Wine tasting, graduating, showering, partying

So, the title of this post explains everything and nothing all at the same time. 😉 If you were wondering where I’ve been for the past couple weeks, you came to the right place to find your answers. I was in California…I know you’re all shocked. 😉 My baby brother graduated from Cal Poly SLO (that’s San Luis Obispo for all you non locals) and we are all super proud of him. Since we were already going to be in the area, Dane and I snuck in an afternoon of wine tasting in the Paso Robles area (our favorite). It’s hard to beat a glass of Turley red zinfindel if you ask us.

My awesome brother in law was able to reserve his family’s beach house in Cayucos where we had an awesome family filled weekend. Seriously, is there anything better than good times with your loved ones? Dane and I were there a day early and spent some time walking on the beach and enjoying the town.

20120622-145343.jpgIf you ever find yourself taking a trip up highway 1 and stop in Cayucos do not miss trying these cookies from the Brown Butter Cookie Co. They are brown sugar and sea salt cookies and they are amazing!

20120622-145529.jpgI’m on a quest to figure out this recipe because I was in love. :)

I was also lucky enough to be showered in love by my dearest friends and family at my bridal shower hosted by my maids of honor and my mom. It was perfect and exactly everything I could have hoped for. We had tapas and wine and yummy desserts too. Once I get around to downloading those pics off my camera I’ll share some.

Since I live afar and coordinating schedules is never easy, we did my bachelorette party the same weekend. The day started off with a cabana by the pool at the Viceroy hotel in Santa Monica where we felt like celebrities.  Mmmmm…mimosas. :)

20120622-145936.jpgA turn of events caused our reservation at BOA Steakhouse to be canceled (a pipe burst at the restaurant!), which led to an awesome dinner at The Misfit Restaurant & Bar right off of the Third Street Promenade also in Santa Monica. I am still raving about their Basil Gimlet and Brussels Sprouts!  I highly recommend!

After dinner, we headed back to the hotel, which turns into a lounge at night. It was perfect. :)

20120622-150338.jpgIsn’t my smaller than me big sister beautiful?

So, after a fun filled week and a half in Cali, I’m back home with my cute pup and handsome fiancé. Maybe someday we’ll even finish our bed (oh, DIY, sometimes you take soo long!).

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Deck Garden Update

I figured it’s been a couple weeks so it’s about time for a veggie garden update! Get excited!  Here’s a link to the post where I talk all about how to plant your own deck garden.

Our Roma tomato plant is pretty much killin’ it, which is great.  No fruit yet, but I have faith. 20120606-124456.jpgRemember how tiny this guy was when I planted him?  They grow up so fast…{tear}.

Our patio tomato plant is also doing well.  It even has some budding flowers!  And budding flowers today mean tomatoes tomorrow!

Oddly enough, we are managing to grow some vegetables fungi that we did not intend to. This is a first for us. Cute little guys, but there’s no way I’m eating magic shrooms I found in my garden!

The red bell pepper plant is not doing as well. Poor guy was ruthlessly attacked by some sort of garden pest. I thought I found an aphid under one of the leaves, but after some googling it seems that this might be the work of slugs…eeewww. I bought some organic insecticidal soap from Home Depot and sprayed the heck out of it. I’ve seen some improvement so I hope it works!

I finally got around to planting the basil and cilantro as well. They seem to be doing just fine. :)

How are your gardens doing?  I know a couple friends that already have some good crops!  Hoping my tomatoes get here soon!

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Planter Do-Over

Dane and I live in one those planned communities.  Ya know the one with a classy name, nice landscaping and several levels of housing available (single-family homes, townhomes, condos…).  We live in a townhome and we actually are really loving it.  We rarely hear our neighbors and our house is nice and spacious, not to mention we are getting some killer calf muscles from all the stairs. 😉  Along with the nice landscaping and ambiance comes rules about your yard.  In our case, we didn’t know there were rules until our landlord very politely told us that we needed to weed and mulch our front planter after she had received an email from the HOA…oops…I’ve been meaning to get to that for a couple weeks now.  I wish I had taken a before picture of this that showed the full extent of how awful the weeds were, but you’ll have to use your imagination.  Here’s what we were working with.  Imagine tall shoots of grass coming out of all the bushes and please note the crazy grass growing in and around the base of the tree…it just looks kinda sad, doesn’t it?

