Plant stack

That's all.

A parallel world

I thought it would be fun today to share photos of the home that we didn't get, but initially really wanted to buy. It's the exact same model as our current home. We made an offer on this one, but after a lot of back and forth negotiations, it went above what we wanted to spend. In the end, I'm glad we saved ourselves the money. What we fell in love with most was the size and layout of the house, and the size of the backyard, all things that we currently have in the same model around the corner. While I do secretly wish we had their landscaping, deck, and shed, I'm cool with not having the actual house. We probably would have just moved straight in and changed nothing, which wouldn't have been nearly as much fun. It was actually to our benefit that we spent so much time thinking about this house because it made us more aware of our fixer-upper's possibilities and charm.  

click through for more photos

gardening steps (for beth)

my sister asked for gardening steps so read more to see what i did. gardening tips and suggestions are welcome from anyone who may know more.

dream print

Up in the Air

i keep staring at the space behind the tv in the living room, and imagining how nice it would look with an antoine rose "up in the air" print. so many nice details and colors... it's fun to imagine reading a good book on one of those blankets. :)

update- found this one too... damn these prices! toggle between sizes for a reality shock. 

praia piquinia

a successful end

the rest of the holiday weekend was a huge improvement over saturday - tocco redid the stairs, i started a couple container gardens (with tomatoes, arugula, mint, cilantro, rosemary, and sage), we went to half moon bay, saw our first kitesurfers for the season (!), had a nice lunch out, checked out some greenhouses, found temporary outdoor seating in our crawl space (yes!) and made a homemade berry tart, curried carrot soup, and banana bread... 

Saturday

Saturday started out with big ideas and really good intentions. We went to the Home Depot (where they now say "See you tomorrow!!"to us) bought all of our stuff and set up shop. We each had our own project to tackle that day, and we went to work for hours, barely seeing each other. I think we were both pretty cheerful for about 6 of those hours. But then I hated the color of the steps and caused a stink and things kind of tumbled down. 

There we were, covered in sweat, dust, dirt, and pollen, and I started to feel like everything we were doing was actually something other than we intended. Everything started to flip in my mind. Like, you think you're making the stairs clean and great looking, but really you're making them a horrible pecan orange color that makes you ill it's such a disappointment. 

You think you're sanding the steps to be smooth, but really you're just getting sanding dust everywhere and on everything. Including the new carpet and desks.

You think you're making the garden a nice place to be, but really you're just breaking your back trying to pull a heavyweight anchor of root out of the ground. And your ruining your shoes. And jeans.

You think you're clearing away two of the three plants that were inexplicably planted on top of one another, but really you're just filling your eyes, nose, and mouth with pollen and old plant dust.

You think you're working together, but really you're just cranky and tired and irritating each other. And so on...
Thankfully, we eventually cleaned Saturday up and put it to bed. Sunday was a different story entirely; all of these projects seemed to turn a corner, and things became much more manageable, and the good stuff started to happen. Yay:)