welcome to chris's and season's houseblog!

this is a very exciting adventure for us and we're glad you've decided to peek in. we're going to keep this blog updated throughout the 2006-07 remodel and afterward, as this is going to become season's first "showhouse" (besides being our fabulous residence).

for those of you not familiar with blogs, they're kinda backwards: the latest entries are posted at the top of the opening page. so if you want to start at the beginning of our tale, then you'll want to click on the "previous 20" link (there's one above the top entry on a page, and one at the bottom of each page) until you reach the 9/29/06 post. then you can move forward in time from there.

so have a look around, enjoy the pictures, and remember: even if you don't have a livejournal account, you can still post comments. just click the "comment" link for the entry you'd like to comment on and post as "anonymous" -- but tell us in the text of your comment who you are, please! :) we'd love to hear from you!

--season & chris
(and misha and sophie)

what with the stormy, overly-hot-and-humid weather keeping me from working on the yard (well, it's horrible for yardwork, but the plants are LOVING it), and our acquisition of a new dining set, i'm all about thinking about more decorating ideas for the house. and i just thought of something: what if i created a false wainscoting in the dining room with a display ledge about 5' up from the floor, and i could put decorative objects on it. (i'd create the false wainscoting with mdf as the background, 1"x3" boards for the "box" frames, 1"x6" boards for the shelf, with decorative trim and brackets) stuff like these plates here, by thomas paul:



i could intersperse such things with more glass jars o' stuff like the ones i've done in the kitchen, filled with various colorful beans, grains, and pastas, to pull in more of an "earthy" feeling (and to save my kitchen counterspace -- haha). (the chalkboard paint works wonderfully, btw; finally got some chalk and tried it out this weekend.)

i also really like the idea of creating silhouettes of people who are near and dear to me (perhaps i'll have them sign and date the backs of their individual silhouette), and hanging a collection of those on the wall somewhere. perhaps in the dining room, since that will be the gathering place for large family events. now i'll just have to figure out how to do that. :)

(x-posted to my personal blog)

i can't believe it's been a month since i last posted on here. We haven't been doing much worth blogging about, really; just trying to keep up with family events for the holidays and stay sane in general (both sometimes easier said than done).

However, that being said, I thought I'd post some pics of our Yule decorations to commemorate our first Yule in this house:



and our house's first winter with us:


:)

i spent saturday re-potting all of our deck plants in sterile pots and soil, cleaning all bugs and bug-related debris from everything, so that i could bring them inside permanently to their new home in the "atrium." they're a little sad-looking from having spent 3 weeks in the garage with no sunlight, but i'm sure they'll spring back to life in their new (much warmer and consistently-temperate) environment. am considering getting a humidifier to keep in the atrium just for them -- i'd have to keep it on the floor, though, so i don't have to climb a ladder to refill it every day, and floorspace over there is at a premium of late, so i haven't made up my mind. however, if i don't get a humidifier, then i'll have to climb up there all the time to spritz the plants, and that'd be just as much work. so.......hm. we placed The Amazing Ficus Tree directly in front of the french door which we don't ever open so that it gets loads of sunlight, and it looks really pretty there. :)

chris-the-stuntman cleaned out all the new (uncovered) gutters on the back of the house yesterday afternoon (while i wasn't home, which terrifies me at the prospect of the horrible things which could have happened), so now my mind's at ease on that front, especially since i've been seeing reports that the weather's supposed to turn nasty and winterish on wednesday (just in time for us to travel all over the state of kansas for thanksgiving on thursday, and then again on saturday for thanksgiving with another branch of the family.....not to mention the family which is travelling to our house this weekend!).

pictures to come soon...

