriously the kind of stuff I think about! As I came to the intersection I saw a swarm of flashing emergency lights and traffic being diverted from what looked to be my home. Our street is a busy one, with a speed limit of 35 that people frequently overlook. It's a scary street where pedestrians have been known to be hit by cars driven by people who don't see there's a crosswalk because they're too busy texting and putting on their make-up. When I pulled up there were no flames and trapped animals but a busted up Pontiac in the middle of my front yard. As I tried to recover from what I was sure to be utter catastrophe I came to find out that the driver had supposedly fallen asleep behind the wheel, clipped the power pole 30 feet before my driveway, come up on the curb, bust an axel, plow over our mailbox (and the neighbor's), smash through the remains of a brick pillar at the foot of our driveway and slide neatly between our 4 year old Maple tree and newly planted shrubs to rest in the middle of my lawn spewing oil over my grass and stone walkway. It was completely surreal. My mail was littered out in the wet street, soaked and driven over, and there was concrete (from the brick pillar), glass and metal everywhere. The officer overseeing the removal of the vehicle from my yard saw the stricken look on my face and correctly deduced the I must live here. He pulled the incident report from the remains of a mailbox on our front porch (which the vehicle narrowly missed, thank the Lord) and filled me in on the details. There were four passengers in the vehicle, two of which were a 22 year old mother, her 4 day old baby included. Dad had been taken to the hospital though the officer assured me all were okay (again thank the Lord!) From what I can tell the driver did not have insurance and our homeowners insurance has a deductible higher than the $80 or so it's going to take to replace our mailbox. The steel post it was attached to is bent to hell and not likely to come back. Once the dust settled and we surveyed the damage, we realized the mailbox the police left on our front porch wasn't even ours, it was the neighbor's. Ours was nowhere to be found. I can only hope the rain soaked, but mostly intact mail I pulled out of the street was all there was that day. The neighbor's phonebook wasn't so lucky. The driver was blessed that he only glanced off of the power pole. From the looks of it the entire pole must have shaken as the soil around the base was pushed out several inches. If he had hit it straight on things could have been much worse. I'm incredibly grateful that our tree that I love was spared, that the car came no closer to our house and that all involved lived to tell about it. Adrian's cake was forgotten in the shuffle but he says he didn't miss it. I did. I could have used a big 'ol fatty slice right about then.

Clematis

This clematis astounds me every day. We planted the three plants in late April 2008, when we bought our house. This summer you could literally watch it grow inches a day. Last year all we saw were the red blooms on the middle plant. This summer, finally, I've got one of the white ones blooming. It brings me a lot of joy so I thought I would share.

Then:
Now:

So awesome

Adrian and I have been working toward making our backyard a place that is pleasant to hang out for the last several years (tho I've only lived here for almost 2 of them). Check out here, here,
and here, for the history highlights. Today we finally invested in a quality set of patio furniture to replace the nasty, broken rickety old plastic stuff we have been using. We weighed the advantages of buying a new umbrella for our new set (the one I bought just last summer is cracked almost all the way down the middle!! Cheap!!) when we saw these great gazebos on sale at Fred Meyer. The gazebo ended up being more bang for only a tiny more buck so we went with that. The result is a totally AWESOME backyard paradise. Check it!

Spring

The first bulbs I've ever planted (with Mom's help) have sprung! It makes for a cheerful homecoming everyday.

At long, long last!

I have to give a shout out to my awesome mom (you're the best!) for her help over the weekend. She came over and worked her weeding magic to help me conquer the last corners of our yard that were yet unfinished. The bark we got way back at the beginning of the summer didn't make it all the way around as we had hoped and in the interim the weeds had yet again taken over. With so much on our plates I wasn't sure when we'd get around to finishing though I was desperate to try to get all the dirt covered before the winter hit. The dogs, Molly especially, love to lay in it and they drag so much of it into our already dusty house. So with mom's tenacious super-weeding abilities we were able to deep-six the weeds and yesterday we got the bark down! Now all that's left is filling it all in with plants, but that's for next year. My backyard is officially done... for now. You may be interested to see the before photos here and here. Most of the work happened this year, except for the grass! However as an aside, I do still have a butt-ton (literally 140) tulip and iris bulbs to plant, perhaps this weekend if it isn't too rainy. Next year our yard should be totally rockin'! I can't wait to have people over for a little bbq on our sweet new patio in our sweet new yard, but I'm afraid that the weather this weekend may not hold up for it. We'll see. You guys have plans?

