Enlightenment

One of the things I'm hoping to do this fall is freshen up front of the house.  The walkway, as previously discussed, needs a serious do-over.  But there are also little details.  Things like adding mums to the stoop for fall (I gave in and bought some gorgeous red ones last week).  Things like the entry light.

The light fixture on the exterior of the house appears to have been installed when the house was originally built, back in the 70's.  Stylistically, it's not really a bad piece, but I was originally thinking that it would require replacing because it was absolutely disgusting.

 

See what I mean?  That white patchy coating did not come off when I tried to scrub it - I don't even know what it is and I don't want to know.  Looks kind of like a hunk of junk here.  But then I got to thinking....if I can give a rusty, revolting mailbox new life with a coat of paint, why not a light fixture?  Albeit without the vinyl decals this time, admittedly.


So that became the new plan.  First I removed the wire attached to the fixture (see top right), which as far as I could tell served absolutely no purpose at all.  Then my helpful husband figured out which fuse controlled the fixture and turned it off for me so as to prevent accidental electrocution.  Details.  Next, I took all the pieces apart, unscrewed it from the wall, and cleaned it out.  This took quite a while, as there were about thirty years of dusty dead bug bits inside.

Next, I brought out the matte black spray paint and went to town, after carefully taping off the wires and the socket first.  Looking better already, no?  In taking it apart I discovered that the windows were plastic and not glass, which was a bit of a disappointment, but I can replace those down the road.  You can find just about anything on the internet, right?

And here is my finished product on the right, side-by-side with the unpainted version.  Looks a million times better and it didn't cost me a dime!

What's Cookin'?

It has been a busy, social weekend here, and boy am I tired!  It's a good tired, though

Being the last weekend of the month, this was the Saturday on which Nick invited some friends out to brew up some beer.  While bottling last month's Vanilla Bourbon Porter (*note to self*: vanilla beans soaked in bourbon taste like bourbon), this month they roasted pumpkins and started an Imperial Pumpkin Stout.  'Tis the season, after all.  Which for them means beer, and for me means toasted pumpkin seeds to snack on.  It's a win-win.

In addition to homebrew, Nick wanted to celebrate his birthday this weekend by trying his hand at something new on the grill: brisket.  He's had some local barbecued brisket and liked it quite a lot, and given his success earlier in the year with ribs on our grill, was hopeful brisket could be done as well.  After consultation with Evan (his BBQ partner-in-crime) and some online research, Project Brisket was a go!  No, they did not actually call it Project Brisket.

Our local Wegman's was happy to supply Nick with a gigantic slab of brisket weighing in at nearly ten pounds.  Enormous.  For six people.  It sat on the grill and cooked ever so slowly and smokily (not a word but ought to be) over a pan of water and beer (to keep it from drying out), for over seven hours.  It could have gone longer, but we needed to actually eat dinner.  

How was it, you ask?  A-MAZING.  Absolutely delicious.  Why would you eat brisket any other way, I ask you?  Oh, and for an appetizer?  Yeah...he made a half rack of baby back ribs, too.  This plus my homemade coleslaw and a divine squash mac n' cheese Evan's wife contributed and we were in heaven.  Oh, and did I mention the cake I baked?

Some of our guests spent the night, and late this morning/early this afternoon one of them helped Nick prepare the second batch of beer for the weekend, a Trois Pistoles clone.  I weeded the garden beds instead.  It's gorgeous outside today, beautifully sunny and not too hot or cold.  Perfect for gardening. 

Speaking of the garden, things are coming along nicely.  The green beans, both old and new plants, are producing many beans on a consistent basis; we are eating a decent helping at least once a week.  Eventually I may want to fill an entire bed with beans or add in some pole beans to have even more available, but for now this works well.  The purple bell pepper plant that let me down earlier in the season is finally happy enough to produce actual bell peppers, and they are indeed turning a lovely deep purple color.  We have more scallions than we know what to do with - need to remember to use succession planting on those next year.  Broccoli seedlings are growing in the space vacated by the failed leeks; something snacked on a few of them but the remainder look happy, and I planted some more today where the eggplant used to live.  The eggplant gave up on making eggplants so we gave up on it.  Next year: more fertilizer.  Or perhaps compost tea?  

We are harvesting some of our Black Krim tomatoes and they taste as good as they look!  We'll see how far we can stretch tomatoes this season; there are a few plums ripening and some new cherries still growing.  Perhaps with the hoop house it will stay warm enough for them; keep your fingers crossed!

