Catching up

I know, it's been more than a year. If anyone is out there...

So what's happened in the past 15 months at my house? We got the craft room done!

Here's the before picture:


And here's how it looks now:





That's been about it for inside work that's been finished.

We've just started the process to paint our kitchen. We can't do a full kitchen remodel just yet, but we figure a new coat of paint, getting rid of the wainscoting, and maybe some peel-and-stick vinyl tile will help the kitchen look better. We're slowly peeling down the wallpaper as we walk past it. After we've recovered from our recent trip to CA for my sister's wedding (congratulations J & C!) and our best friends' wedding this weekend (hooray, S & Tica!), and things settle a bit from the busy spring we've had, we'll start in earnest. We picked up paint yesterday. So olive green for the walls, and off-white with a yellow-antiquing technique for the cabinets.

As for the antiquing - the people at Lowe's weren't terribly helpful yesterday. I hope I ended up with the right kind of glaze. We'll have to see. I got a small sample-sized jug of latex paint in the color we want, and a jug of clear mixing glaze. My plan is to brush it on, let it sit 15-20 minutes, then wipe it off. If all goes well, it'll stick to the crevices, giving it an antiqued look. The people at the store kept looking at an ugly pewter-colored "antique glaze", which looked like it was meant more for metallics than the effect I'm looking for.

We had tried a crackle glaze (testing on the wainscoting) and didn't like the effect. So we'll see how this one turns out.

Other than that, our spring was filled with nuking the side flower bed. By way of description - our driveway sits to the side of our house, with a small yard (our "side yard") at the end of it, directly beside the house. That yard was filled with horribly overgrown siberian iris and hasta, among others. While trying to clean it out, I grumbled to ~D about how I hate the irises (pretty, but I'm sick of them!). His brilliance came through when he said "so get rid of them." Thus began a 2-month or so long project to eradicate the irises. I'm still pulling them up on occasion, but the entire thing got nuked, reshaped, and replanted with other things.

I'll describe it a bit better later - my day at work here is done and I need go pick up my Bug from daycare.

I promise I'll try to be better at posting (if anyone is interested - feel free to comment if you are!)