Garden progress

In an effort to avoid sharing our progress on the nursery so that my parents can be surprised when they visit in a couple of weeks, I thought I'd catch you up on the state of the yard, since it's been a few months since we last checked in.

Some flowers of what I can only assume are from the "wild flower mix" are blooming:

One of our fancy red tiger lilies made an appearance. The flowers closed up and looked dried up and dead each night and then came back each morning. The leaves came up on the other side of the walkway but never sprouted any flowers.

Our Asian lilies were big and dramatic:

We actually had a surprisingly robust strawberry crop, considering this was the plant from last year. We put the planter in the breezeway and largely forgot to water it all winter, and yet it came back happy. The chives in the same planter came back too. This, basil ,and parsley (and the thyme and peppermint that we have in the ground), are our only homegrown items this summer. We couldn't be bothered with the ones that take more effort like tomatoes or cucumbers.

After none of the bare root black-eyed Susans we planted last year came up (I really have bad luck with bare root plants), I got impatient and bought some full-grown ones at Home Depot. Hopefully they come back up next year. This is my second attempt at buying full-grown black-eyed Susans. To be fair, the ones that I planted a few years ago accidentally got gobbled up by the rototiller when we were ripping up liriope, so I can't really blame them.

We planted a small plant that we bought at a county fair, called Strawberry Seduction Yarrow. It turns various shades of red and yellow:

Our butterfly bushes, while still puny compared to some, are growing a lot more than they used to.

 And they're living up to their name:

One hydrangea plant is thriving (relatively) and the other right next to it, not so much:

But we got enough from the one plant to convince me that it was ok to cut some off for our table (usually I hate to take flowers off the plant, because I want to continue to enjoy them outside in the yard where they won't die as quickly):

And my clematis finally made it's way up to the top of our lamp post! I've been trying for years to get a climbing plant to get there to no avail...until now!

Largely, this summer the garden has cared for itself. I'm seeing far less liriope than previous years, meaning that we finally made progress in ridding our garden of the horrible grass infestation. Plants are coming back - and coming back happier than in previous years. The grass in the front yard stopped looking stellar once the weather turned hot and dry. The back is doing pretty well still. This has led us to conclude that we might need to stop using a shade/sun mix in the front and switch to full sun. I always consider our light "dappled" but the grass has other ideas. So this fall when we do our annual compost spreading/overseeding (by "we" I mean D, since being so pregnant by then buys me a free pass), we'll try using a different seed blend.

But lest you think we're not continuing to work hard at keeping things looking nice, take a look at what we set out for pickup not too long ago:

So yes, even with all the nursery decorating, we haven't forgotten about our curb appeal.

Cutting it down to size

J's old desk chair was obtained from some random big box store. It's a wobbly ill-shapen mess that has become increasing fragile due to the over-use of cardboard in its construction. We've kept it for so long for a simple reason - J's desk is a very odd height. It's counter-height, but with a drawer below it. So, it's effectively halfway between a counter-height chair and a dining room chair. Which is not a common height.

During our many trips to Ikea to pick out baby furniture we found that the new Ikea INGOLF was, at least by eyeball, about the right height. So we bought it, figuring that if it was too tall, we could always cut it down.

After bringing it home and building it, we found, of course, it was about 2.5 inches too tall.

So, out came the mitre boxes, rulers, tape, pencils, and wood saws. First I taped off the legs (hoping to reduce splitting of the veneer when sawing), then I marked off 2.5 inches from the bottom of the feet on all sides. It was tricky because the legs are curved.

I then got the bottom of the leg at a right angle to the side of the mitre box. Just with some eyeballing. I was very concerned I would be cutting the legs off at an odd angle, but I didn't have a good idea how to cut it to precisely 90 degrees. 

I had two wood saws, with about the same saw tooth shape and size. But one only got through about 1/8 of the leg with 60 seconds of furious sawing, while the other got through the entire leg in less than a minute.

Did this three more times and was relieved to find that the chair was mostly level, despite my sloppy measuring and cutting. I then chamfered the bottom edges of the feet with a Dremel, so they would be less likely to split in the future.

