that brown house

we didn’t do much on the house during the week last week…instead we celebrated eric’s 35th birthday! fortunately, our celebrating was followed with another perfect weekend for working on the house - sunny & 65-70 degree days - yum! we didn’t finish any of the big projects, but we got so many odds and ends done that i’m very proud of us.

saturday was dominated by the most organized and productive shopping spree that i’ve ever been a part of. i’ve never spent so much money so efficiently and with such a sense of accomplishment. we placed an order with moran supply for the bathroom plumbing fixtures/valves, purchased 450 lbs. of ceramic and porcelain tile (which all conveniently fit in the trunk of the car) from the tile shop in berkeley, made our final choices for the 1920s schoolhouse-style light fixtures for the bathroom and kitchen and placed that order at berkeley lighting, ordered (on sale from home depot) an lg high-efficiency washer & dryer (that we don’t yet have hook-ups for…ahhh, optimism), bought a grab bar for the tub, some wall sconces that we’re going to return because they don’t actually work with the glass cala lily shades i already have, more compost & mulch, and an L-shaped shower curtain bar from ohmega salvage.

after shopping, we assembled a makeshift trellis for the snap pea vines to climb out of a few posts and some bird netting… and once again, saturday evening found us fussing with bird netting and trying to quickly get plants in the ground before the sun went down. despite the lost hour of sleep, i’m thrilled about changing the clocks forward. it’s so lovely to be able to leave work when it is still light out…

i finished planting the veggie patch and spray painted some door and cabinet hardware on sunday while eric did some touch-ups to the kitchen wall patching and vacuumed up the worst of the dust in the house. i think it may almost be time to go shopping for primer and paint! exciting!

we also scraped the partially peeling, partially discolored privacy film off the sidelights flanking the front door. it took three passes of spraying adhesive dissolving solution, waiting, then scraping with razor blades to get the crap off, but goodness does it look better! clear, clean glass! for the sake of evening privacy, however, i’ll probably make some sort of semi-sheer curtain for the door with rod pockets on the top and bottom. my list of sewing projects is getting pretty daunting…i’m not even sure if my laughable sewing skills are going to be up for the challenge.

tonight we are meeting with the electrician. we’ve been playing phone tag with the guy we want to work on the bathroom, but we now have a back up plan if his schedule doesn’t work out for us. so, small steps forward…