Cleaning Up

For a few weeks now, I have been contemplating the idea of DIY homemade laundry detergent.  I saw a post on Facebook and it looked nifty: a chance to save some cash and play with something homemade.   So when my husband mentioned this weekend that we were low on detergent, I saw my opportunity.  After poking around the internet for a bit I happened across a post at "How Does She?" with a recipe that looked pretty good.  It had the same three primary ingredients I'd found in all of the other online recipes, with a little extra thrown in.

This morning I took a trip to Wal-Mart and bought my ingredients.  This alone was kind of a big deal.  I almost never go to Wal-Mart.  I'm a Target (or Tar-jeh) girl, through and through.  However, Wal-Mart had all of the ingredients and Target didn't, so that settled it.  I didn't even burst into flames when walking through the door (though I did flinch a little).

What are these fabled ingredients, you ask?

• Borax: one box (4 lb, 12oz)
• Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda: one box (3 lb, 7 oz)
• Arm & Hammer Baking Soda: one box (4 lb)
• OxyClean: one container (3 lb) - optional but the recipe I found highly recommended it
• Zote Soap: two bars - I used the pink one since that was what Wal-Mart had.  Apparently you can also use Fels Naptha, and some people like Ivory soap but that's not a laundry soap so I'm not so sure...
• I also added a bit of Epsom Salts because various sites had commented that it made a great fabric softener.

I only wanted to make a half recipe, since this is a new project and I might end up hating it.  So I dumped half of all of the containers into a bowl, except the Epsom Salts as that was more like 1/4 of the container.  Then came the slightly tricky part - grating a bar of soap.  As recommended by various websites, I cut the bar into smaller pieces and microwaved them until they got puffy.

Once it cooled, I grated some of it, which worked nicely but took ages.  Tried to put the rest in the mini food processor.  This would have worked fine except that I did not let the soap cool enough first, so the cut pieces stuck together and made larger chunks.  I let them cool and reprocessed them, and for most of them it worked fine, but next time I would definitely either grate it all or let it cool (maybe refrigerate it if I were feeling impatient) before chucking them into the food processor.

And that's it!  You only need 2 tablespoons per load, and it's safe to use with HE washing machines and septic systems, so we should be fine.  Now we'll have to see if it works as well as everyone says it does....stay tuned!

Fall Projects

It has been a quiet couple of weeks on the home front.  I spent several hours split over the course of a couple of weekends scraping moss off our sad little excuse for a back patio.  It looks slightly less sad now.  In a year or two I want to completely redo the patio with actual pavers, and expand it by at least 50%.  But for now at least it is once again recognizably a patio.


My baby acorn squashes have germinated and are kind of adorable.

The Black Krim tomato plant that Nick's sister brought is is coming along nicely and the fruits are starting to ripen - so pretty! Plus, the jalapeno plant is finally putting out fruit, which is kind of exciting.  Even the bell pepper is flowering.  It's the hoop house that Nick built over the middle bed that is making the plants so happy, I think.  The fact that it's not 95 degrees out anymore is probably also helping.  Today we're going to build another hoop house to continue preparing the garden for winter.  We were originally going to expand it from three beds to four, but building and filling a new bed just isn't in the budget right now.  It can be a springtime project.  I'm already planning how to take over the back bed once the tomatoes are done for the season: lettuce, spinach, kale, and radishes!  Perhaps some arugula too.  We'll see.

We planted broccoli seeds but no sooner did they sprout then they were eaten.  Slugs, I suspect.  They absolutely wrecked our broccoli, kale and lettuce earlier this year - it was a disaster.  I haven't been pleased with the Bayer Natria slug killer bait that I bought this summer - it's organic, but the pellets did this weird moldy thing that was disgusting, and didn't really seem to slow down the slugs.  Although admittedly I was so revolted by their moldy fuzz that I did not reapply them as often as I should have.  So this time we took my sister-in-law's advice (she's our family expert) and bought some Sluggo, which is the go-to for organic gardeners plagued by slugs.  Just applied it on Friday - will have to wait and see how well it works.

I am also decorating a bit for fall.  Every year I am unable to resist the allure of small local decorative gourds and pumpkins, and the local farm store has lovely ones in stock.  Willpower is overrated.  Now I just have to find some money in my budget for mums to put out front...

Did you know that the small tri-color corn can be cooked to make popcorn-on-the-cob?
So said the lady at the farm store.  I hadn't known that.  Decorative and tasty!

Changing Plans

Fall is slowly creeping in here in Virginia, little by little.   The sunset is noticeably earlier now than it was a few weeks ago, which saddens me because I often work late and I enjoyed having a bit of daylight to accompany me home.  It is no longer light out when I get up for work in the mornings, either, which make rising a bit tougher.  However, the temperatures are starting to mellow just a smidgen, from the 80's and 90's to the 70's and 80's.  One day last week it was in the fifties overnight!

