Making progress slowly but surely

So my time until my self-imposed end-of-the-month deadline to have the rental house back ready for viewings is fast approaching, and although we're crossing things off the list, our progress might not be as good as I might have liked. However, I have gotten an extraordinary amount of painting done in the last 5 days!

Let's see, I had already painted 2 walls in the kitchen, and now adding both spare bedrooms and the bathroom, plus every inch or trim in the house and every door in the house (and garage), that is a lot of painting! I do still have a second coat to do on several of the doors, since I ran out of paint (oops!) and will have to run across to Home Depot to get more of the low VOC stuff that we have been using. The local Ace Hardware doesn't carry any low VOC paints and I've never been that happy with their color matching abilities, so we don't bother go there for paint any more.

I also still have to paint the bathroom walls in color, to go over top of the kilz odor blocking primer I put down in there over the weekend. I'm not so sure about my color choice on that one, what do you think? I'm worried the color might be a bit dark. But it's hard to tell since we haven't gotten the light fixture completely installed yet, so we don't have very good lighting in there.

Oh, and here are the after pictures of the spare bedroom (light grey/purple) and office/spare bedroom (light grey/blue). I'm finding that photo's of the rooms make them read a lot more grey than they actually are in real life. In real life the purple room looks amazing. I think I might need to paint Little M's room in that color I love it so much! And the Blue room looks really great too. These new colors really bring the whole house together - they match nicely with the grey/green of the master bedroom and the tan of the main hallway and living room. Before the 2 spare rooms really didn't match well at all, and the colors weren't that great even on their own. I really hope these are some of the extra touches that help someone fall in love with the house and make them want to buy it! So here are a couple pictures of the new bedroom colors:

Garden update - August 2011

I missed writing a post here earlier this week, but you'll be happy to know that I've painted lots of trim, fixed the garbage disposal (yay!), and decided that the wired doorbell wasn't going to be salvageable wired so today I'll be picking up a wireless one to install. All of this is at the rental house though, so what's been going on at home you ask? Well lots of garden time! My garden has been growing (weeds) like crazy, and the real plants are growing well too. Here is a selection of garden pictures from last week before I went crazy weeding, but I figured I would show you the ugly (weedy) pictures to keep things true :)

 The marigolds are doing quite well where I randomly placed them near the strawberries right before we left on vacation without anywhere else to plant them.

 The onions (Copra Onions mostly) aren't growing quite as big as I would have hoped. More water? Less Water? Some manure? I'm not sure what to fix, but something needs to change for next year's garden :)

 

The eating corn is growing tall, but just starting to flower. Hopefully we get ears before frost! Next year I may try a shorter season corn, or it may just be that same lack of fertilizer :) Good thing we have chickens now!

 The potatoes did great this year, although we'll see how many actual potatoes we got. We should dig them sometime in the next couple weeks and then I'll let you know how they did. We were happy to just have live plants considering the last 2 summers we've tried to grow them and managed to either drown them or smother them with dirt! The tomatoes in the background are doing alright too, although nothing is remotely red yet...

 Our peppers are doing really really well. This is the first summer we have had peppers produce, so we're pretty happy with the number we got! Especially since the first ones we planted this spring got hailed (almost) to death and I had to replant with my extra starts. Luckily I had plenty of extra's since I grew over twice as many as I wanted to plant. Next summer I'll plan on planting way more peppers, we can freeze extra's for use on our homemade pizzas among other things. In fact I think next summer I'll plan on more of most plants. That's only if I manage to expand the garden though! :)

 The green beans are doing fairly well, considering I almost lost them amongst the weeds! One day about a week and a half ago I realized that the 2 rows of beans between the 2 areas of peas were just hopping with grasshoppers, so I dove in and pulled lots of large weeds, and revealed a floppy double row of green beans complete with some beans all ready to be picked! Since then I've picked about 5 meals worth of beans that have been blanched and frozen for cooler day.

 Our zucchini has been somewhat of a disappointment this year. last year at this time we were harvesting numerous monster zucchini, but this year we haven't even had one yet. There are a couple little teensy ones growing, but nothing worth picking yet.

 The cucumbers have also been a bit disappointing, but at least they are flowering... I really picked a poor spot for them, they are really hidden by the raspberries that just filled in this summer, so likely a different spot would have been better. Next year!

 The popping corn is growing, although perhaps not as quickly as I would have liked. (Can you tell it was really windy when I was taking pictures?!)

 My watermelon grew this year! Although likely the teensy little watermelons won't get big enough to harvest, it is at least heartening to see the little plant grow after last summers repeated failure.

