Wednesday, November 25, 2015

I'm never painting again......

Finally, the knobs have been installed, range hood is still missing because I'm undecided.

Before
After

Many hours spent demolishing, planning, second guessing, tiling and painting. This was the test project for Farrow & Ball paint.  The walls are blackened estate emulsion, the top cabinets are wevet, the bottom, blue black in eggshell.  





Now onto the next kitchen...

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Inspiration for a creative life...

I recently found this blog and got lost... I love her hands.

 Spirit Cloth.

At the end of my current project, I have a fantasy that I can live a little like this textile artist.  I love the way she interprets her musings and transfers them to fabric.  This is not an easy thing to do, how many times have we started a project with an idea of the final result, and we end up somewhere else.  This isn't necessarily bad but when you have a fixed destination and you end up a neighborhood over, it can be frustrating.


This can happen with sewing projects, as well as home renovations.  I thinks it's only when we exercise out creative muscles that we get there quicker.

Speaking of practice,  I think I've forgotten how to sew!


Saturday, November 14, 2015

We have a visitor

We are almost finished with the demolition, just one small attic area above the patio that needs to be cleared of insulation, and 50 sq feet of tile needs to be removed.

In the meantime, walls have been going up and coming down.  Closets have been added, cubbies have been planned.  Plenty of head scratching over how to layout the laundry room, with the placement of a dryer vent next to the hot water heater.  How it was arranged before is a mystery.

We sat outside to ponder the changes when we spotted this. Yes it looks to be a bear paw.  Estimated to be 150 -300 lbs.  This would explain why the chain link fence is bent, despite efforts to straighten it.  A neighbor would later confirm that there is a mama and cub that cross over the fence and take a drink from the cove.  I will have to be vigilant when coming home at night.


 They cross just a few feet from the outside wall of the master bedroom.  The plan is to place a security camera there to catch them in the act.


Bear scat


Monday, November 2, 2015

The life changing magic of tidying up....







Spark joy and tidy your house, this is the underlying message from Marie Kondo.


Packing necessitates putting my hands on every single possession.  This book came to me via my sister in law who supports my decluttering efforts.  It's a very easy read and it's a little book, so you will finish it quickly.  The process, however will take longer.  She recommends that you declutter by category, the first of which is clothing. This means finding all of the clothes in your house and piling it all together, and sorting through it all at once.  Keeping only things that spark joy.  Since most of my clothes have become painting clothes, there is little joy here.

My knit sweaters have already been sorted and stored.  Another element to this system is that things are stored folded on  end. I'll give anything a try once.  The reasoning behind this is visibility and efficient use of drawer space.  You can see everything at once, and you can store a ton.

This is two drawers worth of sweaters  in one drawer, with space left over.



If you lookup Konmari folding you'll find all manner of youtube videos for folding techniques.

The sock drawer is next, apparently this is wrong. According to Marie Kondo, when you ball up socks, the elastic doesn't hold up as well, and you are being disrespectful to them.  This makes me chuckle, I didn't know I was being disrespectful. I thought this was an efficient way of keeping them paired up, but I tried her method anyway.



The socks were paired up folded in three, standing on edge.  The addition of a box inside the drawer to keep them tidy, and this is what we get.




I'm actually amazed, at how much space was found.  There are some lessons here I would love to employ with the fabric collection when the house is done.
I may even write to her to ask about it.

In the meantime tidying is always a good idea and the older I get the more important it is.