A Little Reno, A Little Relaxation!

Tackled the back door to the mudroom, now scrubbed and painted, shade hung.  It was ugly yellow and incredibly dirty!

It did have some nice heart pine under the paint, but no way I am scraping and removing paint to make all the heart pine show, that would be crazy!!

Now painted Porcini.  Princess seems to like it, but she wants her doggy door painted, too!

This whole weekend was a wash-out with the rain, and it's still raining today, so we decided to go to a crafts fair in Asheville on Saturday.  It was breezy and cold, had to be in the 50s!

Some photos of some artists I liked.  Block-printed silk skirts and shawls, very nice.

Beautiful baskets woven out of different materials.

Pottery

Neat chairs

Tiles

Blown glass

Then we walked around before dinner and just admired the town.

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Yes, that cat is a piece of artwork.

Then we had dinner at Rosetta's Kitchen

Bob was being "healthy" and had a kombucha (fermented black tea), ginger, molasses and peach . . . 

I had the "Wandering Roman" in honor of you know who, lemon, basil, vodka and st. germain. Very refreshing!

This week I will finish the kitchen cabinets, finish painting my bathroom and getting all of my portraits up.  I hope to start painting my potting shed just so I can get all the rest of the garden supplies off the farmhouse porch.  We'll see how far I get!

Touch of Autumn at the Lake

Had to retrieve my painting supplies from the boathouse.  The lake was so cool and quiet today, so I decided to walk around the old boyscout camp and take a few pictures.  I love that it looks like the Adirondacks.

Then I decided to check out the road to our land, same old Nature Conservancy gate, now with two locks! I'm now happy it worked out the way it did, except I miss the big mountain view.

Snapped a picture of Linda and Stu's place when crossing the bridge on the way out of the lake.  Love their place!

Making Progress

This ugly yellowish door kept staring at me while I worked in the kitchen, so I decided to take a break from working on cabinets and paint it "Porcini".

Much better, don't you think?

In the master bedroom are two walls of huge windows.  For some reason the sun comes up very early here, around five am so I've had sheets hanging on the windows until I could figure out what to do about curtains.

There were ugly drapes and rods in here, which I took down and when the bedroom is painted and finished I will post again to show the drastic changes.  It's nice to have all this light in the bedroom during the day, not so much early in the morning.

I've never really liked curtains and didn't have many, only shades, and none of those would work.  I didn't want to spend a lot of $ on cheap fabric curtains, then I realized I had these wonderful duck shower curtains at the boathouse and went over to retrieve them, see if they would work.  Bob got my wire rods up.

I pinned them up to get an idea of how they would look.  Now I have to get out the sewing machine, and once ironed they will be perfect.  I highly recommend buying these shower curtains from Vermont Country Store, which I did about 25 years ago.  The material is heavy and bleachable and they now cost $50 apiece.  

The local crew we hired got my heavy black cupboard into the bedroom, which I sprayed with cedar oil and it now houses all of my winter sweaters.

The garden viewing room is now free of boxes, and I brought up my black chairs from the boathouse.  All they need is a couple of pillows, the walls and ceiling painted, the floor scrubbed, the shades put up, the ceiling fan put up, and I will be done!

Okay.  I may not have a lot of boxes, but what was in the boxes is on every surface in the house!  I did get some paintings out of boxes and up on the wall in the sunroom, but I don't know if they'll stay there, but at least they're out of the way!

The living room is now more open, I have a rug down, furniture a little more placed, but still boxes and things on windowsills.  I am working on that this week.

Stan came by yesterday to get the rest of the wood and to give me a screech owl box he made out of some of the cabinet wood he had taken.  He carved an owl on it.  All we need to do is get it up in a tree!

He did a great job.  Even put a ladder in for the babies to have an easier time getting out.  This week I hopefully get more put away, my bathroom painted so I can put up all my antique portraits.  There is an art show in Asheville that we want to go to Saturday.  Sunday we may check out the zipline over the gorge that I am giving to my brother as a birthday gift when he comes to visit.  It's only 15 minutes from our house!