And now for something different: Kitchen Refresh

We've begun doing the early legwork on planning our kitchen...refresh. Let's call it a refresh. It certainly isn't a remodel. The cabinets are staying, the layout is staying and we aren't replacing any appliances. But it's time for an update. The counter is cracked and, since swapping out the linoleum, has become the cheapest part of our kitchen. Not cheap in a good way, cheap in a "why did the previous owners shell out so much for the cabinets and not get a good countertop?" It's been very good to us for years, but now in addition to being cheap, it's showing signs of wear, having a crack all the way through on the side that had to be removed during our new addition construction. And if we're gong to replace the counter, I can get a backsplash like I've always wanted. And if we're doing all that, we might as well pay the person to fix the cracked ceiling and repaint everything too, and and and. This is starting to feel like "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie." But here we are, at the start of making a to-do list that keeps getting longer.

Here's a reminder of what our kitchen looks like now. This picture has obviously been staged in no way, so please excuse the mess - this is what life looks like these days.

Here's a beautiful underside view of our Corian counters, wrapped over some kind of wood composite. Probably not a view most people consider when choosing counters, but since I'm often on the floor playing with the kids, it's a view I see more often than you'd expect.

Everything has to match/compliment our dark cabinets, since those are staying. It makes sense to me to lighten up the kitchen by swapping out our dark gray counters with something bright. We are heavily leaning towards Silestone, despite the price, because it's strong and nonporous and doesn't need treating/sealing. We're open to other ideas if you have a suggestion.

Based on Silestone's color assistant website, I think I'd like something that has veins to look like marble, or maybe specks to look like granite. Eternal Calacatta Classic looks nice, as does Lyra or White Arabesque. Obviously we'd need to see them in person.

Then comes the backsplash. We're thinking of some kind of subway tile look, maybe with a pearly white. Or maybe slightly smaller rectangles, but also in a gray/pearly white shade. A friend suggested getting the grout done in the darker gray of the veins/specks of the counter, which sounds like it would look good. He also suggested avoiding the 3'' counter wrap that goes along the wall and getting the backsplash all the way down to the countertop.

Here are some random pictures I've compiled from the internet as I try to find inspiration. What do you think?

Personally I have always adored pressed tin. Whenever it's on a ceiling in a bar, I always notice it and enjoy it. It's probably not realistic, both because it would be hard to clean and because it looks too dark and too remarkable to blend well, but I'm putting it out there anyway as an idea. Do you like it?

As usually, I find it easier to find looks that I hate, rather than ones I love. Here some kitchens that have similar color schemes but that I find ugly.

Apparently, I don't like square tiles:

And even though I like having a decorative tile row in our bathroom, this doesn't look good in a kitchen, to me:

 And despite saying I like subway tile, this is too boring:

 The rectangles in this are too narrow and the color is too varies:

Natural stone looks like like it's pretending to be the wall of a fortress. A big nope:

I still haven't found the perfect "this is what I want" picture, but maybe I will eventually. We had our first contractor com out to start giving us price estimates and he recommended a tile store, so we may have to go shop in person to find our inspiration.

Other things we're looking to possibly "refresh" in the kitchen:

• New cabinet pulls/handles
• New coat of paint
• New dining room light
• New kitchen light, possibly switching to recessed lighting
• New under-cabinet lights
• Fresh coat of stain on some of the cabinet edges, where the wood has gotten worn

We'll see how what we end up deciding to do as we start to figure out pricing and time demands.

The ants are back, again

Last year, like every year lately, we got ants. The difference was that D discovered the only effective solution to-date to get rid of them. This year, they snuck up early and in an unexpected spot - the living room front door area, where we keep the kids' jackets and the diaper bag. What were they after? You may have guessed it - food in the diaper bag. Guess those boxes of raisins are no match for ants.

D had kept the solution he'd made last year, containing water, sugar, Borax, and cotton balls. He put one along their path.

They flocked to it within minutes, and the problem, like so many others like it, became worse before it got better.

Fortunately we left town for 3 days, leaving the doors to the cubbies open and freshly washed and the cotton ball in place. Just a single cotton ball.

We came back from our trip - NO ANTS! None. They gobbled up the poison, brought it back to their friends, and that was that.

That night, we found another little path back in their usual location, next to the kitchen oven. I forgot to take a picture evidently, but they got the same treatment. Next day - no ants. This stuff is amazing. And while Borax isn't exactly safe for kids, in the small quantities used on the cotton ball and compared to real pesticides, this is a pretty good solution. The bottle is well-labeled and out of reach in the garage of course.

Be gone, ants!

Happy Little Trees

The trees we planted in November are looking very happy. We've been dutifully watering them each day (and now, thanks to some torrential rains, they're getting plenty on their own) and they are leafing out beautifully.

