Home & Garden Crashing - Laura & Scott's place

This past weekend we road-tripped it down to Portland to visit Karl's sister and her husband. They recently remodeled their kitchen, and we were dying to see it (not to mention we were also really looking forward to seeing them since it's been way too long)! On our way down there, we stopped in Centralia, WA to grab a burger at Burgerville (yum!) and we saw a cool old car ahead of us in the drive-thru line.



After a quick lunch, we powered on through to Portland where we were promptly wowed by how great their kitchen looks! This sucker was stripped down to the studs for several months as they slowly replaced pretty much everything except for the skylight and window.


They got the cabinets at Ikea, the quartz counters and floor tiles at Lowes (I think) and the appliances at Sears. I wish I had a before picture to show, but I don't so you'll just have to trust me when I say this is such an amazing makeover!


I love the black lower cabinets mixed with the glass-fronted white upper cabinets. Very chic.


They also replaced the storage in their laundry room with matching solid-front white cabinets. The light blue color that they've painted in there is so refreshing and crisp. Perfect for a laundry room.


And their vegetable garden, with it's prime location in the sunny back half of their yard, is doing amazingly great as well. Laura takes after her mom (my mother-in-law) by being ruthless with weeds! Laura...if you ever get an itch to spend hours and hours weeding, we've got a guest bedroom just waiting for you up here in Seattle! :)


Lots of marigolds are planted around the perimeter of this garden, including these tiny orange guys. I don't think I've ever seen tiny marigolds like this. Too cute!


While down in Portland, we all went to see The Hangover. Oh. My. Goodness. I laughed so hard that I nearly hyperventilated! Really, really funny...if you are in to that kind of humor!

So that's my little sneak peak into Laura & Scott's life. :) L&S - thank you so much for being such great hosts to us. Great BBQ, great laughs, great gifts exchanged and just a great time in general. We need to do that more often.

Sunday garden tour - June 28

Happy June 28!


This week I don't have a whole lot to report. I pulled a carrot that I thought would be huge. Turns out...not so much.


I also harvested 13 oz of peas and 12.4 oz of broccoli. Yum! There are a few tiny little cucumbers that are starting, and a few little peppers as well. And my nasturtiums are going CRAZY. Those things spread like wildfire, so that's a good lesson learned for next year.

And then this weekend, we took a little road trip down to Portland to visit Laura & Scott (pictures to come tomorrow, or Tuesday)...and we picked up some tax-free soaker hoses while we were down there. It's a pain in the a$$ to wind a soaker hose around nearly full-grown plants, but it's going to make watering the garden so much easier!

Happy Sunday...I'm looking forward to this week because Friday is a holiday. Woo hoo! :)

sewing

I did some sewing recently! A baby gift using Hawaiian fabric (blanket + bib) for a coworker, a grocery bag and a table runner...all in one day! Too bad I didn't take any pictures of the baby gift before it went off to the new mommy, and I haven't taken a finished shot of the table runner yet (I'll save that for another post). But...here is the grocery bag, all rolled up for easy storage (it's the white one):


And here it is unfolded along with a picture of my original 'inspiration piece', an Envirosax bag:



I have some poly-blend Hawaiian fabric that a friend brought back for me recently, and I think it would make a perfect set of fold-up grocery bags...but I wanted to test the pattern out since I was just essentially tracing around the existed bag. I had an old set of curtains that I thrifted from Goodwill a long time ago for use in a camping quilt, and it turned out this fabric was just perfect to use for my test bag.

When I make the 'real' bags out of the Hawaiian print, I think I'll do the handles a bit differently to make it a little easier on me. But all in all, I'm pretty happy with my little project! :)

on my iPod today...

Black Eyed Peas :: I Gotta Feeling
The Airborne Toxic Event :: Sometime Around Midnight
Mat Kearney :: Beathe In Breathe Out
Michael Jackson :: Rock With You (still can't believe he's gone...R.I.P. MJ)

Sunday garden tour - June 21

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!

This week I harvested 10.6 oz of snap peas. Yum! And there is a lot of rainbow chard, lettuce and broccoli that is either ready or right on the brink.


We've also got fava beans! A lot of people tell me they've never had fava beans and wouldn't know what to do with them.....well, try this Jamie Oliver recipe. I love it! I add garlic and eat it over pasta. So good.


And we've got overgrown potato bins, too! I read that if you don't hill up your potato stems before they get more than 4 inches tall or so....they'll remain stems and won't turn into more roots. The hot sun we had a few weeks ago caused these suckers to grow. Like. Crazy. So we'll see how many potatoes we get out of the bins as they are, but I'm not adding any more boards or dirt to them since that would be a waste at this point. Lesson learned for next year!


And then finally our big project this week was to build tomato cages. Since I planted so many (28) tomato plants, purchasing cages for all of them wasn't really in the budget (not to mention that those store-bought cages are pretty flimsy). So we bought a big roll of galvanized metal fencing (with 4-in x 2-in openings) and turned it in to super sturdy tomato cages for a fraction of the cost. We snipped off the very bottom row of metal to create a bunch of spikes to secure the cages in the ground and then also snipped out 6 large rectangular areas in each cage so that we can have plenty of space to reach in and grab the tomatoes when they ripen. If you click and enlarge the very first photo above, you can see all of the cages in a little more detail.


So that's the garden tour for today. Happy June 21! :)

Redneck Japanese water fountain

"That looks like a redneck version of a Japanese water fountain."...is what Karl said when he saw the contraption I had set up after a recent rainfall. Ha! A nice thought (??), but really I was just trying to capture the rain water so that both of our rain barrels could get filled for use in the garden. Since we hadn't yet linked the two barrels together, this is what I did...

First I found a piece of scrap metal in our shed and set it up to act as a gutter diverting rain into this bucket:


When the bucket was full, I'd pick it up and lift it over to the other barrel:


Dump the water in, and repeat over and over and over again:


And then, once I'd used up this water and the barrels were empty again...I got out the hack saw and cut a section of our gutter away so that I could prop the dark green barrel up on cinder blocks up higher than the blue barrel. And now the run-off from the green barrel will automatically pour into the blue barrel...so much easier than the redneck Japanese water fountain method (although not nearly as funny)! :)

(Like those hand prints in the first shot? Those are from the previous owners of our house, and I tried to pressure wash them off but had no luck...so now they just wave at me all the time, and it's a little annoying...)

Friday Funny

This is Cooper, trying to be subtle...


Too bad he ended up getting too sleepy to stay on guard duty for very long, so the birds just came and went as they pleased and he was none the wiser. I'm sure he was dreaming about his hunting prowess! :)