(cross-posted somewhat from my personal journal)

last night, after preparing a nummylicious dinner of herbed scrambled eggs with sauteed mushrooms and onions, toast with homemade amish apple butter, and canned peaches, i decided that i was feeling crafty. so i FINALLY got around to re-covering our new barstools with the striped fabric i'd previously used on my "martha-stewart-y" bulletin board (which i still need to re-frame):

it was SO easy, took hardly any time at all, and they look fabulous! (i'll post pictures soon; i couldn't find my camera last night and chris was working late.)

it's funny, but i felt really encouraged by that project (i've been distinctly un-crafty of late) to continue into my other fabric/sewing projects that i want to do for the house (i.e., sewing curtains for practically every room in the place, but beginning with the kitchen and living room). i found a really cute idea for curtains for the living room: tack doornails into the wall above the window; sew loops along the top of your backed fabric panel (i'd make mine floor-length); hang curtain via loops on doornails. you can adjust how the curtain looks and how much light is allowed in by folding the curtain and hanging it differently on various nails. perhaps i'll also hang a sheer behind it so that light can be allowed in without sacrificing privacy, and to soften the look a bit. ...and perhaps i'll make two panels, so i can create the effect of a bigger, more dramatic window. :)

i'm still on the fence about recovering our current couches or having one built for me and having that covered in the fabric i have. see, i've got in my mind's eye a living room setup consisting of a couch that's a wide semi-circle facing the fireplace/tv-above-the-mantel (oh! did i tell you that chris and i bought an LCD teevee last weekend? we've got it perched on the fireplace mantel until we do the massive project of rebuilding the chimney and creating a wall of built-in bookshelves with a cabinet to encase the tv), and flanked on either side by (possibly slipper) chairs covered in a reddish/berryish leather (which will bring out the reds in the couch fabric). an ottoman/coffee table (with built-in storage) which one could put one's feet up on and use for more seating would center the group, right in front of the fireplace. see, the living room is weird in that the furniture has to be in the center of the room for traffic-flow (and lack of much wall between the living and dining rooms). and although our current couch and loveseat work all right, facing each other on either side of the fireplace, i just can't help but think that my dreamed-up arrangement would create a far more cohesive and unique "look" for the room, besides being ultimately more useable.

i've also been toying with the idea of painting patterns on the walls in the bathrooms, and using wallpaper scraps to create a vintage botany-esque scene on at least one wall in the guest room. future projects... :)

after a bitter disappointment when home depot ran out of the wrought-iron, 7-piece outdoor dining set that i had my heart set on (i thought they wouldn't be restocking it since it's "seasonal" product and was so heavily discounted), i was overjoyed to discover yesterday that they'd restocked it, that it was still on super-sale, and that they offered free shipping for it. so we snatched a set up right away. yaaaaaaaaaaay! i'm SO excited about it.....now we just need to finish the dining pavilion so we have somewhere to put it once it arrives! haha

last night while on a dash to home depot (i should get a discount there, seriously!) for a construction stapler, i decided to check out their lighting section to see if they had any decent wall sconces in stock -- and they did! they were only ~$26 each, and they look really frickin' good if i do say so myself. hehe and i'm glad i bought them, too, because, although the dirt-moving guy was supposed to meet my stepdad at our house to move the last "bit" of our dirt mountain and the smaller sand-hill to the backyard, he no-call/no-showed (again). so the sconces were a good way to cheer my dahlink up -- he really wanted something on the wall besides the fugly temporary construction lights we had before. :)

since i hadn't done a very good job spraypainting the curtain hooks for the dining room wednesday night and therefore couldn't install them last night (had to wait for them to dry all over again), i worked on my room (at long last). i got all the trim re-painted, and then decided to have a go at painting over the beige walls with my van-dyke-brown glaze. i got one wall (mostly) done, and part of another, and then brushed it with big, swooping brushstrokes. and i was VERY pleasantly surprised to discover that now, when the light catches the glaze, it literally *sparkles* along the brushstrokes, with a golden gleam. it didn't have that effect in the living room, so having the beige as a basecoat must be causing it, but it looks SO FRICKIN COOL!!! i have to buy more glaze and van-dyke-brown paint tonight to finish the rest of the beige walls, and i can't hardly wait. i think i'm going to coat the red walls with some clear glaze, too, and brush them, too, to give them some depth -- they're awfully flat now (especially compared to the newly-textured other walls), and they constantly look dusty for some reason (ugh!). my room is gonna be SO FRACKIN COOL by the time i'm done.