Here is the maple in our front yard, evidently still leaning after a few months of training. We took the band off to see how it was doing and clearly it still needs some help learning to grow straight.

The maple in the back has a much rounder ball of leaves and seems much fuller - which will make for a nice and robust shade cover in the maybe not too distant future. The tree to the right in this picture is on the chopping block, sort of literally. It's mostly dead and now it is stealing light from our maple, so we plan to cut it down soon.

 The Japanese Snowbell is also looking happy.

And now for the very littlest of trees. D is on a mission to replant those random trees in our yard that grew in our flower beds from natural causes. He's planting a row of them along the property line with the empty lot in an effort to (one day) bring back some shade to that side of the house. Here is a tin maple we found in a garden:

He's also planting a row of them at the curb between the sidewalk and the street. It's not technically our property but it is ours to maintain. Our town recently went through planting some saplings along certain streets, but ours was not one of them. The trees that do exist in that space are looking old and worn out, so it's time to replenish the tree canopy here as well. These are tulip trees but we have a few maple babies growing in our gardens that we plan to put in this area as well, maybe not until after the hot summer.

And now a diversion to show you what has apparently become our very purple spring garden. Right now the alliums are in full bloom, as are the dark purple irises and the clematis. The lighter purple irises and the purple phlox are past their peak but still hanging on. I am loving having a garden in my favorite color. Though I'm excited for the yellows of the late summer black-eyed susans too (hopefully with some purple echinacea thrown in for good measure).

And finally, some new additions to our patio - two very inexpensive adirondack chairs from Target to match the mini ones we got the kids. I should have about another week to enjoy them before the mosquitoes come out in full force.

Weed, the Legal Stuff

Oh I remember the good old days of gardens filled with unwanted liriope. Those heady days when I thought that removing that scourge from my garden would be the end of my worries.

Well the liriope plugs that we pull each year have diminished to a small handful. Meanwhile, new assaults are being waged by various invasive and unwanted species.

There is literally no space in our garden. It is filled up with weeds. All that greenery between the iris fronds and the grass line? Weeds. (Don't mind the straw - it was an attempt to get grass to grow in a different area and some of it blew into the garden.) It's so pervasive it's quite hard to uproot because the process seems to involves digging up and upturning almost all the soil without accidentally uprooting desirable plants just below the surface.

 The most noticeable int he above picture appears to be what is called wild violet:

It is choking our flowers and hostas and is all over our front and back lawn as well. In the grass, it might be a lost cause unless we opt to use a herbicide. We tend to avoid doing that kind of thing on the grass, where the kids are playing. Honestly if it's green and sending down roots to help with soil erosion, we usually just live with it and mow it when it gets to high. In the garden though, it seems to be taking over.

Next up is this one, mostly gathered around the trunk of the cherry tree, may possibly be called Henbit:

Finally, we have a lot of butter cup (I didn't take a picture of that). All of these weeds seem to be mostly newcomers this year. We've had violet in the yard before but now it has really made a home in our garden bed. We also have plants that we deliberately introduced to the garden that have taken over. Our strawberries have grown wild and sent runners everywhere. I don't target them for uprooting, but I'm not careful with them either. Otherwise the irises and black-eyed Susans seem to have taken over - but they are welcome.

With effort, I weeded a small plot of garden. It looks so naked now without the weeds there. Hopefully now that they aren't so crowded, the other plants can start to thrive.

Some mulch made the whole thing look much nicer, and might help dissuade weeds from taking roots.

 There's a pretty ugly and obvious line where I stopped. I have quite a lot more work ahead of me...

That Spring Post

We've been doing this long enough that every loyal reader probably knows what's coming - that post where I go on and on about what we've been doing outdoors to improve our yard and garden. It's that time of year. As spring arrives, so do our big plans and dreams to give our house great curb appeal or create a backyard that's inviting and fun (and then the sun gets hot and the bugs come out and I retreat inside and never get to enjoy it). We've been doing so many of these that I won't even link back to them all. Peruse March, April, and May for every year we've been doing this, and you'll find them.

And so, it begins. First, as a reminder of how much we've done in just a couple of week, this was the first day of spring:

 The blooming trees were quite surprised:

But two weeks later when the weather finally warmed up to about 45 during the day, we got to work. We went to Home Depot to stock up on mulch and, as always happens, came home with a few extra items. Some lavender and rosemary, a tomato plant (we've been starting basil from seeds in our window but weren't planning to do vegetables until we remembered that basil and tomatoes love to grow together)

We also bought some full sun colorful flowers to add to the front garden that we were planning to redo. We got Lithadora and Salvia, which were both very on sale and therefore very tempting:

However, that meant the clock was ticking to rearrange the garden and get these guys in the ground. Our front largest garden bed had been designed so that we surrounded our big oak with flowering ground cover. So it never looked good after we had to remove the giant oak tree. For the first year (when we were told we should not plant anything permanent there to allow the pest that killed our tree to subside), we planted a depressingly small amount of annuals that didn't last the summer. Then last fall when we tried to plant our crepe myrtle there, we found out that the hollowed-out stump area was still too woody to give us the room to plant a tree, forming a solid floor of trunk about a foot below the surface.

