Snow and Presidents

Happy President's Day!  And also Happy Snow Day!  Today we are snowed in and so decided to throw on some boots and trudge over to Karen's house and feel like we did something.  Before I show you what, here is a nice picture of the view out on your deck today:

So I decided to install the knobs of the cabinet in the hall bath.  They are very exciting and they look like this:

Yesterday, Princie and Chris dropped by for a while and she put a coat of Kilz on your bed.  It's looking about 1,000 times better now.  Doesn't this look great, and it's not even the real paint yet!

And the main thing I wanted to do today was start painting the daybed black.  And then while I had the black paint, I also painted a couple of other things:

Finally, while I was doing such a fabulous job of painting stuff black, Terry cleaned and reinstalled the doors on the bottom kitchen cabinets.  This is just a couple of them. Okay, three:

The plan is to keep the bottom cabinets stained and paint the top ones white.  I think it's going to look fabulous!

Everyone should stay indoors and remain calm!  It's still snowing and very cold out there!

Love, Vicki

Painting and More Painting. Lots of Painting. And Love.

Yes, pretty soon we will run out of things to paint and then we'll call 'er done! But for now we are still painting. For the past couple of weeks,we were working on the board and batten on what I now call 'the purple room' and it is finished.  Janice did nearly all the painting in there and this morning I painted the trim.

Here is the finished product:

Isn't it swell?!  I can't wait to do the decorating part.

Also, while I monkeyed around, Princie has been working on painting the bed.  Here are a few pictures of the bed project:

I started playing with my phone camera and this is one of the cool pics I took:

And even more camera fun:

I love taking pictures while other people work1  As a side note: Princie, there is now a gallon of Killz over at the house!

And then this weekend I nearly finished the hall bathroom.  I started painting the cabinetry and then decided to paint a stripe around the room while I was waiting for the first coat to dry.  Here it is taped off with one coat:

And after the tape was removed:

Then I painted the second coat on the vanity and thought it looked pretty good and probably was finished. While that was drying I did the trim in this little bathroom.  It didn't take long. I realized that I could see better if there were some better light in there and decided to finish the light installation:

It's the same light we put in the master bath, and once I turned it on it was bright enough to perform surgery in there.  It was also bright enough to see that I would need a third coat of paint on the cabinet so I proclaimed the work day over and went home.  

The other day when Princie was over, she styled my little green corner shelf for Valentine's Day.  Isn't it cute?

Love is a many splendid thing.

 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Love Vicki

Bored with Batten.

This past weekend we planned to continue our fine work on the board and batten wall, but first I decided Princie and I should scope out the local flea market to see if they had a night stand or end table we liked.   I had a swell time but we might have looked around there too long.  However, we did find a few potential treasures.

How'd you like to have this guy guarding your entry?

I asked Janice to stand next to him for a size reference.  If he's even for sale, I don't know his price, but I'm sure it's more than the $69 that we had to spend.

Then we proceeded onward. 

This is a picture of Princie admiring herself in a nonexistent mirror.  Humorously, I did the exact same thing on the other side when we walked down that aisle.  It looked like a mirror but I couldn't see myself and it kind of freaked me out for a second.  Janice said, "What did you think - that you had turned into a vampire?"   And I'm still laughing hysterically about it.

Well, we did finally get outta there!  I'm not exaggerating at all; we were there 4 1/2 hours. I don't know how it happened. And also, we did not find any good end tables.  We found one small mirror for the wall of mirrors. And I got a pink purse that I've since taken apart to make it over.  So much for getting anything done on Saturday.

Yesterday was a whole 'nother story!  We got over there and some stuff got done!  I painted the ceiling in the hall bathroom.  Thankfully it's a very small bathroom.  Don't ceilings look so much nicer all clean and white?

 And while I did that Princie worked on the puzzle:

Just kidding!  Actually while I did that, she worked on filling in the holes and painting primer on the boards. Or did she paint the batten?  What the heck is batten anyway?

I didn't get a picture of it, but she also started getting the bed ready to paint, cleaning it with TSP and filling in a few dings.  And I finally finished the sink cabinet in the master bathroom.

I don't know if anyone was aware but yesterday was National Irish Coffee day, and since I believe we are some part Irish, I celebrated after I got home with this:

Here's the recipe (just like the Baldwin sisters):  Pour some hot coffee in a clear mug. Add some Irish whiskey. If you don't have that, just add whatever whiskey Terry happens to have. Then stir in a tablespoon of brown sugar. Top with whipped cream. At this point it is a good idea to take a photo of it.   Taste it. Gag.  Add more sugar and stir.

After that it was pretty good!  I don't think I'm a whiskey drinker.

Love Vicki

Sticks on the Wall

 A few days ago, we all went over to the house to get a little work done on the board and batten in the 3rd bedroom.  Terry and I cut all the wood over in our front yard because it was a pretty nice day and if you cut your wood outside then the wind takes care of the sawdust. Then we took the 'sticks' over and set them around the room to judge how far apart they should be. Here is Princie overseeing the project.











Once we decided on 13 inches apart I would hold the 1 x 2 against the wall and use the level to get it straight and Terry attached them with his trusty nail gun thing. 

Terry loves his nail gun.

It kind of looks like we're ready to attach something else to the wall.

This is going to look so good! (I hope)

It actually went pretty quickly. So we all admired our work for a few minutes and went home.

Love, Vicki

Fine Art

I need to go ahead and retire so I can spend all my time playing house.  I always have a long list of things I want to do and everything takes longer than expected.  Thankfully, Janice is in this too, and she does all the work!  Anyway - yesterday we made some progress:  

I finished painting the cabinetry in the master bathroom.   Here are the drawers drying in the sun.