This planter wraps around to the side of our house as well.  Notice the overgrown bush in the back and overall ugliness.

When we went out to take a closer look at things to see what work needed to be done, we realized the wood edger had seen much better days.

The grass had basically grown in, around, through, and over the edger…pretty much it was no longer edging anything.  So, we decided that if we were going to do it, we should do it right.  After a trip to Home Depot for supplies (red scalloped edger at $1.32 a foot and 7 bags of mulch at $3 ish dollars a bag) we began the demo and weeding portion of our project.  (Sadly, this day was originally intended to be a bed building day, but duty called.)  Some of the edger was so decayed that it simply broke apart when you went to pull it out of the ground.  And if you were really lucky, you might find a bunch of slugs or other nastiness that had made a home inside of the wood…gag.  (I didn’t take any pictures of that…those pieces with the creepy crawlies got tossed in the trash as fast as possible which was followed by me doing a dance trying to get the yuckiness off of me…I’m a wuss when it comes to bugs.)

Sections of the smaller pieces of wood were connected by a plastic strip with rusty nails.  See it in the trash there?

And if you were lucky, it would come out as all one piece.

Sometimes just a trowel did the job, but in areas where the grass was really embedded, we busted out the big gun.

While Dane began to lay the new edging, I did a whole bunch of weeding.  I despise weeding.  But, it had to be done.  There were several times where I was convinced I had pulled some poison ivy or something since my arms got pretty red and blotchy and quite itchy.  I think I’m just allergic to grass or something.  My lifelong dream of becoming a professional gardener was shattered in one afternoon.  😉

This shot shows how we laid out the edging to make sure we had enough.  We actually had a little too much, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The magic of the internet makes it look like this went pretty quickly…that’s a lie…it was hot and the work was hard and tedious and it made me wonder why gardeners aren’t paid more.  Furthermore, if you are someone who pays another person to do your weeding and mulching…give them a good tip…they deserve it…especially if they are working in the midst of the swamp called Washington DC.

We started on the edge nearest the driveway and worked our way around.  We weren’t sure if we wanted to square off the corner or round it, but after some configuring we decided this looked best.

I’ll be honest, I was not a fan of the red scalloped edge.  It seems a little retro to me, but not in a good way.  I wanted something more natural rock looking and in the grey department.  But, there’s a reason why everyone in the neighborhood has this style…it’s inexpensive and does the job well.  The fancier edgers at Home Depot were at least double the cost and we needed 40 feet, so that was going to make a pretty big difference in the overall price of this little project.  And considering we’re renters, we wanted it to look nice, but going above and beyond wasn’t really needed for this project.  So, red scalloped it is.  Now that it’s all said and done, I actually like it.  To install the edger, Dane used a small hand held rake to dig a channel where the pieces would be placed.

Then, we went back and filled in with some extra top soil we had from when we planted out deck garden.  (Please ignore my pasty white leg…I’m an East Coaster now…{tear}.  The sun was intense, so that hat was actually pretty awesome.  Seems contradictory now that I think about it…intense sun, pasty white leg…oh the irony!)  We stamped down the soil with out foot to make sure it was nice and secure on both sides of the edger.

We went with Pine Bark Nugget Mulch from Home Depot.  We didn’t even look at it before we bought it, but we looked at the mulch that was slightly cheaper, which resembled a bunch of twigs and hay and decided that the Nuggets had to be better.

It’s funny because we were both a little surprised at how big the pieces were, but they were aptly named, so you had to give ’em that.  We like the look and it was a lot easier to spread around than other mulch we’ve used.  I’m pretty sure we didn’t need as much either since we ended up with an extra bag or so.

And here’s the after…ta da!

I’ll save you the trouble of scrolling all the way back up…here’s the before again.