The official studio

Ok, so it might not look like much, and of course the sofa isn't ideal, and the seasoned potter with their complete studio may look at this and think how can anyone work like that, but to me it's pure gold because it's all mine! I haven't had a chance to break it in yet as we are, yet again, projecting around the house. Our latest is that we are chinking our logs so that we can oil the house in another couple of weeks. But then today we were out of chinking material so we went to the nurseries looking for the great sales. Unfortunately we came home with a truck full of yard work on top of everything else. In the middle of purchasing all our shrubs and grasses and rose bushes and trees I looked at Adrian and said, "What the HELL are we thinking?" The afternoon was spent transplanting our old bushes that are nowhere near creating the hedge we desired in the front yard and started replacing them with larger, faster growing hedge plants. So we had to move the old boxwoods to the backyard, plant our new trees (in the middle of which Adrian decided he needed to prune the overgrown pine tree in our front yard) and we have yet to get to the rest of the grasses in, finish the transplant of the boxwoods and plant the new rose bush.

We still need to move my shelves upstairs and get rid of a few things we'd been needlessly storing up in the loft before I'll be able to fully utilize my new studio space, but rest assured I'll be breaking in the new wheel SOON.

woo!

Just a taste... we'll be finishing the rest this week!

Update

For those of you who were wondering, we are continuing to slave over the patio project. We spent yet another long hot weekend working our tails off on it last weekend. The largest part of which was dealing with the gravel. We had finished digging the depth last week and bought the first yard of gravel. According to the magic book our finished gravel depth needed to be 4 inches. I don't know what I expected, but by the end of the weekend it took 5 and a half yards of gravel (which is 11 trips... wait, is that right?? holy cow) to the local (thank goodness) D & B store which is about a minute and a half from our house. Lemme tell you guys, at this point we have SO blown the budget, which was our stimulus check. We blew that in just the stone alone. I ordered the stones from Home Depot and was enormously grateful to see that they could deliver them directly to us. A blessing of the largest sort as we needed 4 pallets and each pallet weighs 2800 pounds... that alone would have made for at least 16 trips to Home Depot and that's a 20 minute drive one way! Yicks. So, the stone showed up last Friday night. We have yet to actually lay any of it but it'll be beautiful!
On Sunday we rented a plate compactor from Tates and compacted the gravel. Nacho had to exert his authority over the compactor and chased it around gnawing on it's edges and barking, much the way he does every time we vacuum. He's very tough. So at this point we have our set-up mostly complete, the problems hopefully problem-solved and have only to screed an inch thick layer of sand and lay our stones. Voila! Just like that it'll be done... psh, just like that.
The Supervisors, very helpful.
The aftermath...
840 Rustic Tumbled Cobblestone $1300
5+ yards of gravel $187
55 feet of edging and stakes $100
26 Retaining wall bricks $39
? Yards of sand for screeding $?

50 + Hours of hard, sweaty labor and having a patio we can entertain on... Priceless

No pizza for you

So we started at 8:30 this morning and 6 hours and a new wheelbarrow later we finished... with the digging portion anyway. I'm too tired to write any more than that. So here are the photos instead.

Hot Weekend

We finally got our economic stimulus money this week, with which we had planned to rid our lives of the miserable patch of dirt next to our patio that the dog loves to roll in so much and replace it with a beautiful new stone patio. The only problem is now that we have the money we also have the heat with it. So this weekend was slated to be the beginning of the project and fittingly, we should see temperatures in the mid-90s. Great. So I thought maybe I'd get a jump-start on the weekend's work this morning while it was still cool out.


