Happy Halloween

We had a great time at with our friends at a Halloween bash. Rory was the chubby guy from the movie "The Hangover", and he had his side kick Carlos strapped into his Baby Bjorn. (That's the Wolverine behind him.) I was a Hot Devil and Baxter was my little demon boy. Baxter didn't get to come to the the party with us, but here he is begging for a piece of Bacon with his costume on.

Trick or Treat!

We love this time of year for many reasons, the change in weather, the Halloween parties, costumes, and most importantly Candy and Treats!
Rory and I thoroughly enjoyed making these sugar cookies in our new kitchen. Decorating, of course is always a favorite of mine, Rory likes the eating part.

Autumn colors

We all feel fall upon us, Halloween is near and the leaves are dropping. There is a crisp wind today and it's just a gorgeous day here in the Valley. One of Rory's favorite trees is pictured here in it's most beautiful time of the year, showing vivid golden yellows, ambers, and reds.
This picture of a Japanese Maple with my Aunt and Grandmother was taken while they were in Seattle just this last week. The photo was captured by a very talented photographer and I just had to post it. Enjoy!

Outdoor dining set

We bought a 7 piece dining set that we plan to use for our outside patio. I found it on craigslist for a good deal, and it's a nice solid wood set but it needed some style. (We are not into golden oak)
So I decided to tackle my first real refinishing project. Rory told me what the steps would be, and a little advice from girls on the web for the proper paints to use....and I was off to Home Depot, a new home owners favorite place.

I sanded the whole set, and had removed the seats. I plan to reupholster those this week.

Before

The seat cushion material I ordered is Sunbrella outdoor fabric, it is waterproof and UV resistant.

Seagrass Green
(much lighter in person)

I have painted the whole set in one coat of flat black oil paint. Rory and I "distressed" the table and I can do the chairs tomorrow. The photos make the table look gray, but it will be black when it's done. The whole set will be finished with a semi-gloss clear coat.

After!

I'll post done pictures when I finish it!

Digging around

The boys did a bit of digging today. When we got off work Rory started to dig me a hole to plant our new rosemary plant. I have to have fresh rosemary for cooking.
Baxter quickly caught the digging bug, and began to dig a gopher hole with much enthusiasm. He got in about shoulder deep before he lost interest.

Video of the digging in action

Here it is...

...the finished product. (Well besides the few details, the outlets still need to be replaced, the drywall needs some patching and painting from when we took off the original tile.)
But it looks GREAT! It's grouted and finished it just needs sealing in a day, but we cleaned off the counter clutter and pushed the range back in place. What do you think? Quite a change from the plain "blah" kitchen from before, eh?

Old kitchen

New kitchen!

Almost done with the Kitchen!

Well I am not posting pictures of the progress from today, because we are almost done and I want to take pictures of the final product. We got ALL the tiles up. Tomorrow we grout them and then we wait a few days and we can seal them, so it's almost done.
This is our latest furniture piece, we got it at a shop in SB, its really cool looking. It was on clearance and the green pillow was free! Well, it had a tear in the case but the pillow is down, with a dupioni silk case. So I asked if I could have it and I embroidered the floral design to cover up the tear. Voila!

A little grout

Rory grouted the blue "cove" tonight after work. It looks really cool and almost finished! Oh yeah and Baxter "helped".
I finished sewing a little cotton valance for the 1/2 bath off the laundry room. We should get the tiling done by the end of the weekend, I hope.

Hawk behavior

Well here is the latest tile progress. I was hoping to finish putting it all up by the end of today, but the tile had it's own plan. We got up a good amount of yellow, and pretty much finished the blue trim pieces. It looks good, it's bright yellow and a new look from the gray hardybacker we have been looking at for 2 months.
Note: Rory changed the blue trim piece set up on the back splash above the stove, He mitered the edges, (see below post for the before) we think it looks way better mitered.
Also the oil painting I finished last week is now up in our living room. I am satisfied with the first oil I attempted. I am not designed for oil, as I don't have the patience for it. But the process is growing on me.
Do you think it's too small for the space? I was just noticing that, but Rory said it's a fine size.

So, we had a bit of a distraction during the tiling job. We kept hearing a bang every so often while we worked and after about 30 minutes of it we saw what it was. A Hawk was trying to get in our house! He was flying into the french doors and windows on purpose over and over and over again for hours. Baxter wanted to kill it, and the hawk wanted to take Baxter on! It was distracting and also a bit disturbing. We thought it was over with after he was gone for about an hour, but when we got back from the store and sat down for dinner, BANG! Again at the front door glass. It flew back up into the tree and then again on Rory's truck. It is so bizarre I can't even explain it.
If you click on the pictures they should get much bigger so you can see the hawk and detail of the painting.

More tile progress

Well today is our first anniversary as a married pair! We have a full day ahead of us of tiling. We got behind schedule quite a bit yesterday, due to my fault. I wanted to drive down to Santa Barbara first thing to pick up a craigslist find of a solid wood table and 6 matching chairs that I plan to refinish for our outdoor dining set. So we didn't get back till 11 am.
Then when we started to prep for our tile job for the day, when we came across a miscalculation on my part. Oops! We had to change the design a bit to make it fit properly. Also a miss shipment of the wrong size trim tile. Instead of a 6"x1" blue trim tile we were shipped 4"x1" leaving us with a large difference of 2" less per tile by 44 tiles = 88 inches we are missing. Well we dealt with it, and started to map out a different plan using less trim. We didn't actually get to putting tile up on the wall till 2pm. This is how its looking so far. We are going to get the yellow done today and our goal is to get all the tile up by tonight, and I think we will have to wait to grout another day. I worked on the cobalt blue cove where I plan to hang the copper pots. I still need to do the "lid" or ceiling of the cove. But I am proud of my first tiling job.
Rory is now chopping wood out back for our fire tonight, as I blog and finish up our morning coffee. And now we are going to take Baxter for a nice long walk and then start the tile! I will make Rory a anniversary breakfast of waffles and sausage, and use the delicious maple syrup my parents brought back for us from Canada!

1st Anniversary!

It's our first anniversary this Sunday, October 11th. We picked up our cake topper today, and it's so cute. The pastry chef who made our wedding cake offers a 6" round cake for your first anniversary on the house! So we don't have to eat that year old cake in the freezer, we get a fresh one. She does any flavor you want, but we stuck with an original flavor from the wedding cake. We had a lot of the coconut passion fruit leftover after the wedding, but all of the lemon with fresh blueberries was gone. So we had her replicate the lemon cake, with lemon curd Bavarian cream filling and fresh blueberries for us, and we can't wait to cut into that cake! Yum!

Cooling off around here.

As we get closer to our first anniversary the weather is starting to change. It has been quite windy here the last few days and the temperature is dropping. Rory started our first fire in our fireplace! We have a ton of oak from a tree we took down at my dads place, so we started to use it.
We also started on the tile, it is slow going with all the other tasks we need to get done first. We didn't get much up yet, but the bit we did looks cool. Check it out.