Doesn’t it look so much better?  Dane also trimmed up that crazy bush in the back.  He did a great job, no?  I’m not sure how I feel about the mini Christmas trees, but I think I’ve had my fill of gardening for a while, so if it’s not dead, it’s not moving.

Back to the extra edger and mulch…didn’t think I’d forget, did ya?  There’s a small strip of dirt/planter that runs along our driveway and our neighbors walkway and we weren’t exactly sure who it belonged to (townhome lines can be tricky like that).  We happened to see our neighbor and asked him and he wasn’t sure either, but wasn’t opposed to us sprucing it up a bit either.  Here’s the sad looking before.

We had almost the exact amount of edger needed (with only one foot to spare) and just enough mulch…it’s like it was meant to be.  It also worked out well that our neighbors already were using the red scalloped edger for their planter…hurray!

Now, here’s hoping that the mulch does its job and stops any weeds from growing.  I’ll be ok with weeding once a year…I guess… ;).

By the way, does anyone know what kind of tree we have in the front?  It’s got these cool looking spiky berries…like a pretty tree that won’t be messed with.

So, that’s what we did all. day. on Sunday…don’t worry mom, we went to church Saturday evening.  :)

Has anyone else been a weekend warrior and got their garden on recently?  Any notices from your HOA telling you to get with the program?

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Building a Farmhouse Bed: Part 1

A couple weeks after Dane and I moved to Virginia, we made a bold move and bought a new King sized mattress.  I say it was bold because we decided not to buy a box spring at the time (a $200 savings) with the intention of building a bed from these plans by Ana White on ana-white.com.  (Her site is pretty great and full of free plans for people of all levels of ability.)  I also say it was bold, because as I suspected would happen, we’ve been sleeping on our new huge mattress on the floor since it arrived (procrastinators much?).  Part of the problem is that it’s actually rather comfortable on the floor.  Apparently, most mattresses these days are made to be comfortable on platform style beds (ie. no box spring needed) and most box springs aren’t even made with springs anymore.  Box springs are now just a wood framed box or a riser.  (Here’s a link to the mattress we went with and we actually got $100 off from the deal that was going on at the time…it was almost too good to pass up!)

So, here we are, a couple months later and we are finally starting to building the bed!  No, the bed is not yet built (I figured I take you through it quasi-real time), but I wanted to share what I had.

So, how did we come to the decision to build a bed?  Well, we decided that we wanted a real wood bed (something that will last as long as we want it to and could even be passed on) and we liked the Hemnes line at Ikea.

{image found here}

We even purchased two of their 2-drawer cabinets for bedside tables.  But, we weren’t sold on the quality or the design of the bed frame and at $249 for the frame plus at least $80 for the cheapest slatted bed base (they have a few different kinds, the most expensive would have been $200 for the king!) it wasn’t exactly a deal either.  That’s when I came across the plans for the farmhouse bed.  Dane and I both liked the simple design and the fact that we could customize it as well.  And since, most people on Ana’s site who built the bed were boasting that it came in at right around $200 for the lumber, it was actually going to be cheaper, too!  Bonus!

{image found here}

So, we modified the plans to work for us (we wanted to be able to take the bed apart easily for moving and had to adjust some measurements to fit our bed) and we went off to buy some wood.  After pricing out our local Home Depot and Lowe’s (and finding they had literally the exact same prices on lumber) I did some research on local lumber yards.  We took a trip down to one that was about 20 minutes away.  The owner was very helpful, but it was difficult to price compare since they didn’t have the same type of wood (we planned on using the cheapest “whitewood” or pine that we could find and he only had yellow poplar for an inexpensive choice).  Also, they only carried rough lumber (as in we would need a planer and a table saw to cut it to the widths we needed.  Check out this link for more info on rough lumber.).  He even showed us a few places in the local area that have a full hobby shops we could use to build our projects (for a nominal fee), but for this project we were looking for the more quick and dirty route, and less beautifully-crafted-furniture-route, so off to Home Depot we went!  Unfortunately, Home Depot didn’t have any 4 x4 untreated lumber…road block numero dos. (Just a tip: I guess that most big box stores don’t carry untreated 4x4s, so if you want to build this, plan ahead and special order it or check out mom and pop stores in your area.)  We bought what we could and decided to go to the Lowe’s later (which we knew would have 4x4s in fir since we had gone there to price out the wood initially).  Home Depot not having all the wood we needed was actually a blessing in disguise…my poor Volvo was beyond packed with just the wood we had!  Here’s a shot from the back.