The change of seasons has been accompanied by less daylight for the garden, and a recognition that it is time to start planting some cooler season crops.  We have some tiny broccoli seedlings growing - hopefully I can do a better job of keeping the slugs off this time.

 This weekend my squash seeds arrived in the mail (yay!) and today I planted some acorn squash.  It's late to be planting it since it takes 3 months to mature, but between the fact that we're doing raised bed gardening and the hoop houses that will be over all of the beds, we should be able to pull off 3-season or 4-season gardening, so hopefully we'll get some acorn squash this fall and winter.

The tomatoes are still hanging in there.  Nick went through the main tomato bed this week and pulled out all of the plants suffering from a severe fungal infection, and then stripped the diseased leaves off of partially affected plants to slow it down, since it spreads vertically and horizontally.  So we now have a sparse bed of healthy-looking tomato plants.  Still have a serious stinkbug problem, but they haven't done much to the newer tomato plants and some of those are looking happy.  Case in point, the black krim on the right, which has some gorgeous fruits!  I am concerned that it's only a matter of time before the hundreds of stinkbugs we are fighting realize they are there, though.  Never thought I'd wish that the stinkbugs would come inside the house instead of staying outside, but at least indoors they don't do any harm.

Along with changes to the garden came changes to my weekend plans.  I had originally thought to spend the weekend redoing the front walkway, but after pricing it out I realized that my budget for the month was not going to cover that.  However, I did have enough to buy a gallon of paint in Benjamin Moore's Wickham Grey, so I spent the weekend repainting the dining room instead.  Friday was spackle/sand/tape day, and Saturday was the actual painting day.  It looks pretty good, if I say so myself!

Before

After

The light gray is a soothing, pretty color.  Depending on the time of day and the exterior sunlight, sometimes it looks a little blue or even green.  Nick especially loves it.  It's the same color that the hall has been painted, so the rooms flow nicely together.  Eventually I'd like to upgrade the room with a chair rail, and paint the bottom 1/3 or so of the wall a brighter color to punch it up a little bit.  Perhaps one of these?

Time will tell!  I actually did purchase a small sample jar of Hawthorne Yellow to put up on the wall, but apparently I left it on the edge of a counter and our pup took the term "sample" literally:

Oh well.  Live and learn!  At least it was only a small jar of paint.  Plus, he didn't actually consume much (so no health hazard there), and he thoughtfully decided to spill it only on his dog bed and not on the couch or carpet.  Could have been so much worse.

Freshening Up

Happy Labor Day!  Hope yours has been good; we have spent ours most definitely not laboring.  Too much time in the hot sun this weekend - we're wiped!

We made significant progress on the hall bathroom in August; it's received a fresh coat of paint and a new mirror above the vanity.  I decided to paint it Hollingsworth Green to match the guest bedroom, seeing as how I had about 2/3 of a can left over and it seemed like a shame to waste it.

I actually painted the room a few weeks ago, but it's taken me a while to decide that I like it (and hence post it).  Plus, when I taped the wall off to paint the trim, the tape pulled some paint off, so I had to patch and repaint a few spots.  The color comes off a bit mintier than I had wanted, and at first I hated it.  Funny enough, though, it looks better now that the hallway has been painted Wickham Grey, because now the color goes from gray to green, instead of from off-white (the former hallway color) to green.  Adding the new mirror helped tremendously as well.  The previous owners, when redoing this bathroom, had installed a series of three oval mirrors to fill the space on the wall.  They weren't terrible, but both Nick and I thought one larger mirror would work better.  We found a nice one at Home Depot that was reasonably-priced, but installing it took some work since the D-rings that came pre-placed on the mirror were far too high up on the back of the frame.  He installed it Sunday morning though, and we both really like it!  As an unexpected bonus, the dark wood of the mirror adds some gravity to the room and mellows the brighter green of the walls nicely.  I'm going to hang some artwork in a dark frame as well (perhaps black and white photos) and buy some towels in either a dark purple or a dark grey to further mellow the room.

The green does not show up terribly well in the photo below, but it does showcase the mirror change nicely. You can actually get a decent feel for the green by looking at the reflection of the wall in the mirror.  Old look on the left, new on the right.

So that's the bathroom redo.  The next room to be painted will be the dining room, also in Wickham Grey....probably not until October, though.

On tap for next weekend (tentatively) is a redo of our front walkway.  It is currently inhabited by large concrete-type pavers that I would like to get rid of for two reasons: a) I do not find attractive, and b) I keep turning my ankles on them.  However, the previous owners left us a sizeable pile of irregularly-shaped slate pavers, and I think it might be enough to make a new walkway.  Perhaps something like one of these that I dug up on the internet...?

We shall see - stay tuned!