We had already used some old paving stones to lead to the air conditioner, where it had once been a muddy, ivy-entangled area.
Then we planted a piece of yellow sedum...which in time turned into a jungle.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
So we had a few landscaping rails left over from the upper bed project. We thought putting a few of them ontop of eachother and driving two stakes through them would make a nice flower bed on the side of the house where there was just an erroding patch of dirt.
We had already used some old paving stones to lead to the air conditioner, where it had once been a muddy, ivy-entangled area.
Then we planted a piece of yellow sedum...which in time turned into a jungle.
We had already used some old paving stones to lead to the air conditioner, where it had once been a muddy, ivy-entangled area.
Then we planted a piece of yellow sedum...which in time turned into a jungle.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Record High Temperatures
Can only mean one thing...that's right! It's the weekend to do huge home improvement projects. It's sunny and 90 degrees in early April...in Pittsburgh?! Surely it is a sign from the gods, we are to paint this day. So...Let's go! Gotta get it done...NOW, because every other spring weekend there'll be rain, right?! Hustle, hustle, hustle! I don't hear the wisp of bristles.
I don't do this on purpose...I swear I don't, it's just my gift...okay, I guess "curse" is more like it. For the record, I consider myself to be merciful because I didn't make Dave work with me at noon when the sun was hottest...so if you're reading this, you're welcome babydoll! What's that?! You know what Napoleon's men felt like as he lead them to their deaths at Waterloo? Now that's just silly, they were marching through Russia and it's frick-ity cold up there....it's 90 here, paintin' weather ;-)
Deck:
Bam! Painted.
Front whatever-the-heck-it-is:
Cha-ching! Painted.
Railroad tie wall:
Painted.
I don't do this on purpose...I swear I don't, it's just my gift...okay, I guess "curse" is more like it. For the record, I consider myself to be merciful because I didn't make Dave work with me at noon when the sun was hottest...so if you're reading this, you're welcome babydoll! What's that?! You know what Napoleon's men felt like as he lead them to their deaths at Waterloo? Now that's just silly, they were marching through Russia and it's frick-ity cold up there....it's 90 here, paintin' weather ;-)
Deck:
Bam! Painted.
Front whatever-the-heck-it-is:
Cha-ching! Painted.
Railroad tie wall:
Painted.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Refinishing End Tables
A co-worker of Dave's was selling marble top end tables on Craig's list and we bought them from him. The wood was scratched up, and they were lighter wood than we wanted for our living room, so I refinished them.
First, take off all hardware and sand the tables to make sure the stain will stick. I used a 1" foam brush so there wouldn't be any brush strokes and minwax polyshades. Polyshades is in all seriousness the best home improvement product I've come accross. It works on unfinished and finished wood. I've finished a floor with it, I've gone over our bathroom cabinets and molding to brighten them up(without sanding them first). So my advice is rather than buying minwax stain, just buy the polyshades, it makes it so much easier. Other than drying time, I got the three tables done in under 2 hours. Now our challenge is going to be attaching the marble tops to the tables.
Before:
After:
First, take off all hardware and sand the tables to make sure the stain will stick. I used a 1" foam brush so there wouldn't be any brush strokes and minwax polyshades. Polyshades is in all seriousness the best home improvement product I've come accross. It works on unfinished and finished wood. I've finished a floor with it, I've gone over our bathroom cabinets and molding to brighten them up(without sanding them first). So my advice is rather than buying minwax stain, just buy the polyshades, it makes it so much easier. Other than drying time, I got the three tables done in under 2 hours. Now our challenge is going to be attaching the marble tops to the tables.
Before:
After:
Happy 3rd Birthday to our house!
For the past two weekends we've been working like crazy outside. Trying to get the yard under control before the weeds take over.
We finally got around to landscaping the area beside our sunporch. Let me put this into perspective...the day we closed on our house (April 28, 2006), we tore up the shrubs that were in that area. Three years later almost to the day, we planted 20 hostas (they were in huge clumps all over our property, so we broke them up into smaller groups), built a tiny wall around it, and put down sand pebbles. Procrastination-3, Us-1. Naturally I picked the weekend with temperatures that tied record highs to do all the physical labor.
This weekend we bought paint for our fence and started on that task. I had stained our front porch a few years ago and I just did not want to play with oil based stain again; it's so messy, you have to do more than one coat, and you can never get the smell of mineral spirits off your hands. It was great painting weather, temps near 60 and not much sun, so we were able to get about 1/3 of the yard done!
Thanks to all the rain we got the last week, the weeds have officially won and taken over our yard :-( It's going to be an uphill battle from here.
Before:
After:
We finally got around to landscaping the area beside our sunporch. Let me put this into perspective...the day we closed on our house (April 28, 2006), we tore up the shrubs that were in that area. Three years later almost to the day, we planted 20 hostas (they were in huge clumps all over our property, so we broke them up into smaller groups), built a tiny wall around it, and put down sand pebbles. Procrastination-3, Us-1. Naturally I picked the weekend with temperatures that tied record highs to do all the physical labor.
This weekend we bought paint for our fence and started on that task. I had stained our front porch a few years ago and I just did not want to play with oil based stain again; it's so messy, you have to do more than one coat, and you can never get the smell of mineral spirits off your hands. It was great painting weather, temps near 60 and not much sun, so we were able to get about 1/3 of the yard done!
Thanks to all the rain we got the last week, the weeds have officially won and taken over our yard :-( It's going to be an uphill battle from here.
Before:
After:
Friday, April 3, 2009
Refinishing the Kitchen Floor
I did this last year and only now I am getting around to blogging about it. This is before I realized that Minwax polyshades existed so I did it the hard way. I planned on making our house number on a plaque. So as I was staining the plaque one night, and naturally it lead to me deciding I needed to stain the kitchen floor *sigh* I tend to get myself into these things if you haven't noticed yet ;-)
After doing two coats of stain I did another two coats of polyeurethane gloss finish. Our kitchen door has also been painted blue since this photo was taken, I'll have to post a picture of our whole kitchen at some point in the future.
Before (I had already stained 3 tiles, and though "oh crap, better take a before photo"):
After: 
After doing two coats of stain I did another two coats of polyeurethane gloss finish. Our kitchen door has also been painted blue since this photo was taken, I'll have to post a picture of our whole kitchen at some point in the future.
Before (I had already stained 3 tiles, and though "oh crap, better take a before photo"):
After: 
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