I <3 You Paint

I love paint. It truly is the cheapest way to make a huge difference in a space.

Case in point:

Me, seething with hate for the ugly brick fireplace wall

Me, seething with hate for all the mortar lines that needed to be primed and painted by hand

Not shown, me, in love with the final color.

Once we put away the shop vac and paint accoutrements, the room will be completely beautiful. At some point soon, we're going to paint the rest of the walls a light shade of gray. But in the meantime, two full weekend days, a gallon and a half of primer, half a gallon of paint, and a few paint splatters in the hair equal new love for our living room.

Left Behind

The last time I bought a house, it was pristine the day I moved in. The guy I bought it from, Larry, called me a few times in the days before he moved out to see if I wanted to keep anything he was thinking of leaving behind. I didn't want his cooties despite his excellent taste in paint colors so I politely declined and moved into a junk-free house.

This house, however, has lots of prizes left behind. It is like one big treasure hunt - you never know what will greet you when you open up a closet door. I made a few giant donations to Goodwill when moving out of the old house, and I'm collecting lots more for a new humongous donation courtesy of the new house.

Here's a random sampling of what Will and I have found:

Half empty bag of cotton balls - why thanks for sharing these nifty soft things, I've never seen them before!

Cleaning supplies - ironic because I don't think they actually got used before we moved in. I kept the Mrs. Meyers cleaner & the laundry detergent and tossed the rest of the mostly used bottles.

Assorted kitchen stuff - my parents came up to help us on Sunday and I gave my dad the task of taking down the multiple paper towel dispensers and magnetic knife racks in the kitchen. Really, who needs paper towels in two different spots? In the same kitchen?

Super sweet lamp - this nifty little ditty was attached to the wall above my desk in the office. It had a pee-yellow metal lamp shade with a Norwegian type flower pattern on it. I couldn't concentrate on a conference call it was so distracting. 

Iron - perhaps original to the house, circa 1960. My dad thinks I should take it to an antique shop, my mom and I disagree.

Light bulbs - not in light fixtures, mind you. Just laying around the house, in the back of closet shelves, in the laundry room, on the kitchen counter top.

Coat racks - I love coats a little too much, but even I don't need more space than the coat closet allows.

Spiders - seriously wondering if the previous folks bred spiders for research and had an unfortunate escape episode. I'm normally a capture-the-spider-in-a-glass-and-release-it-outside girl, but I have to admit I've become jaded and I squished one last night.

Canadian coins - eh?

And that, my friends, is my assessment of the great moving adventure week 1. 

Happy Gardening Anniversary

The small xeriscape garden bed

I just got an email that made my day. It was from Gardner's Supply Company wishing me a Happy Anniversary since my first order with them was April 18, 2005. 

I ordered a Tomato Success Kit from Gardner's Supply so I could grow some vegetables in pots even though I didn't have a garden. I've had some huge success and huge failures in the 3 seasons that I've grown in the success kit. Cherry tomatoes = OMG I can't eat another tomato by the end of the season. Heirloom tomatoes = it's October and I'd really like one ripe tomato before the frost kicks in.

The gardening project I'm most proud of though is my xeriscape garden. When I first moved to the townhouse, it had two giant, spiderweb infested, fire-hazard dry evergreen bushes straddling the front walk. When I'd leave the house in the morning for work, I'd put both arms straight out in front of me and scissor them as I walked to keep the spider webs from hitting me in the face. I lived with this for three years.

But then, Will moved in and our first project was to tackle the outside - rebuild the back deck and do something about the evergreen bushes. We braved the heat and prickles that summer and spent a miserable weekend cutting back and hauling away the bushes. 

My initial plan was to grind the stumps so we could have a flat garden. But, being smart and responsible we had the utility company come out to mark where all of our pipes were and the gas line went right under one of the bushes. So, Plan B emerged and we used leftover wood from our big deck project to build raised garden beds.

I knew I wanted a xeriscape garden out front because it gets so much heat and sun. I had fallen madly in love with the Xeric Aroma Garden from High Country Gardens. It was sold out for the spring, so I had to wait until the fall to get my plants. They were tiny when they arrived, and Will was embarrassed by our teeny tiny plants randomly spaced our huge planters. But the next spring-summer-fall, they went gangbusters and grew into giant behemoths that gave off the most amazing scent whenever it rained. Rather than defending myself against the plants in the front, I touched them whenever I walked by to release the herby scents from each of the plants.

I can take my Tomato Success Kit with me to the new house, but I have to leave behind my aroma garden. It will be so hard to leave behind something that I've spent so much time nurturing. The good news though, is that I'll have a blank slate (once I clear out all of the new house's weeds & sucker trees) to start over with a new garden that I know I'll love just as much as this one.

Inching Toward Moving On

At what point do I start the break-up process with my now-under-contract-townhouse? Or did I already start it the minute I signed the paperwork to put it up for sale?

