Morning Light in the Garden

I've really been enjoying having actual dirt to plant things in at this house. There wasn't much planted here when we moved in, and a lot of what was here we pulled out. But things are finally starting to fill in. The nasturtiums are going crazy even though they have a horrible aphid problem. I guess they are supposed to attract the aphids away from your other plants, so maybe that is ok. The tomatoes are finally getting ripe. I'm starting to think about what fall vegetables I can plant in the planter box and am trying to get Nate to build more planter boxes for next year.

Puppy Playdate

We had some friends over last week to finally test out the kamado smoker, drink some of Nate's newly completed home brew and have our puppies finally meet each other.

Ollie is a 7 month old miniature Australian shepherd and though still incredibly cute, was possibly the cutest puppy ever to exist when he was two or three months old.

I swear Keita and Ollie really loved each other and were playing very nicely despite how ferocious they look in the pictures.

After dinner (Nate made baby back ribs in the kamado) we used the fire pit for the first time and had some s'mores.

Keita Update

Keita is four months old now and getting big, well not big, just bigger. When we adopted her the rescue group said that she was a labradoodle, but we are now pretty positive that there is neither lab or doodle in her. Probably she is some kind of terrier mix.

She is growing up so fast, so I thought I would post some puppy pictures of her in chronological order.

Here she is with Nate at 6 weeks, when we first went to look at her and her siblings. She was definitely the sweetest and cutest of the bunch.

Here she is with her brothers and sister and a tiny jack russell puppy. I think she is the one on the bottom left.

Here she is with me at 8 weeks the day we brought her home.

At 9 weeks.

Meeting Harris for the first time. You can kind of tell, even though it is blurry, that she definitely smaller than Harris.

At 10 weeks, back when she wasn't able to climb over the baby gates in the kitchen.

11 weeks and never sitting still long enough to get a clear picture.

13 weeks sitting with Nate on the couch.

She got spayed at 14 weeks and had to wear this dorky looking bib/smock for two weeks afterwards so she wouldn't chew at her stitches.

And just today, exhausted from her first trip to the dog park.

Wood Pests

I have been in kind of a creative drought lately. Besides sewing some housewares for the new place, working on other projects around the house and a few hand made cards, I haven't really done much with my crafting since we moved. Nate has really been the creative one around here lately with all his wood working projects. (He's a writer so he is always being creative, but I mean more physically creative.)

I decided I needed to get back into making things, so I dug some of my art supplies out of the boxes they are still in and I painted these forest pests on a piece of scrap wood from Nate's shop. Hopefully this is just the start of more creativity to come.

Some of Nate's Woodworking Projects

Since we bought this house Nate has gotten exponentially more handy. He bought a table saw and keeps trying to find projects to work on. Since we aren't ready to tackle any major interior projects, he has kept himself busy with outdoor stuff mostly.

I think either the first or one of the first things he built was this picnic table. It may have ended up costing more to build than one of those prefab ones from home depot, but it is really big and made out of pressurized lumber so it should last a long time.

We have gotten a lot of use out of it already. This was one of the first meals we had on it (turkey burgers with avocado and turkey bacon) and we have had countless more meals out there since then. I'm pretty sure we have sat down to eat a meal at the picnic table more times than we have at our dining room table.

I really wanted a fire pit for the back yard. My dream fire pit would have been the cast iron fire bowl from DWR but $465 was a little out of our price range. I also really liked the revolver solid base fire pit especially because it had a wooden top so you could use it as an outdoor coffee table when not in use as a fire pit. $250 was still a little more than we wanted to pay. So we ended up buying this square fire pit that still has a nice modern look to it, but was a little more in our price range. The only problem was, no wooden top. But Nate managed to make this top for it out of super cheep fence boards. It has two holes drilled through so you can lift it out.

Our house has this weird little wooden shelf on the front of the house under the window to my office with a frilly decorative lip on it. I'm assuming that it was intended to hold a planter box and it seemed pretty silly without one. So Nate built this planter box to fit the dimensions of the shelf. He drilled drainage holes in the bottom that matched up with the space in between the boards so water could drain directly into the planting area below.

I pained the box white to match the trim on the outside of the house (the former owners left a gazillion cans of paint in the garage and it is always a challenge figuring out what color goes to what part of the house). And I planted the planter box with potted succulent plants that I brought from our old house. Amazingly I didn't buy any succulents for this thing, I had way too many little pots filled with succulents.

Hopefully someday we will replace the frilly edge on this thing, or maybe eventually the succulents will get long enough that they will cover it.

More Living Room Updates

New Wall Unit, a photo by krakencrafts on Flickr.

There is another new furniture piece in the living room. I found this Danish buffet/wall unit at the Salvation Army the same day the couch was delivered. Nate wasn't too keen on it at first. He thought it made the living room look too crowded, but I think he was just overwhelmed with multiple new pieces of furniture arriving the same day.

We picked up a free earthquake kit from Ikea and Nate managed to get the top piece properly attached to the bottom piece (it was missing its pegs). So I was finally able to unpack a bunch of my pottery and get it properly displayed.

New Couch

We ordered a new couch from West Elm to finally replace to old, brown, cat scratched, ikea couch that I had been dragging around each time I moved since 2003. It is the lorimer sectional in charcoal faux-suede. Charcoal faux-suede was not the stock fabric for the couch, but we wanted it because it would be harder for the cats to get their claws into. West Elm said it would take 8-10 weeks to deliver the couch (which is already a crazy long time), but it actually took 11 weeks.

It was such a long time to wait. But it finally came on Friday.

We probably should have measured before we ordered it, because it might be a little too large for the space. If we were on "designed to sell" they would tell us it was making the living room look smaller than it is. But, it is so wonderful for both Nate and I and the two cats to be able to lay on the couch comfortably.

We had been waiting for the couch to come before we put up anything up on the walls in the living room, incase we needed to reposition the buffet that the TV sits on.

The living room is looking so much more like home with pictures on the walls.

We also put up some wedding pictures and our quaker wedding certificate/ketubah in the entryway. It is almost our one year anniversary and it's nice to be reminded of the wedding every time we walk by.

Also, Nate is getting really handy with his power tools. He built this little bench to use as a landing strip for my purse and to hide shoes under.