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Before & After Bliss: Painter's Paradise to Official Office

I know everyone is dying to see at least one semi-finished interior room! To be honest, most of our rooms are still "in process". We've posted an update about our laundry room, including our tone-on-tone paint job, which is proving very popular, but we haven't quite finished any other room as most of them still need to be painted and/or repaired and/or both! However, we have completed all of the heavy lifting (literally) in our new office, minus accessories! But before we dish the goods, you have to know where we came from. Here is a pretty nebulous before:

Not much to look at, right? It may be hard to see from the picture (as it is rather small on blogger - this page will be moving in the coming weeks to a more robust website), but we had a Painter in residence prior to our takeover! In fact, judging from the grubby fingerprints on the door jamb, I'd estimate this artist's height at around 3 feet tall :-). This was definitely a multi-talented artist, utilizing acrylic paints, crayons, and colored pencils to boot! The artistry was evident around the room, including on the closet doors:

This artist's mastery was not limited to the static arts. Our base moldings also were recipients of this artist's treatment, perhaps in the form of *martial* arts. Needless to say, this room was in need of some serious repair work (did I mention the house was a foreclosure?). So here are a few pictures of the after artistry on behalf of J&L, two budding homeowners just trying to make it happen.

The iMac Workstation, where most of the Tell'er All About It magic happens

The newly painted closet doors, courtesy of J's artistry

Our PC workstation, lovingly housed in the heaviest piece of furniture in our home,

ironically contained on the second floor!

Our brand new base moldings, upgraded from dowdy MDF planks to

substantial and carved MDF! How do I love thee!

So what else did we change? The wall color, for one. Remember the Builder's Buttercream Flat paint that I love so much? (that was a joke, by the way) Well, that was in this room as well. I painted this room by myself over a period of two days in Glidden's Water Chestnut - such a delicious name, don'tcha think? I was able to cover up all of the dirt, paint, and Crayola to a warmer, but less yellow-y color. In fact, I love it so much I bought 2 more gallons of it and I can't wait to paint another room in that color! We may be in Water Chestnut overload before this year is done...

When we started to prep for paint, we realized that the base moldings were not worth saving. The builder used cheap MDF "planks" at a meek 3.5 inches around the entire house and the ones in the Painter's Paradise were in desperate need of a paint job to say the least. Since the previous owners took all of the touch up paint with them, J&I made the executive decision to just rip out the old baseboards and make the office our first attempt at replacing the baseboards throughout the house. With a fresh coat of paint and a more substantial 5.5 inch base, the room feels rich and luxurious! And check out the hubs' awesome handiwork on the exterior corner in the room with caulk!

We also painted the interior of the closet as it was also painted in a "flat" finish, which meant that every scrape of a hangar over the past 4 years showed up like a "Who's Who" of bad wardrobe and paint choices. And since we brought in a new tone on the base molding, we also painted the closet doors to match.

And perhaps our greatest achievement in this space was moving our 300+ (?) pound computer armoire from the garage up to the second floor. It took the combined efforts of both J&L from Tell'er All About It and L's Mother just to get it upstairs - and neither my Mom or I are professional movers! The most fascinating aspect were all of the neighbors who stopped what they were doing just to watch! You know what they were thinking - "We should get a video camera just to have evidence that there really *are* people buried under that Armoire in the front yard!" Really, we shouldn't have been able to get it upstairs. The weight alone was daunting, but the shape is just absolutely ungainly, particularly with a 90 degree turn and a rectangular shape that doesn't fit on a square landing. But we did it! And my arms and legs are still aching from the strain! However, we may advertise this as a selling point when we go to sell the house - Armoire FREE with purchase! Phew!

So there ya have it! Our updated (yet still unfinished) office! It was an adventure! More to come, so stay tuned!

xoxo,

J&L

Home Discovery: Blackberry Bush!

Hello, Readers! We are still writing and updating about our new (to us) house. I actually completed my first full week living here and I have many aches, pains, bruises, and pricks to prove it! Keep reading and sending us comments and let us know how we can improve the website and what we might be missing. I am in the process of developing a new site through iWeb (a Mac-based program) and I'm hoping to research some new websites to see who might be the most user-friendly so that we can have more functionality on our blog. Keep checking back for updates as we will be updating often!

But back to our home's tastiest discovery; a blackberry bush over the fence! We have a fence that separates our property from the school behind us and we found a blackberry bush was gently dropping berries on our property - finders keepers! Here's a view of one half of our yard with the blackberry bush on the right growing over the fence:

So while Mom was in town last week, we went out to pick a few berries to have for dessert and, OUCH! We found out they are worse than rose bushes when it comes to pricklies! I guess that explains why they are so expensive in the store - hrmmm.... So our Blackberry bush discovery became both a happy accident and a massive pest, all at the same time! Yet another trivial nuance about the Pacific Northwest - berries grow like weeds out here! There is something about our very acidic and volcanic soil which they absolutely love and so we have every berry varietal known to man growing wild (and cultivated) our here: blackberries, boysenberries, raspberries, black raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, marionberries, huckleberries, berries eeeeeverywhere! Here's a close up view of our blackberry bush:

But back to this blackberry nuisance. One of the best parts of our property is actually a tree that is just on the other side of our property that grows shady over our backyard. It's great for privacy and it's big and leafy and green, so it's really great for eating breakfast outside in the morning as it covers up most of our Eastern sun - score! So when we started picking these blackberries, we noticed that this blackberry had literally "infested" the bottom of this tree with its stickers and prickers! My Mom, being a wonderful gardener, told us that if we don't take care of it, the Blackberry will suffocate the tree and it will die - oh, no! So it was either the shady tree or the blackberries. Not to mention all of those blackberries were coming out the Magsters (our dog) on the other end - yuck! So we spent most of the day Friday clearing out blackberry bush and trimming back overgrown ivy, which was weeding its way under our fence and up our evergreen trees - never a good sign. We also cleaned up our backyard of construction debris (yes, 4 years later!), and began the painful process of weed pulling and Round Up treatments. Here's a little in-process photo:

But what about those pesky (yet tasty) blackberries?