I love this house. I have since the minute I walked in the door while house hunting and saw two Birds of Paradise flowers on the dining room table beneath the orange pendant light. It was totally over my budget and my realtor was only showing me the house because he wanted to set me up with the seller. It was love at first sight with the house, not so much with the guy.

This is the last house my old-man cat lived in. This is the house where Will proposed to me. This is the house where I got really sick, and then got healthy again (and again). I still call the guest bathroom "Carrie's bathroom" after my roommate and dear friend who lived here with me for the first three years. Somewhere in this house is the ring that my mom gave me with the green stone that I'm super bummed I misplaced (okay, lost). Will and I have put a lot of work into this house - we've rebuilt the decks, redone the bathrooms, painted and painted again, replaced crunchy dead evergreen bushes with a xeriscaped garden, and so much more. 

I want to move (believe me, I wouldn't go through all the headache of house hunting for nothing). I want new and bigger projects to tackle with Will. I want potential to make a house a home without an HOA dictating how that can be done and what colors can be used to do it. I want a garden with room for more than a pot of tomatoes. And the new (potential) house is perfect for all of these wants. 

But I'm still wandering around the current house, thinking about all of the things that I'm going to miss. That will go away, right? 

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

For the last handful of years, Will and I have been putting spare change in old jelly jars. Once one fills up, we start on another. We've jokingly been calling this our "down payment for a house fund." I finally combined all of the jelly jar change into a purple Crown Royal bag (I don't know where that came from or why I have it, but it was hefty and could handle the massive pile we'd acquired). 

I trundled off to Safeway this afternoon with my Crown Royal bag full of change to get it counted. And would you believe that we had $92.58 in change*? Plus a few battered and beaten coins that the machine rejected. Clearly not a down payment on the house, but not a bad total either. We'll put it into the ol' savings account for new house fun.

But that's not even the biggest change around here. Our house has gone through some pretty drastic updates over the last two weeks. Since last Saturday, we've been sprucing, painting, yard selling, installing, cleaning, packing, moving & unmoving stuff, all to get the house looking nice for potential buyers. More than a few times Will and I have exclaimed, "Why didn't we do this years ago?" We're pretty pleased with how things have turned out. I'm especially in love with the laundry closet. Serious love. I want to marry it.

I was hoping to post some before and after shots tonight... but I don't have the after photos just yet. I guess that gives me an excuse for another post soon!

*That's before the coin counter took their 8.9% cut. Grrr....

Nostalgia

We are getting ready to put our house on the market.  So far, "getting ready" has entailed creating a list of the home improvement projects we didn't quite finish or get to, convincing my Mom to be our realtor, and creating piles of stuff we don't want anymore.  Needless to say, we've got a lot of work ahead of us.

I went through my books and CDs today and separated out the keepers from the get-rid-ofs.  It was so much easier to get rid of the CDs than the books.  I get really, really attached to my books. Even books I didn't love, I feel like I'm somehow betraying the characters by admitting that maybe they aren't worth living in my library.  

CDs on the other hand, are pretty easy to get rid of. The good ones I've got on my computer. And the bad ones are the hardest to get rid of because I have to admit that I actually purchased that music at one point (um, Candlebox? I plead the insanity of the 90s).

I also found a whole bunch of tapes that I held onto.  Mostly mix tapes from old friends and a large collection of U2. I know I got rid of tapes a long time ago and I must have held onto U2 because the tapes are all from when they were beyond awesome. I purged the tapes, but found a few that I just couldn't get rid of:

To: Anne From: Chris Keep Jammin' in the Car, Chica. A mix tape from my friend, Christine, from our junior year of high school. Having good tunes in the car in high school was key. I took this mix with me to Architecture Camp the summer between my junior & senior years of high school and the mix became famous in my studio for its awesomeness. Plus, I'm feeling all nostalgic.

Learn Xhosa with Anne Munik. This tape is from my Xhosa language class in South Africa. Anne Munik was my teacher and she was the cutest little white lady. She had grown up on a farm outside of Cape Town and absolutely loved the Xhosa culture and language - enough to dedicate her career to teaching it to other white people so they could appreciate it as well. The thing I absolutely adored about Anne was that whenever we'd learn something contradictory from our host families to what she taught us in class, she'd say, "Well, it is their culture, so they know it best." And she'd make a note. In a country where white people had for so long ruled as oppressors, it was amazing to see this woman who not only loved and appreciated the African cultures around her, but realized that she could never be the ultimate expert despite all of her learnings. 

A Reading for Anne 2003.  I usually get my tarot cards read about once a year, usually around my birthday.  I adore my Mom's friend, Bonnie, who reads the cards and records the sessions for us. She is such a gentle soul and I love that there are people in the world that see things that I don't. I also think that this is the reading she gave me where she said I would have a husband whose birthday was very close to mine. I met Will later that year and his birthday is 5 days after mine. Coincidence? I think not.

An unopened, blank tape. You never know when you are going to need ancient relics like this.

Now that I've decided what to keep, I need to figure out what to do with the old.