Yes Master or Indoor Project #4

So after 15 years of marriage, H and I have an actual matched set of bedroom furniture for the master bedroom.  First it needed to be painted.  This room was great but had a little too much earth-tone action going.  H found what I thought woudl end up as a very bleak and dreary color and, after a master bathroom repaint that even she admitted was a fiasco, I didn't have a lot of confidence.  Even so, we moved forward, using some great trim pain techniques I'd learned from my brother-in-law Stephen.  The paint was done well in advance of the furniture acquisition but it is all together now and the  results are great. 

Sick and Wrong Becomes Basketballicious or Indoor Project #3



Not to be outdone by his younger brother. . . .

You might think that we just did this in order to make for a more dramatic, "WOW!" factor with the before and after action but I assure, we would never put our children at risk in this fashion for that or any other reason.  This was all T, who has traditionally, been very good at keeping his room relatively clean.  Hopefully, a little DIY (or should I say DIM - Do-it-Myself) action will help right this wrong and get this room's inhabitant back on track. 

T is, as you may know, a big basketball fan and especially loves the Boston Celtics.  We picked a color that could pass for Boston/TD Gardens parquet floor (though we/I didn't have the ambition to do any kind of intricate parquetry pattern) and Boston Celtic's green.  An NBA poster, new bedding along with his pre-existing Cs blanket, Team Fatheads of the 2011 Cs starting lineup (given by M as a birthday present) and a lot of work done solo while everyone else was in Oregon yielded a sweet end result. 

Waste Not, Want Not or Indoor Project #2.

This project was actually completed at about this time last year; my first significant indoor project involving something other than paint and (not unrelated to that) was actually my idea.  We had a large landing at the bottom of the stairs leading down to the basement that was not really part of the family room.  It has been said that nature abhors a vacuum and I felt that this space needed to be filled with something.  What better to fill it with than cabinetry topped off with a nice color-coordinated counter top that the kids could use for homework and various creative projects?  We love it.  It makes the otherwise useless space functional and makes it feel a little more like our house, which is a good thing given that we have lived here a relatively short time so far. 

The Great Indoors

Since outdoor labor seems to consume most of our spare time in the summer, it should be no surprise that we have more free time to pursue other projects in the winter.  We're not smart enough to just sit back and kick it until spring so the previous post and several to follow summarize some things we've tackled on the inside during the long, cold, bitter, barren, dark, dreary and in all other ways - useless winter. 

Adults With Painting and Decorating Experience Wanted or Winter Project #1

 

This is what it looks like when a very interesting 9-10 year old gets to create the look for his personal space.

This is what it looks like when grown-ups with lots of painting experience and some sense of aesthetics and who love that interesting 10 year old very much get involved.  This was part of M's birthday present when he turned 11 this year.   

M has always been into nature and nature stuff so why not a small mural of a tree and a picture of the Tetons and some new nature-inspired colors?  What you can't see in this picture of the tree are the small white dots of glow in the dark paint which are luminescent when the lights are off reminiscent of Lehi's description of the fruit of the Tree of Life.

M has done a great job of keeping his new space clean.  Kids can be well - let's just say "not-so-neat" at times.  Yet, they love it when the space they occupy is clean and orderly.  Now if we could just get everyone on board with the rest of our space. 

The Buzz

Have you ever heard the buzz of 50,000 bees on a hot summer day?  The sound is truly remarkable, though somewhat enigmatic.  It is at once, calming and awe-inspiring, primative yet sophisticated, natural yet electric, with sounds made by individual members of the group which then blend together to produce a collective but unified chorus - like a Gregorian chant.  Come over sometime and place your ear against the hive and you'll hear what I'm talking about.  Or better yet, stick around while we open up the hive, as we did today when we installed our queen excluder, which is basically a grate that goes between the hive bodies and the supers.  The function of the queen excluder is to provide a grate with spacing large enough for workers to go through but too small for the queen to negotiate.  This allows for compartmentalization of brood production from some of the honey storage so that the supers contain only honey, which is what we will  harvest from in due time.

    

The Plots Thicken - or - I Must Be Inasane

Just what I need.  Another yard to work in.  This is a house in our neighborhood - a rental that has been poorly maintained much to the dismay of us locals.  This house, which is now vacant, is in desperate need of rehabilitation after being subjected to the "If I don't water it, I don't  have to mow it" approach.  Now that I am an expert in rehabilitating burned out, weedy rental yards, I got T and M an extra lawn-mowing gig (fortunately just for the week) which, of course means that I got myself an extra yard job.

After speaking with the dissappointed property manager and negotiating the terms, I set the boys to work and wielded the weed-eater prior to the Herculean task of clearing out the flowerbeds.  Fortunately, I didn't have anything fun planned for my day off.  When I am completely burned out in another week or two, I will rename this blog to "The Plop" to describe what I am going to do for the rest of the Summer, which is just to plop down somewhere and not do any more yard work forever.  All future  blogs will be about work I've already done so far this year and from there, will chronicle how I let my yard(s) go completely. 

 Anyway, the block looks better.  The other neighbors are grateful for a change of scenery and so are we.  Hopefully, I can keep up with my yard (at my house - I mean where I live - not the other one - well that one too, Grrrr! - you know what I mean) so that my neighbors do not wish that I too would vacate the area.