You can also see in that photo the blades of the ceiling fan from the other bedroom. They had been painted blue, so I made them white again. I love how much better it looks. Paint really is a wonderful thing.  While I worked very hard on painting a drawer, Princie painted in the other bedroom:

There she is, painting the ceiling.  (roughly equivalent to a drawer in my book)  Once she got that done, we decided to install a better light bulb:

 

It is very gratifying to see how things look better after every light bulb is changed.  Princie continued to work on the bedroom while I had the happy job of doing some painting around the new light fixture and getting it finished up.  Now it looks like this:

I wasn't able to get a good photo of it with the light on, but, Yay! it works! Pay no attention to the paint on the mirror.  Unless you like that look, in which case, I meant to do that and will leave it there if you wish.

So then it was time to install the terrific sparkly knobs that I keep talking about.  I will miss carrying them around the house and playing with them.  We will absolutely have to get some more sparkly things.  Sparkly has replaced plaid as my favorite color.

This might be my favorite picture I have ever taken with my phone.  So the master bath is now done except for the fun decorating part! woo hoo! I'm thinking one of those shower curtains with all the ruffles.

On to the other bathroom.  It's right next to the other bedroom.  Which is where Princie is still working!  Let's see what she's doing now!

Ohhh, the purple is going on!  How exciting!  Doesn't it look great with the yellow?  Of course the yellow won't be staying.  The rest of  the walls will be white. We hopefully will get to that today.

In case you've been wondering what Terry was up to while we worked so hard, he dropped by for a cocktail:

I think he's waiting for someone to refill his beverage.  He was also admiring this bowl we found at the thrift store:

Isn't that great?  On the bottom it says Susan Branch and on the inside bottom it says something about simplicity in cooking.  It's really pretty and we think it will look great in the kitchen.  And it was only three dollars!

Well, the sun started to go down so we decided to quit for the day.  I tried to get a photo of the fabulous sunset but it was hard to capture.  It was all pink and purply and beautiful.   Here's what I did get. Janice thought that house made it look as if there is a mountain view. If so, it's a flat-on-top mountain, sort of like the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Maybe I need a better phone/camera. ha.  As you can see, there are now NO leaves on your trees and I can't wait for them to come back. 

love, Vicki

Weekend of Fun!

We got some stuff done over there this weekend.  I am sitting here now all worn out from the experience while Terry washes dishes.  I expect he is all worn out too. Mostly we're waiting for Downton Abbey to come on.  The other day I was planning to go over and do some work but it was mighty cold and I decided instead to enjoy this cup of hot chocolate:

And while I did that I looked at the internet - mostly Pinterest -  and got more good ideas for the house! Multitasking all over the place. 

Yesterday, Janice and I went over there to get some more painting done.  While I worked on the vanity cabinet in the bathroom, Princie worked her way down the river.  Or painted the hallway. Yes that was it.  We both were painting white.  But before we got started, we decided to assemble the bed so we could make sure  of the size before we get a mattress:  Here it is!

Isn't it swell?!   And yep, it's full size. A little smaller than queen size.  Could it be called princess sized?  If so, should be put it in Princie's room?   And speaking of Princie, here she is working away on the hallway:

I still say she ought to put that t-shirt on a canvas stretcher and call it art.  It does remind me a lot of Jackson Pollock.  And now it is the brightest hallway I've ever seen.  It looks great! And so does Princie!  What about that hat?  Millinery at its finest.

Meanwhile, I was painting the cabinet.  It took much more time to get ready to paint the cabinet than it did to actually paint it.  And then it needs several coats of paint.  Here's an action shot:

I was just starting then, so I still had a smile on my face and a song in my heart. I stopped after my second coat and wouldn't be able to get back to it until it dried all the way.  So I took one of the new crystal knobs for the cabinet and played with it in the sun.  They're very sparkly and they do this:

The hallway took longer than my cabinet painting operation, but when Princie finished it was just this bright!

And even out in the kitchen where nothing has been done yet, all was sparkly!

We might have had too much fun with cabinet knobs.

Moving on, today Janice and Terry and I were back over there. Janice finished up her hallway, painting the trim, and then she cleaned some stuff and What Not!  While she engaged in all that fun and frolic, Terry installed the two bathroom vanity lights.  The old lights had been there since 1993 and were very rusted and very ugly. In spite of running into a few problems, Terry did get R done! Here he is with a smile on his face and a song in his heart because he was nearly finished. 

After we were done for the day, we had to go back to our house for apple pie and coffee, and rest up from the experience.

And we all lived happily ever after!

Love, Vicki

Roaring Into Action

We've finally gotten past the holidays and now we're getting back to work!  Today I went over to the house and finally finished painting the walls and trim on the master bathroom.  I'd post a picture of it, but it looks the same only painted better.  The great thing was taking over all our old cassette tapes and finding out that the under-counter radio plays them! I was re-living my youth there for a while.

Then when we were leaving, Janice commented that we should take the end table from the garage into the house.  We bought it to make into a bar cart. Then she styled it up a bit with stuff we've picked up at thrift stores.  So it looks like this without doing anything to it:

After that, we went out shopping for a little while and picked up some lamps and a few kitchen supplies.  We also bought something called Liquid Leaf for the mirror collection we're putting in the very white master bathroom.  The plan is to make all the mirrors have gold frames.  I laid out some of them to look at:

I think they're going to look great!

Okay, it's time to watch Downton Abbey! 

Love, Vicki