Well Hello there, Friends. I hope you are all having a fantastic summer. Mine has been busy and productive. I'm constantly taking pictures of things that I want to show you, and before I know it, I have way too many pictures for just one post. The bigger challenge though, is taking the time out of all of the craziness to write a blog post.
That's what I'm here for today. I'll try to keep it shortish.
First up, I've tackled my exterior back doors. These doors have been in sad, boring shape since we moved in, and every time I pass through them, I fantasize about painting them a popping fun color.
And since I'm into procrastination, I took the time to tackle this smallish project amongst my other, more important projects. Here you see the door after I've scraped and sanded the paint in preparation for painting.
Next I primed the door with this stuff. I probably didn't need to pull out such big guns for this one, but my other stuff was in the basement and this was already upstairs, and . . . I'm lazy.
After the primer, I put two coats of this exterior semi-gloss paint on the door.
And I almost stopped here because I loved it so much, but nevertheless, I persisted and continued on with my original vision.
The biggest dilemma I faced when deciding how to paint this door was whether or not to paint the trim surrounding the glass white, or teal. My thinking was that it should be white because the trim inside the glass is white. I obsessed over what to do, and I even took to Facebook to ask for advice from my friends.
Finally I decided to just take the plunge and do the opposite of what I thought I should do. And I'm not sorry I did either. I love the end result.
I have never used Antiquing Glaze before, and I'm happy to report that it wasn't difficult to use at all. It's not rocket science. In fact, I think it would be hard to mess it up.
What do you think?
The final step was to put a couple coats of clear gloss over the whole shebang to protect the Antiquing Glaze, which is not intended for exterior use. This stuff is for exterior use, so we should be set for winter trauma now.
This is our other back door, and it's a fake French door unit.
For some reason the birds love doing fly-bys on this door and letting loose with their organic ammo. Blasted birds.
Next up, curtains in the girls' rooms. They've only gone six months without window coverings. No biggie.
We got this idea off Pinterest, and it is all over Pinterest, so you've probably seen it already. We made our own curtain rods with plumbing hardware.
I love the way they turned out, but I feel I should warn you about some things that none of the Pinterest pins bother to mention.
First of all, the galvanized steel pieces were covered with a coat of grease which first had to be scrubbed off before painting them.
These pipes especially had an extremely thick coating and they were a nightmare to get clean enough to paint.
After we cleaned all of our pieces, I gave them a couple coats of paint with this spray paint that dries with a hammered look to it.
There are lots of tutorials on Pinterest for you to DIY your own industrial curtain rods, so I won't bother to bore you through another one. However, consider this next little bit to be a public service announcement.
This is the part that nobody bothered to mention on Pinterest, and I'm a little bitter about it.
Unless you have a perfect amount of space on at least one side of your window, you may not be able to get the rod in the piece that is called a Tee. This is especially true if you have a large window. Large as in wide.
Not all the tutorials use this particular piece, but of course we did, so just consider that we took one for the team here.
This series of pictures will hopefully show you what I mean. Peanut Head had to loosen the Tee piece so that he and Zoe could carefully ease the rod through it while turning the Tee piece back into its rightful horizontal position.
It was a slow process, trying not to scrape the rod against the wall.
Before sliding the other end of the rod into the opposite Tee piece, the curtain panels had to be slid on.
Ta Da!
I bought Stinkerbell's curtains at Kohl's and they are clearly inferior to the ones I purchased for Zoe at Bed, Bath and Beyond because, obviously, these curtains need a liner.
These too, although it's not as noticeable here because this window faces the shady part of the house.
And yes, I probably should iron these curtains, but I doubt I will. Those wrinkles will shake out over time, don't you think?
These are Zoe's curtains with the liner sewed in.
Now that we are finished with this project, I'm pretty happy we went this route because these curtain rods are super sturdy. I don't know that they were really all that much cheaper, but they are definitely more durable.
I have made some progress on the bathroom, although it is slow and limping progress.
I'm not going to lie, I hate every minute of it. I loathe tiling, but I love the look of it when it's finished.
And I can't afford to hire it out, so my mantra has been "Suck it up, Princess, and get your gnarly carcass back in that bathroom!"
I H-A-A-A-A-A-A-T-E it.
Hate, hate, hate.
I did empty one box of tile though, so Yay Me!
Although some work is getting done on the inside, the bulk of our work has been outside. We have to take advantage of the weather while it's here. Too soon we will be forced back inside for another winter.
There's a lot of pruning that needs to be done. I mean a LOT of pruning to be done.
And with pruning comes branches which need to be run through the chipper shredder.
And let me tell you, there's no dirty like running the chipper shredder dirty. It gets everywhere inside and outside your clothes, your hair, your crevices. It's icky.
Thankfully Clark's sister, Barbara, was willing to get dirty and we got these eight Lilac bushes extreme pruned. She also pruned all the trees in the orchard. Girl Power!
All the Lilacs had to be extreme pruned because we have drainage issues. We needed to cut these back so we can dig a trench around and between the bushes, and then put a river rock creek through here for drainage.
Peanut Head, being the nice guy that he is, has painted our dig path.
This is our progress so far.
We would maybe be faster at this, but Peanut Head insists that we "clean" the dirt. He's going to use it for raised garden beds.
This is our garden for this year. I'm pretty happy that we even got one in the ground at all. It can only get better each year.
In animal news, the goats are still fat and happy. I snuck up on Clementine here while she was asleep. Have you ever seen such a relaxed goat before?
I'd like to tell you that I screamed "Boo!" at her, but I did not.
Even I can be nice sometimes.
Poor Pajama-Rama was locked in the round pen for a few days until we could find a grazing muzzle to fit his face.
He was putting on too much weight and beginning to look like he was going to have several litters of kittens.
He was not happy about the muzzle.
I'm not going to lie, every time I saw him wearing that thing all I could see was . . .
This.
Thankfully he got back to his fighting weight, that's Cupcake Wars weight, and we were able to retire the grazing muzzle . . . until next time.
He's the kind of guy who enjoys his food.
The flies around here are getting ridiculous! They get bigger every day.
Sweets is assuming the mindset of the dentist's chair, and is pretending that this gigantic fly is not on his back.
Stinky sent me this picture, via text, informing me that we have a new cat.
Upon first glance, I was horrified. Something does not look right about this cat.
Then she followed it up with this picture of Dr. Lucinda Gooseberry looking very sleek and summer ready.
Needless to say, we have a new pair of equine clippers in the house. Aaaaand they work great on kitty cats too!
Cecilia quite likes her new look as well. We call her Truffula Tail now. She was not agreeable to Stinky trimming the backs of her legs though, so she looks like she's wearing pantaloons. It's most noticeable when she's walking away.