The boss approves.

Little Details

No additional mural progress - real life, vacations, work, etc temporarily took over. But I should be back to that soon. In the meantime, sharing a few other small touches we've added to the room over the last month or so.

We painted the insides of the shelf nooks blue. It will be a lot darker when we put the top shelf back on - for now it almost looks like a different color on the top and bottom shelf (it's the same paint - just the sun is hitting the top shelf), which now makes me wish I had thought to do that myself. My plan is to paint little fishes in there.

We painted the attic cubby doors with magnetic primer and chalk board paint:

We rolled two coats of a very well shaken and stirred Rustoleum Magnetic Primer (seriously - the instructions even say to have it professionally shaken and then use immediately, since it takes very rigorous stirring and shaking to get the metal pieces distributed through the paint) followed by three thin coats of their chalkboard paint. It's tintable to a lot of fun shades but we specifically wanted the classic chalkboard gray look.

A lot of reviews said that the magnetic primer wasn't very effective and, indeed, it doesn't seem like it will be able to hold up alphabet magnets or anything heavy. But it can hold up a sheet or two of paper with a pretty strong (but not necessarily "super strong") magnet:

I should mention that the "we" here really is just D. Both these paints are most definitely not low VOC and they reeked of stinky fumes. I kept away and we aired the room out for a while before I made my way back in.

And finally (for now) we ordered these adorable elephant switch and outlet plates off Etsy - further making me think that elephant curtains might start to be a little too much...

Furniture is on the way and more mural work is coming. Stay tuned!

Happy Little Clouds

You'll have to bear with me as I continue to go on and on about the nursery. We actually have some fun yard pictures to share too, but I'm on a roll here and excited to show you all our progress.

First an update on the Curtain Poll - if you haven't voted yet, please do. I have to admit I went into the whole thing almost sure of which fabric I liked best. And it isn't the fabric you like best. And while I reserve the right to choose mine over yours, your convincing arguments are changing my mind (for the record, I like the blue and green elephants, so it was still a popular choice). I think the simpler design of the yellow stripes might be the way to go.

Next onto the good stuff. My cloud dream has come true! After a few hours dragging the ladder around the room and dabbing on paint, I have a pretty sky ceiling.  I read a lot of how-to guides on the internet and it turns out there are about as many "how to paint cloud" websites and strategies as there are clouds. There is no standard set of colors, tools, or techniques. So I picked a few ideas I liked and got to work.

Step one, for me, was mixing white and the blue ceiling paint to make a subtle base layer. I put this on gently and sparingly with a large, very dry brush. It was so pale that I thought it would be helpful to mark the clouds with painters tape, but the tape kept falling down anyway, so I gave up on that strategy. Right away, I ran into the small problem of deciding which way to orient the clouds (most clouds in the sky are at last in part parallel with the horizon, but of course I had no horizon). I decided to have them all sort of face different directions, with a vague orientation towards the sun lamp in the middle of the room.

 After step one, this was the very subtle result. I let that dry for a little while.

An hour or so later, I was dabbing on pure white paint with a sponge, for the highlights (i.e. where the sun would hit the cloud). I think the fact that the ceiling is a flat paint and the white is a semi-gloss also helped the clouds stand out. I didn't take a picture of this step but basically it made it a lot easier to see the clouds and gave them some depth.

That took a little a little extra time to dry, since it was a little thicker than the first layer (but still not "three-dimensional" - I tried to apply very little paint so that there was no actual texture that would one day complicate an attempt to repaint the ceiling white).

Finally, the third layer was a little bit of gray mixed with white (I actually used Sherwin William's Knitting Needles, our living room paint, that has slightly warm undertones). I dabbed this below the white highlight areas for shadows.

Here's the final results, taken with D's much better camera and much better skill than the two pictures above:

Love love love it! The ceiling isn't as blue as I would have liked (this picture actually makes it look more vibrant than it is) but the whole effect is probably much better this way - much more subtle. Now that it's done, I find myself staring at my own bedroom ceiling thinking how boring it looks....maybe time to add a few happy little clouds?