Then D had a genius idea last week, after I complained about it for the umpteenth time and debated whether we should pay someone to dig/carve it out. He moved it a couple of feet closer to our lamppost and moved a hydrangea that was crowded in a different garden bed into the shallower hole where the old tree had been. This let us move the crepe myrtle away from being directly under power lines AND allowed us to shrink the garden bed more in line with the more modest plants we have there now that the oak tree is gone.

We planted the Salvia and Lithadora all around the hydrangea and crepe myrtle. It was a family affair.

 Then D uprooted the plastic garden divider and moved it to make the garden smaller.

You can see better in this picture the old bed area and the new one. Obviously we need to turn the soil on the area that used to be garden, uproot any Georgia Blue ground cover worth saving, and then level the ground off and start trying to grow grass.

We just had 4 cubic yards of compost delivered. We better get to work.

Leave a Light On: Outside Edition

If you've been following along for a while, you may remember that we have a security light on the back of our house. It has never worked and we never shelled out the cash to fix it.

And then, suddenly, a tree fell on it. So we asked for a new one - it was broken after all, even more so than before. Fortunately as the 2013 electrician predicted, the light itself must have been the problem because the replacement worked! Let there be light!

The light turns on automatically when it gets dark out and stays on all night, getting brighter when something sets off the motion detector. It doesn't seem to have an "off" switch, as far as we can tell. Which can be fun when you look out the window and realize an opossum is crossing through your yard:

However, the light coming from two halogen bulbs had to add up (we don't have a smart meter anymore to tell us exactly how much it was costing). After a few months with the two 75W halogens, we finally got around to putting in LED lights. The problem was that our LEDs were actually brighter than the the halogen they were replacing.

A quick adjustment and we were all set:

The halogen lights had stayed on low all the time and then brightened when the motion sensor went off. The motion sensor doesn't seem to work with the LED bulbs, but the constant low lighting in the backyard gives us a better sense of security than the pitch black nothingness, so we'll take it. It's also nice to have a little light back there in the late evening just to hang out outside, though we might have to make some adjustments when the lightning bugs start to come out.

By the way, the title of this post refers to a post a few years ago when we bought an LED bulb, a cheap lamp, and a timer and set it up so that there was a light on in the house to greet me when I came in after work for the few months of the year that it was dark.

Family of Four

There are indeed four humans living in our house now but this post isn't about us (this is a house blog, after all). It is about how we managed to acquire yet another vacuum, bringing our total number up to four. Of course, the fact that we also have four humans (including two particularly messy young ones) probably has some connection to our growing family of vacuum cleaners. Though we have struggled to find ways to keep the floors clean ever since we moved here.

Our vacuum family consists of a Roomba that makes its rounds twice a week, a Miele canister vacuum that we rarely take out now that we have a cleaner come weekly, an old Dyson animal that lives in the basement from back when we lived in an apartment with wall-to-wall carpets, and a hand-me-down Black and Decker dust buster that had outlived its usefulness despite being our most used vacuum.

Thanks to a toddler who likes to walk around with bowls full of cereal, crackers, goldfish, and other small things that go crunch underfoot, the dust buster has become our go-to floor cleaner. Step on an oatmeal sure? Go grab the dust buster. Ride-on toy scooter roll over some cheerios? Time to dust bust. But that thing did not have the suction power, nor was it doing our backs any favors bending down to the floor cleaning up the crumbs.

And so, a couple of weeks ago, we acquired a refurbished Dyson V7 Motorhead vacuum, also known as a stick vacuum.  It lives in the hallway right near where we had parked the (now departed) dust buster. It's not that noticeable from the living room (second picture below) and is very centrally located to all our usual messes. I am also partial to what Dyson calls purple and I call magenta color.

It comes with a few attachments and the stick feature means no more bending down to vacuum. The fact that it has an actual motorized brush bar means it can pick things up from carpeting pretty easily, and it has two power settings depending on how much needs picking up (plus a "trigger" button that somehow is much more intuitive than having to switch something on).

It is so thin that I had high hopes it would fit under things like this sofa, a home to dust and crumbs (and toys and plates??) that get kicked or brushed under  while the kids are playing. Alas, it does not.

Nonetheless, in the two weeks we've had it, we are finding that we love having it around. Here is the haul just from this morning - crumbs, cat hair, dust, and play-doh.

It's not what we would use for when we have to vacuum the whole floor (that's what the Miele is for, or the Roomba if we can wait an hour for it to do its thing). But it's great for the almost constant little messes caused from a house full of people.