AND i thought of a really cool thing to do in the guest room: i'm going to turn the daybed so that its back is along the west wall, centered on the window and facing the doorway. then i'm going to make floor-to-ceiling curtains that span the length of the wall, draping them over the bedframe a la a canopy, creating a haven-like feeling and *just* opening on the window, so it feels more intimate and makes the window seem larger. then, on the walls, i'm going to paint a design in green that will sort of frame the prints that i'm going to hang in there. i think this arrangement will really open up the quite-small space of the room, while at the same time create a cozy little nook for relaxing on the daybed -- plus, it'll look *so* inviting when one peeps in the doorway! :)

chris says he likes my ideas for painting in the master bedroom, so i'm going to start paint-shopping for the *perfect* aubergine color, even though we won't be able to actually *buy* the stuff until probably the next pay-period, haha. weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

so this has been on my mind lately.....i painted 2.5 of the walls in my room a deep, crimson red, and the remaining ones the same beige as is in the hallways &etc. the funny thing is, ever since i did this, i've been avoiding my room like the plague -- even to the point that chris has to nag me to finish the touch-up work on the trim &etc. the furniture's still shoved into the middle of the room, and i just never go in there unless i absolutely have to. so i've been thinking that, since i'm so enamored of the chocolate linen treatment that i just completed on the living room walls, perhaps i'll repeat the treatment on the currently-beige walls in my room. i'm thinking that that will not only balance the weight of the red, but also warm up the space, and the texturing will be a neat addition. i don't think the room would become too dark because it's got two large windows in there in addition to the white ceiling. and whatever artwork and shelving i put up can be framed in white (like the trim) to keep things lightened up. and bronze lighting. :-)

also, i'm thinking of doing a similar brush-treatment in our bedroom, in eggplant glaze over the current (*blah*) beige paint, except i'd only brush vertically so that it's not a complete copy of the living room's look. (single-direction brushing gives the paint a look rather like that grasscloth wallpaper that i like so well in ralph-lauren-style homes.) i think the eggplant would really compliment the wood furniture we've got, and we could keep the space warm by adding dark-bronze lighting fixtures and colorful botanical art on the walls. the eggplant will also go perfectly with both of our sets of bedding, we can continue that color in accents in the master bathroom, it will compliment the living room's brown, and it wouldn't be too "girly" a color for chris.

just so chris and i can have an idea of how many people to expect, could our friends here please comment as to whether they think they'll come to our housewarming party this saturday? we'd really appreciate it.

in case you need it, here's chris's party webpage, which contains a link of a map to the house.

thanks!



(x-posted to my personal LJ)

well, it took 4.5 hours last night, but i got the living room finished. and it looks FABULOUS! the wall treatment even makes our sofas look better -- less "relic-from-the-early-'90s"-ish (haha) -- and they'll *really* pop once they're wearing their new slipcovers (i couldn't resist holding the fabric up to the freshly-painted wall to check. me=nerd). i'm hobbling about quite a bit this morning -- my ankles apparently quite dislike being used to clamber up and down ladders for long stretches of time -- but my new sneakers and a couple excedrins are helping alleviate that. :-)

chris doesn't want to take pictures of the completed room until we can put the furniture back in place (which i won't allow until tomorrow night at the earliest so the glaze has the utmost time to dry in this freakishly humid (though central-air-conditioned inside, thank the gods) weather), so in the meantime, here are a couple teasers:





here's a shot of our new barstools, too, which i bought at target a couple weekends ago. though chris wouldn't let me paint the wood black, to match the kitchen better (which i now agree with -- it helps create a visual transition to the living room's brown tones, especially since they're right in the kitchen/living room doorway), i'll be re-covering the seats with our fancy new striped fabric before saturday's party. :-)