 The pumpkins are doing really well, there are at least 4 pumpkins growing big & round for Little M to 'carve' with us this fall!

The hubbards are also growing well, and have several squash growing. The butternuts aren't doing quite as well, but they are slowly coming along.

Well, that's it for the garden update this month! How are your gardens growing?

A welcome garden visitor

To many people, seeing a snake in the garden would be cause for alarm. Screaming, running for the shovel, vacating the garden for days hoping it will leave and not come back, you name it. But for me, seeing a snake, especially a gophersnake (Great Basin gophersnake, Pituophis catenifer deserticola, or commonly called a Bullsnake around these parts) just makes me very happy.

After supper the night before last, Little M and I went down to the garden to eat some strawberries and maybe some beans & peas, and to check out all the plants and see how they were all growing. The first thing I noticed as I bent down to look for ripe strawberries in the strawberry patch was the distinctive blotching pattern of a gophersnake woven through the strawberry plants!

I looked a bit closer to make sure it was a gophersnake (not a rattlesnake which would have meant removing Little M and heading back down with my snake hook to relocate it a good distance away from the house (but still within it's home range). Luckily it was just a gophersnake, not a small one either, although not the biggest we have seen on the property, and definitely not the biggest one I have ever seen. That's because I moved out west to do a masters thesis on gophersnakes up in British Columbia's Okanogan Valley. Yup, that's right, I studied snakes! So I guess you could say I have a bit of a soft spot for them now, so snakes are welcome in my garden!

Closet organizing at Grammy's house

Last weekend, and the weekend 2 weeks before that, was spent at my mother-in-law's house outside of Spokane. She lives on a lake, so we had a lot of fun playing on the beach, walking the boardwalk along the lake, and playing in the water. Little M had fun with her Grammy, and I had fun organizing the closet in Grammy's spare room! It was basically a win-win-win-win situation. I knew Little M was being well taken care of & loved on (and spoiled!) by Grammy (and G-daddy as her husband likes to be called!), I got a good break from her while being able to do one of my favorite things - organize, and Grammy of course got quality time with her granddaughter!

So back to the closet. Grammy's house is a two level home with a two bedroom main floor with an open floor plan living space & kitchen, and a walkout basement that is rented out as an apartment right now, so her space is limited to the upstairs. When her husband retires (he still lives over on the west side in the home my husband grew up) and moves over to live there too, the renter will go and they will do some renovating to have full use of the downstairs as well. For now though, her space is a bit tight for all of the stuff she has.

You see, she buys things at yard sales or thrift stores for cheap, and then sells them on eBay. She does really well since she is great at spotting salable items! Last year she started buying Halloween costumes when she saw good quality ones for cheap throughout the year, and then she sold them online before Halloween. She quickly realized it was well worth buying them up and storing them. But that meant she had even more things to store around her house, and this year the bins of costumes were taking over!

So that is how I came to be organizing her closet. The spare bedroom has a nice sized closet, but it was full (literally) to the brim with quilting supplies in boxes and bins and bags. It was quite a mess, and as Grammy had just retired and is now hoping to do more quilting, we thought having the quilting fabrics more accessible and less of a mess would help her be better able to relax and quilt! So we decided that the quilting supplies would be moved out of the closet, likely to end up in a storage system like an Ikea Expedit bookshelf system, or something similar.

I realized that I forgot to take a true before picture of all the quilting supplies in the closet, and of the bins and bins of costumes (bad blogger!). But here is the stack of quilting supplies after we took almost everything out of the closet (and when I remembered to take a photo), and below that is what was still in the closet when I remembered. That tower with drawers below was in the closet too. Yup, that closet was literally packed full!

That left the closet empty to fill with all those Halloween costumes! Although Grammy claims that she really doesn't need to easily see the stuff she sells online, since once she brings it home she takes a photo of it to list it with, and then until it sells she just needs it stored someplace, I thought that by having the costumes sorted she wouldn't have to dig through multiple bins to find the specific one she was looking to package up and mail out. So that led us to design a closet with multiple levels of rods for hanging costumes, along with some shelves for storing those miscellaneous costume accessories like wigs, witch hats, and crowns.

We ended up picking up a system at Home Depot that she can rearrange if in the future she stops selling Halloween costumes and decides she wants something else in that closet. It was fairly easy to install and now can be adjusted in minutes if she decides she wants a rod higher or lower, or wants to add a shelf. Here is the closet all empty and waiting to be filled with costumes!

And here it is again once we packed all those costumes in there! Great, right?! I think Grammy was pleased that we did all this organizing, and hopefully she lets me come back and visit again :)