Please don’t yell at me. I feel bad enough as it is.
I have my maternal and paternal grandmothers sewing machines. They are well over 100 years old and I did a terrible thing to them. I painted over them with Anne Sloan Chalk Paint and then put on her protective wax. In a world of regrets this is up there on the list.
I love our down comforter. Okay it’s not real down, it’s a much less expensive version but I still love it. It’s been ripped, lost some filling and repaired. It’s now more of an almost crispy, orange/yellow because I did not know about that whole bleach/well water laundry thing when we first moved here. It’s seen some things. Lately I’ve thought about replacing it. I started thinking maybe it was time to get a new one after the last husky related rippage. It was a fairly large, jagged tear that made it look like it was snowing in the bedroom when I went to go to bed and fluffed the blankets. This was the second tear in as many weeks. Also the most dramatic tear which left me wondering if I could even fix it.
I’ve tried duvet covers. The comforter always made it’s way down to our feet or off to one side or in a corner. Perhaps I could have solved this by adding ties to our comforter and then adding more ties to the cover. I even thought about just buying a new insert that had ties and then buying a cover that had matching ties! There has to be a better way.
“Have drill, will screw things up.”
Last week I went into Bill’s office to get a drill. He naturally, and with some fear, asked what I was doing. I explained that now that I have repainted the mudroom door the ugly hinges needed to be fixed. These hinges are probably as old as the house which puts them at over 30 years. They work fine. They are heavy duty external door hinges. They have also been painted over numerous times, as many times as I have repainted that door. They are ugly, they have been ugly for years, I actually hate the fact that I painted over them. I also did not know exactly how to fix the damage that past me had done.
Quick post. Interesting news is that we have added a new season! We now have Winter, Spring, Summer, Monsoon, and Fall. Notice I did not say “good news” I said “interesting news”. It has forced us to take a break from all the things that need doing outside and brought us inside to wrap up some projects. Have you ever walked into a room and thought, “This is nice I think I could stay here forever”? On the flip side of that is when you walk into a room and you hurry through it as fast as you can because something just doesn’t feel right. That’s our mudroom.
Sounds kind of boring. And it probably is. The floor of our mud room is about 12 1/2″ lower than kitchen hallway floor. For the longest time we had a large wooden block step there. It wasn’t very big, and we thought a larger platform step would be better.
We decided on a 49″ x 22 1/2″ platform, with a 1/2″ overhang from the base. So we made the base 48″ x 22″. No overhang on the back, as it would be attached directly to the wall. The wall juts into the room about 4 inches on the side of the doorway.
We love our greenhouses. They aren’t fancy. They weren’t expensive. They are cheap. But they’ve given us some protected areas for starting and growing a variety of plants.
While we love them, the door zippers are frustrating. They are the cheapest, weakest, most poorly made zippers I believe on the whole planet. Every tab broke off of them, so I had to use a piece of twine tied to the tab loop in order to close them. The cover is stretched so tightly over the frame that there was a lot of stress put on these zippers, causing them to be very difficult to close, and they would separate under the stress. Numerous teeth broke, making zipping and unzipping very difficult. We knew early on that we would be building something to replace these doors.
Once again, the tomatoes got completely out of control before we got a decent trellis up for them. Seems to happen every year. One year I will have this made before the tomatoes are 8 feet tall! We put the tomatoes along the back fence of our new garden area, six 8′ x 2′ x 1′ high raised garden beds. There are also two of these beds on the front fence, next to the gate. The idea this year was to plant our raspberries in these beds, but long before we got to that, the tomatoes needed to be planted.
Instead of filling these beds with soil, we decided to use 10 gallon grow bags placed inside of the bed with one tomato plant in each bag. The idea was that later we could move the beds around without having to shovel dirt out of them. Once the tomatoes were done just pick the bags up and move the bed. When we did this in the spring we thought the layout of the beds would be changing. After living with it we might actually leave the layout the way it is. Bags in beds gave us options. Soil in bags can dry out faster than soil in beds, but having the bags in the beds might actually have helped to minimize that issue.
I grew up in the country. We had well water and there were times when I was younger that I would ask my grandmother for a glass of water. She would put a dish towel over the glass and pour the water through that to filter it. The water coming from the tap was mostly solid, red, sludge. The towel formed a solid cap of iron over the cup and I lost my desire to drink water.
This year we moved a lot of our raspberries, some to a row of raised beds at the lower part of what we call the berry room, and the rest of the black raspberries that were still in 22 gallon tubs to the top of the hill in the berry room. The golden and red raspberries, blackberries, loganberries, and currants were moved to the new garden area by the fruit trees. This left the blueberries where they were. This was mainly because 6 of the blueberry plants are in a raised bed. Three of them are still in the 22 gallon tubs, and we could have moved them, but decided to keep all of the blueberries together. Well, except for the 2 in the greenhouse.