Well, not to be deterred, I sat down outside with garden gloves, tongs, scissors, and a bag filled with blackberry branches and picked myself about 3.5 cups worth of Pacific Northwest Oregon blackberries, all for free! Gotta love livin' off the land! I looked up on FoodNetwork.com a couple of Blackberry Pie recipes until I sort of combined a few aspects of several different recipes to create one that would work with the ingredients I had because I'm lazy and didn't feel like running to the store. So here's basically what I came up with:

L's Better-than-Store-Bought Blackberry pie!

(Yes, it's a smily face - ha ha!)

Crust:

1 Package, Pillsbury Pie Crusts (Freezer Section)

1 egg + splash of water for the crust

Filling:

3.5 cups, Fresh Blackberries (stickers optional!)

1/2 cup, Sugar (I used raw cane sugar and it tasted great!)

1/4 cup flour

Juice of 3/4 of a fresh lemon (I swear by using fresh if you've got it)

Dash of Cinnamon

Couple of Pinches of Nutmeg (from the nut, never pre-ground - oh, it's SOOO good)

Follow the Pie Crust instructions for defrosting. Once defrosted, roll out and place 1 crust in your pie dish. Pinch the sides together so that you have no extra crust.

For the filling. Wash your blackberries and remove any stickers that might be straying. Put them in a bowl and combine with remaining ingredients. Gently mix (I would recommend using a plastic or silicone spatula for this technique - and go slow or you'll have blackberry blood all over you! Don't use a wood spoon - it will stain!). Pour the blackberry mixture into your pie dish and spread evenly.

Place the remaining pie crust over the blackberry mixture and create slits in the top (smily face is optional). Be sure to pinch off the sides as well to get a good seal on the crust. Brush on the egg mixture as best you can and then wrap the sides of the pie dish/crust with tin foil, place on a cookie sheet, and bake! I set my oven for about 375 and it was in the oven for about 40-45 minutes. After about 20 minutes of baking, remove the tin foil and continue to bake until the crust is a golden sunshine-y color. Enjoy!

I'll be the first to admit, the pie didn't last 24 hours! It was so good, in fact, that Mom called my dad on the East Coast at midnight to tell him how good it was. Mmmmm.....

So there ya have it! We're still discovering and enjoying many things about our new home. It's all an adventure, we hope you stay tuned for the journey!

xoxo,

J&L

Before and After Bliss: Our Garage!

What a crazy couple of weeks it has been! I've been traveling and we've been working away on our house bit by teeny bit! My Mother has even traveled all the way from Ohio to help us get more "situated" this week. Lemme tell ya, she's a slave driver! But she's a slave driver in a way that a deep-tissue massage feels wonderful after a long day of hard work. In a sense, it's a very GOOD thing. More on our accomplishments later!

We did want to share our amazing Garage Re-organization with you because it's just too amazing not to share! We have a small-ish 2-car garage and it has never been our intention to park both cars inside of it. It's the Pacific Northwest after all, and unlike the Midwest where you need to park your car inside for the winter, most people park their cars outside because, let's face it, we rarely get snow, hardly any ice, and the rain we do get is so misty that you hardly get your hair wet by the time you walk across the driveway to get into your car. However, our garage was suffering from serious post-move neglect and since we have free slave labor (thanks, Mom!), a re-org was definitely in order. For the groan-inducing before, please read on:

I know, right? Doesn't that just scream, "Help me!" And if not that, then perhaps a wee bit of, "Oh, it can wait until next summer, right?!?" HA HA! We had to move one dining table from the garage (which da hubs was using as a work table - yikes!) and my giant computer armoire that needed to go upstairs - what a chore that was! But once those were out of the way, we set to work clearing, cleaning, throwing away, opening more boxes, etc, etc. Even the Magsters got involved:

Well, not really....

But after about 3 hours, we had ourselves an organized and ready-to-go garage! We have many plans for it, including building a work bench for J, pegboards, ski storage, bike storage, etc, etc, but for the moment, this is as good as it gets!

Beautiful, right?

In more detail, however, here are a few highlights. We created a temporary coat hook and mudroom system with some screw-in hooks we had lying around for our grubby "garage coats" and shoes (the Dyson is an added bonus):

We set up an old Ikea desk from college to use as a workbench until we can build a "real" one. J loves having a workspace and a spot for his multiple toolboxes:

We set up some much-needed kitchen storage for all of those random things you just don't want to keep "on-hand" (i.e. Holiday and Christmas dishes, etc). We also needed extra storage for paper goods and cleaning supplies. And it has doors and is closed away so that sawdust and dust won't get to it:

And, lastly, since we knew we would never park 2 cars in this garage, we went ahead and set up the far side of the garage with sporting goods and painting supplies and left enough room to store our Recyclables and trash in the garage. J's table saws and other things are also set up on that side, out of the way and easy to access for all of the fun projects we have planned (wink, wink, nudge, nudge):

So there ya have it, kids! Our organized garage, courtesy of a slave driving mother, a sleeping dog, a motivated husband, and me as the emergency backup lifter!

It's an adventure, we hope you stay turned for the journey!

xoxo,

J&L