2 hours and 11 wheel barrows of heavy, hard packed clay later this was all I accomplished. We're supposed to dig out 7 and a half inches of dirt below our finished level. This is just the beginning. Once we get the lion's share of dirt out we've got to string up our levels and level it all off to the same depth. I've only scratched the surface and I've already got the beginnings of blisters...
Anyone free this weekend?? I'll buy you pizza!! Lots and lots of pizza. And beer! Just bring a shovel!

Check it!

Hooray for bark! Look at the sophistication!

We ordered 6 yards of bark and still didn't quite make it all the way around (not shown). I get paid next week so we'll get a few more to finish it off. And of course you should all see it in person. The photos just don't do it justice. It's majestic!

These are my front porch baskets... the ones that make me smile everyday.

Closing-on-the-house Eve

When we began the earnest attempt to purchase our house from my father-in-law a month ago we had originally set the closing date for May 2nd. I've written it on all of my calendars. It's been committed as a national holiday. Lately though I've been feeling the crunch of getting all the pieces-parts together to seal the deal. I've become good friends with our mortgage broker's secretary. It seems like every day I've fielded calls from various parties needing information on this insurance, that pay-out, this file, that title etc. I had no idea how much goes in to the buying and selling of property and honestly if we weren't related to our seller (who's going to give us his $15,000 payout so we can fix the roof and oil the logs) I think I'd probably have beat my head against the busted door jam and moved to a cabin in the woods. Yet with all my dealings with my new best friend I somehow missed the memo that our closing date had been moved up a week and oh yah, it's tomorrow. I'm not even sure how it happened but apparently my father-in-law goes in tomorrow morning to sign his portion and we're going in at 4 to do our part. Apparently we're also supposed to bring $900+ dollars to this shindig, though I don't get paid til Friday and we have about 20 bucks. (Don't worry, we'll get through.) I'm just a little floored to think that it's already happening. Don't get me wrong, I'll be damn glad when it's done but it feels a little unceremonious seeing as how we're already living in our "new house." So the day off I scheduled for next Friday, our "closing" holiday, is now just unnecessary fluff. However we've decided that I'll keep the day off and we'll take off to McCall for the weekend. Let's celebrate the purchase of our house by sleeping somewhere else for a couple of nights, right? Makes sense. Or not. But that's what we're doing.

Tonight we had my nephews over. Zach (who's nearly 4) and Marcus (who's just over a month old). We played with the dogs and went ghost hunting with some really old tennis rackets, played video games and the keyboard, tossed the egg parachute off the loft, and changed the dog water. Pretty much a great night.

Projects

So, as expected, I have been hesitant to actually get to posting about my many projects that are on-going. I suppose it comes from a deep-rooted belief that what I do isn't any good and putting my stuff out there on the web for all to see is a little daunting. I'm just going to have to get over that.

Adrian and I are in the process of purchasing "our house" from his father (and by "in the process of" I mean, of course, that we know we need to get on that and damn, if only we could get our finances in order etc. etc. etc...) but in the meantime we have been slowly projecting around the interior and exterior of the house. We painted the kitchen and main hallway a year ago February and Adrian began to re-do our kitchen cabinets at the same time. Since we have this great log cabin house with a large fireplace central to everything, I wanted to keep all the colors warm.



This hallway leads to the back of our house and is painted in an amazing golden yellow that lights up when the sun shines through our west-facing windows. I'm currently working on a pair of 24" x 24" paintings to hang on the bare walls. Progress is slow but I'm hoping to finish one by the end of spring break. Here's what I've got so far:



A couple of weeks ago we decided to finally tackle painting the bedroom (by we, of course I mean I) along with the laundry room and bedroom (I aim high). Unfortunately that was the same weekend I came down with strep throat so I only accomplished the walls of the bedroom. I've yet to finish the door frames and the closet.

Before: old vanilla ice cream


After: peanut butter

The frames and closet door will be painted a cream color, here I'm just painting the primer

I've got several pieces of pottery to post about but I'll save that for another day. More images to follow.