Caulk, Baby and A Garden Boom

I have a new addiction. Caulking. This morning I was doing a little more work on the bathroom trim and I discovered a tube of white bathroom sealing caulk I'd stocked under the sink. It was all downhill from there! Love squeezing it out like glossy frosting and the tactile precision of smoothing it with my rubber gloved finger. I caulked everything in the room and am now on the prowl for more places in my life that need caulking! Caulk! Its fun!

The baby, Pom is growing wildly. He's trying busily to roll over although I expect he won't be successful for quite a while yet. He is completely intolerant of dirty diapers and will fuss until changed and then bloom in smiles. He loves to be held at my shoulder, surveying the world behind me and watching whatever brother is bobbing behind saying, "Hi Baby! Hi!" Pom also has the most incredibly blue eyes. I think he got my Papa's peepers. I've admired his eyes for as long as I can remember so I'm beyond thrilled to have this tiny sapphire eyed creature mirroring him. So fun! A has given up insisting that they're going to fade to brown every time I mention them. I think we may have three brown eyed boys and blue eyed caboose.

The garden is churning out so many vegetables that I am hard pressed to keep up: zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, swiss chard..etc. etc. With all the new garden space we have this year I might finally be able to let go of having a CSA in the future. We really have so much available using both that its a bit manic. I need to remember the freezer and stock things away for winter. I have been freezing herbs in ziplocs which I also remembered to do last year and love, love, loved. Small victories! All our sweet corn is in now and sitting in a bag on the counter waiting to be shucked so that ought to be my first big project.

I am feeling excited about working on the house and a bit disenchanted with the outdoors (bugs, heat..etc.) and am starting to think fondly of our autumn hikes we start taking on Sunday afternoons once it is cool enough to deter ticks. Other things on the mind: curriculum arranging for this fall (1st grade approaches!!!), plans for roasting haunches of meat in the oven on cool evenings, prepping for Christmas (I will not be blindsided!) and our newly annual Thanksgiving dinner with friends. Summer is still with us right now though as the endless tomato salads do testify. Am hoping to have a dip in the community pool before we're through and this weekend we're headed to the county fair!

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Trimming My Sails

English: Paintbrush Português: Trincha (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The radiator, segueing from old dingy white to glossy new white.

The sun is shining, the tomatoes are pouring in, the weather is finally cool enough to stand and the mosquitoes are thicker than thieves in our yard. My speckled legs bear testament. Urgh. So...I'm painting indoors for respite.

Before Trim

After Trim!

 The trim in the boy's bath is finally getting a glossy coat of white and I'm humming away. Coming along, isn't it? I'm so excited about the whole project. I think this room may really end up looking miles better. I adore the cool aqua blue on the walls and shiny white trim always makes me feel better. Have a peek!

The baby has learned to stay asleep for a reasonable amount of time and little jobs like this don't require any taping or hauling out of drop cloths. I could do picky detail work like this all day long. I love being down on my hands and knees with a bitty brush, trying to be sure to go right up to the very edge. What does that mean about me? Something important I'm sure.

The Bathroom Saga, Part Three

Oh man....time gets away. Here I am, finally...sharing what I hoped would be the third and final chapter of the story about the bathroom walls but which looks like it will actually be Bathroom Saga Chapter Three of....four? I hope just four. It will all eventually end. I believe in it.

One time I ripped down all that strange, vinyl wallpaper with the blue faux wood pattern and was left in the world of caked on old glue. Then I got inspired in this post and kismet happened and I found the-most-fabulous-wallpaper-glue-removing-spray-in-the-world. (Everyone who has old wallpaper to remove, run, don't walk to that link and order some from Amazon immediately! Chomp rocks and I'm not even sort of being paid to say that.)

So then, A pitched in and we sprayed and scraped and scraped and sprayed and swept up glue bits off the floor and washed it off our feet and daubed it off of various children and then one day we finished!Woohoo!!!There actually was a finite amount of glue on the wall and it didn't and couldn't go on forever. Hooray! After all the scraping and stripping and what-not there was a little spackle work to do and then some light sanding to wrap the whole thing up.

Tah Dah!!!!Naked walls!!!!

So very, very clean...except for a little random white paint at the top...odd, eh?

And so now the walls stand naked before us! Naked, boring walls never looked so good. Such a relief. So, now we have a manic, crazy week ahead of us and we won't get a chance to slap the two or three coats of soft tealy blue on the walls that I have all ready and waiting in a can. But I feel it...we're close.

Bathroom Stripping

 No, not me...this frightening bathroom wallpaper! One of our upstairs bathrooms had this lovely heavily plasticky, blueish, faux-woodgrain wallpaper. As soon as we strolled through the house for the first time I put removing it on the list of renovations to tackle early on.

 Now, of course, all of you real life home-owners know that "early on" means sometime in the first five years of owning your new place, right? I'm so ahead of schedule, getting to the job in the first year. (This is what I tell myself anyhow.) I did a little online reading about wallpaper stripping and then began....then there was a long lull and finally A helped me tear the rest off. Handily, the heavy plastic texture turned out to be a bonus....it peeled off in pretty large sheets and left nothing but a little glue on the wall.

Here are some shots of the plain white tile that lines the shower and the tiny teal-ish tiles that are on the floor. Inspired by them, I am hoping to paint the walls a bright orange as soon as I finish washing all the glue off the newly naked walls. Good thing it's a small room. I am hoping to go for a nice poppy bright color. I always do these edgy, borderline bizarre rich colors and I'm not entirely sure it is wise. I am no interior decorating wizard, that's for sure.

 This one spot above the sink is all I really have clear so far. Lots left to do. This could take a while. Good thing we started to early, eh? We could be occupied for a bit.

Here's Nib on the new bath mat, next to the shower curtain. I hope the whole theme works out. I am primarily being inspired by bright orange coral and seafoamy ocean water. Sounds sane, right? Tell me I'm sane.

Here's my whole design inspiration board, just in case you wanna visualize the colors I'm thinking.