Still accepting donations towards my truck btw! 😉  And here’s from the front.  I ended up sitting in the front seat completely reclined…good times…and I’m sure the absolute safest way to drive…errr, maybe not.

Along with the lumber, we bought these 2×6 hangers which we plan to use in the making of the slatted portion of the bed…more on that to come in future posts.

We also bought a whole slew of screws, nails, and wood glue.  We might not actually need this many, but I’m sure any unused screws will be used in future projects (we already have other plans in  the works, so I’m not concerned).

A nice gentleman at Lowe’s suggested we purchase this handy pilot hole/counter sink in one doo-hicky (technical term).  We plan on counter sinking the screws and filling them with wood filler for a more finished look.  I’ll let you know how it works once we test it out.

Once we got home, the first task at hand was to make all of our cuts.  Since we don’t own a table saw, we thought about having Home Depot do the cuts for us, but after reading lots of reviews, it’s kind of a crap shoot as far as the skill of the worker (they recommend NOT having them do precision cuts) and some will charge up to a $1 per cut over 2 cuts…umm, no thanks.  We figured out a good system to ensure that we got straight cuts using our circular saw (and when I say “we” I mean, my wood cutter and handsome fiance, Dane).  First, Dane measured the correct length (twice…measure twice cut once!).

Then he drew a second line parallel to the first, which was the exact distance between the saw guide and the blade.  He clamped a small piece of wood along that guide line so that the saw could run along it and stay straight. (I hope this makes sense.)

He used this method for the 4x4s as well, but it took three whole cuts…he’s persistent!  Clamped…

Cut 1…

2 cuts in…

And then he finished it off…of course I don’t have a picture of that…haha.  I’ll be honest, it wasn’t a perfectly smooth cut, but nothing a little sanding can’t fix.  Maybe I’ll ask for a table saw for Christmas…haha.  All this wood will eventually be a bed…kinda crazy.  Oh, and don’t mind our peach walls in the garage…we are renters after all ;).

While Dane cut, I sanded.  We wanted the corners to be a little rounded so I gave everything a rough sand and sanded down the edges.  For the panels, we decided that we wanted even more shaved off…more on that later when we actually do it.

Luckily, before we started assembling everything, I did a little more research on putting it all together and came across a blog that mentioned the measurements were off for them.  Apparently, not all 1x8s are created equal.  This all goes back to the whole rough wood vs. dimensional lumber thing.  Some companies shave off a little more than others when transitioning from rough wood to S4 (all 4 edges finished).  Some 1x8s come out to 7.5 inches wide (and 3/4 inches deep), while others are only 7.25 inches.  The plans assume the 1x8s used are 7.5 inches…therefore, we assumed ours were 7.5 inches…WRONG!  Our boards were the 7.25 inch variety!  We were so glad I saw that before it was all glued and nailed and we realized our brand new bed that we put all kinds of blood, sweat, and tears into wasn’t wide enough for our mattress!  We laid the headboard out and realized we needed an extra 5 1/2 inches, so we bought a 1×6 (which is actually .75 x 5.5, are you thoroughly confused yet?) and called it a day.  My OCD told me that it wasn’t right, but we plan on putting it in the center and having 5 panels on either side (see the pic below).  Since it was even, my OCD mind was able to rest easy (my sister will understand 😉 ).  Here’s the headboard all laid out (with the extra board not yet cut), so we could see if we liked it.So, as of now, we have a whole bunch of cut and sanded wood…and still no bed, but I’ll let you know how it goes as we move along.  That’s all you get for now. 😉

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