I love Ace Hardware!

They made me a screen for my bathroom window for $7.60 in about 5 minutes. My favorite location is Markus Supply in Jack London Square which is a super easy bike ride on my lunch break. Now we can leave the window in the shower open without lots of moths coming in. And we had to use our awesome ladder to get the screen in upstairs - go homeownership!

More Color at 667

I finally had a weekend without work or a frisbee tournament. House project! David & I once again used Sunset magazine coupons to score free paint samples for our upstairs bathroom. I prepped & painted the first coat listening to NPR's Weekend Addition, Car Talk & the beginning of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

Before.

First coat.

KFOG and some White Stripes & Elvis Costello made the second coat seem super quick. Some tips though - your drop cloth should not be weaved, cause if it is, it's probably porous and when you step into the yogurt container that has become your paint can, paint soaks right through.

Finished.

Our bathroom is now Spring Valley. It needs a little touch-up here & there as I also learned that even when you buy super good painting tape, you still have to do a really good job of getting all the edges really smooth.

Expanding the Garden

Our garden has LOTS of vegetables. But we need fruit to eat too, so today we planted an Osborne Prolific Fig tree in our front yard!

David doing the hard work.

Giving our new tree a drink.

 

Almost Free Shelves

When houses were built in 1944 like ours, they did not invest in as much closet space as modern homes. Or they didn't have as much stuff! Either way we decided our closets needed additional shelves to maximize storage. We took a trip to the Habitat for Humanity East Bay ReStore to find some salvaged baseboard trim to use to hold up the shelves. I recommend anyone with home projects to visit a ReStore near them. The stores have all kinds of home improvement items -- windows, doors, paint, cabinets, fixtures and lights. Most things have been donated from construction projects and some items are even new. Plus your purchases help a great organization that builds homes for low income families.
For our shelves, Patrick picked up some free extra-thick, plywood from a neighbor. Using a table saw borrowed from the Oakland Tool Lending Library, he carefully cut our shelves to size. Then we painted them to match our current shelves with paint left over from the previous owners' remodel. A few nails and wood glue applications later, we have more storage than we need. (At least for now!)

Patrick adds shelf to office closet

Storage!

Bedroom Closet: After

Bedroom Closet: Before

Numbers!

We have house numbers!
Buying six numbers can be expensive, especially those fancy modern metal ones. We opted for the cost effective classic wooden numbers for our front gate from this website:
http://www.sjawoodesign.com/pinewoodenlettershousenumbers.htm
We thought about making our own but we didn't.

Now everyone can find our house.

Garden View - 2nd week of May

The days are getting warmer, but we are still getting some rain. The garden is exploding! We are eating lots of greens made many ways. Plus lettuce & radish salads. One night David & I had simple boiled beets & the next night mushroom soup with the greens & stems. And of course, David made spinach & feta pizza!

Sewing Project 2: Bedroom Curtains

I learned a few things while working on these curtains for David & my bedroom. One - it's nice to have a gift card from your mother-in-law to the fabric store so you can buy $18/yard fabric. Two - having a properly working iron is key when straightening said fabric.

Before

After

I made the ties from vintage fabric that Abbey & I had in our sewing collections and I got the curtain fabric from Stonemountain & Daughter in Berkeley. I found the pattern here on sew4home.com when I was searching for ideas for my kitchen curtain.

Native Plant Update

Back in October we planted some native grasses and flowers in front of our fence. Now things are blooming! From left to right: the yellow is Buttercup, the pink is Checkerbloom, the orange is California Poppy and way in the back, the white is Yarrow.

 

Clothesline: Sustainability Wonder

We decided our backyard needed a clothesline, but didn't have a great place for permanent one or want ropes strung out all the time. We picked out retractable lines long enough to stretch from the pagoda to the fence and have been using them ever since set-up.

Apparently clotheslines are quite contentious throughout the country and many homeowners associations and even a few cities have bans against them. As electric dryers became a household appliance in the 1970s and 80s, clotheslines became a thing of the past. But as energy prices rise and global warming continues, the clothesline is being called one of the "Sustainable Wonders of the World." According to the Department of Energy, a dryer uses 6% of a household's total energy consumption. There is even a slow laundry movement that encourages air-drying and resources for simple, effective ways to save money and energy.


Katie and I grew up helping mom hang the laundry, so I wouldn't call it some radical, eco-idea on our part. Just a simple way to use the sun to help us save resources.

Kitchen Curtain

I had a few weekends with free time, so I looked through my fabric stash and found a pattern online to make a valance curtain for our kitchen.

Before:

After: