February 18, 2015

What do you do when the weather is rough?

Why, a home tour of course!

The Junior League Holiday Home Tour, to be exact. Is participating in a home tour something everyone should offer up their home for... absolutely not! No offense ladies, but imagine a group of "the ladies who lunch" meandering through your home and voicing their opinions on everything. Of course there are upsides also... you get things done! Our master bathroom received its finishing touches, including mirrors! a wonderful invention those mirrors are, except for the bald spot showing on top of my head in the mirror behind me... where did that come from??? And our laundry room inherited it's sink, a good old fashioned janitors sink that we rescued from a neighbors back yard.


The line began about a half an hour prior to admittance 

An attendee by the name of Lindsey Albrecht, an interior designer in Napa county, took quite a number of photographs of the house, and I hope she does not mind if I share a few with you.



A sink and a work cabinet. Cabinet salveged, still not sold on it

One side of the Master Bathroom, still needs vent covers


And a festive dining room set for Christmas dinner


All in all it was fun day, with lots of really nice folks who wanted to see the house. Best part of all was that the Junior League raised more money during this Home Tour than they ever had!



February 06, 2015

It never rains in California...

It is, again, pouring rain. But wait... it is never going to rain here again, we must save our bath water to wash our clothes, and save that water to water the garden. December found Healdsburg deluged in water, our "way back" yard held over a foot of water at the height of the storm. For that couple of days our property value went through the roof... "Lake View"!  January was incredibly gorgeous, perfect weather for getting the garden ready for spring, and I did get all of the front and the two sides of the house done. But, here we are again in the pouring rain. The News says yat another 100 year storm, I even heard that CBS news sent their cameras to the Safeway parking lot yesterday in anticipation of Storm-a-gedon, so as to catch the kayakers cruising around after Foss Creek floods again.

If you haven't noticed, when you own a house of this age, 145 and counting, you hate rain!

On the up side, we finally made the jump a couple of weeks ago, and bought something we have been putting off for years due to the high cost...

GUTTERS and DOWN SPOUTS!

So Exciting, and seems to have solved our water issues, but we are still in test phase and time will tell.




This shot is out of one of the windows, white gutters, and bi-color downspouts. I would love to have a photo for you of the wood gutter with its copper down spouts that is on the front of the house...
But it's raining out there! I love you all, but I don't want to get soaked for the sake of a photo.

February 02, 2015

A new Year, a new opportunity for a catch up

Yes it is true, I have not been writing, I have no real excuse. So much has been going on that life seems like a whirlwind! Our summer was spent re-trimming the back of the house in preparation for paint. Scaffolding everywhere, plywood frieze boards pulled down (how they got there I do not want to discuss, lets just say it was one of those last straw moments), sixteen inch wide redwood went up in it place, moldings, moldings and more moldings, casings and top trim went on windows and doors, columns were erected on the deck, and all corners of the back of the house were finally trimmed out.
Let the painting commence. The house is ninety nine point nine percent painted, and is looking fantastic! I will follow soon with some photographs of the back of the house.




Last June we went to New Orleans for a long weekend to celebrate our sister in-law's unmentionable birthday. We both adore New Orleans and actually spent a week there in the summer of 2005 looking at real estate. We indeed had picked out a house and headed back to Los Angeles to put our house on the market and prepare to make an official offer... Katrina hit a few weeks after our home hunt visit, and although the house we were looking at fared very nicely, the hurricane took the wind out of desire to live there.

Astrid's Birthday party was an excuse to run away for a few days and visit a place we love. While there we had some time on our hands so we went shopping. Salvage! New Orleans is a great place for salvage, but we were just looking... or so we thought. If you will remember back ,we had cut one of the kitchen cabinets due to cost (take a quick refresher look at this post from October 2012). Although the cabinet we had rescued and placed in the breakfast room was interesting and did the job, it was never quite right. While at "The Bank Antiques" in New Orleans, we rounded a corner and were presented with this... ooooooooooooh, I wanted it so bad!




Just the look and feel we wanted, and she measured out as a perfect fit. Salvage in New Orleans is so amazing, everything you look at is stripped of all paint and just begging to be taken home, sanded down, shored up, and installed. The down side... shipping cost. So we passed on it and went home. But the cabinet kept haunting our thoughts. Two weeks later I called, it was still there and I bought it over the phone and planned a road trip. Onto a plane, a few days with family in the Big Easy, and then into U-haul, ready for the trip home.






We took an entire week driving across the country, junk shopping all the way, and filled up the truck with treasures. Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, following route 66 all the way. There are lots of stories, but suffice it to say the journey was a lot of fun. There are other treasures purchased in New Orleans, but I will hold back on those until a future post.

Our cabinet arrived in Healdsburg and went through days of sanding, glueing, nailing, and an almost complete hardware change. We chose to leave it raw, and not put a finish on it, and she is a beauty.





So it is a new year, and I promise to be more diligent about posting. I have a lot of things to show you all and stories to share. Spring is right around the corner, the days are getting longer, and I am not so grumpy anymore.