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.