When we first moved here, Barclay and Navi loved digging up all the carrots the previous owner had planted in the garden. After the carrots were gone, I thought the entertainment was over. We ignored the rest of the garden, including the row of parsnips, and let them grow. They got quite tall – taller than me!
Then Barclay discovered that parsnips are fun to chew on – like carrots!
All he has to do is dig them out and haul them away.
These are sure big!
Nom nom nom…
Good stuff!
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We spent last weekend with our Airstream friends in John Day Oregon at Clyde Holliday State Recreation Area. There was a super nice campground there, right on the John Day River. I picked it because I heard it was nice, and I’d never been out there before, but it turned out to be a 6 hour drive! Pretty long for just a weekend. But the scenery along the way was incredible, so that made it tolerable.
We started out heading down 84 to The Dalles, and cut over at Biggs, and for the first time got to see the wind power generators. There hadn’t been any of these the last time we headed up to Yakima, which was probably ten years ago. Some people hate them because they are a blight on the landscape, but I thought they were pretty amazing.
Dave found a mountain!
The farther we got into central Oregon, the crazier the scenery got. If you think of evergreens and rain when you think of Oregon, this would change your mind.
We got to the park and got setup. Some early arrivals had saved spots for us, which annoyed the ranger, but they wouldn’t have had to do that if they allowed reservations. Luckily all but one of our group arrived before the Ranger noticed! Then another camper went and paid for the late arrival’s spot and parked their truck in it so it would be saved.
The spots were HUGE – the biggest camping spots I’ve ever seen! Here you can see the distance between our trailer and our neighbor – tons of room!
We set up the ‘dog yard’ so the pooches could relax in the grass.
After a late night of music around the bonfire, the next morning we headed out to visit the Fossil Beds National Monument.
They had a fabulous museum showing many of the amazing fossils they had unearthed in the area. Not dinosaurs, but early mammals – camels and hippos, and tiny horses – it was really interesting! Also plants and seeds and bugs. After the museum we drove up the road to a ‘Blue’ canyon where many fossils were found. It’s hard to see the color in the photos, but it was indeed a light blue color. The rock was very soft and heavily eroded, and that is how the fossilized animals get revealed.
It was an interesting walk, but the dogs didn’t like walking over these bridges, which had bumpy metal grating, and there were a lot of them, so we eventually turned back.
Dogs refused to face the camera!
We drove around a bit more to enjoy the scenery.
Then headed back to the park for an afternoon nap, potluck, and music around the campfire late into the night.
I love these gatherings, but the next morning it was time to go home. We didn’t even wait for breakfast, knowing we had a long day of driving ahead of us. We took a different route to get some new scenery. It was amazing with gentle rolling hills that stretched to the horizon. We also saw many abandoned hoses and barns.
Back into Windmill country
Navi doesn’t enjoy the ride much, but Barclay is a real traveller. He just relaxes and enjoys the ride.
Before long we were back to familiar territory, seeing barges on the Columbia River, and headed home. It was a great weekend, and I loved seeing some scenery I had never seen before.
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I was reading on my favorite vintage-house blog, Retro Renovation, about vintage houses that featured wall murals. I guess it was a thing back in the day. So I went searching around on the web for vintage wall murals, and found a site which features just about any image you can imagine, blown up to wall size. Intrigued by the boldness of a wall-sized image, I started searching for 70’s style images in the colors I was interested in, and found one I thought was pretty awesome and 70s looking. Only problem – wall size murals cost about $200. That’s a lot of money to pay and then decide you hate it. On the other hand, if I painted it myself, for the cost of less than $50 in supplies, I could decide if I liked it or not, and then just paint it all a solid color if it was not to my taste.
And hey, I was home sick anyway this weekend, so why not have a little fun?
I laid out the tape by hand, following the top half of the image above as a pattern.
At this point the first layer of colors are in, and I can’t wait to get the tape off and see how it looks with white outlines.
I laid on a second coat of all the colors late last night, and this morning, stripped off the masking tape to see how it looks with white outlines – I love it!
The masking tape had a lot of bleed-under that needs to be touched up.
All the touch-ups are done, and the final touch is a piece of wall art we picked up a few months ago. I knew it was going to fit perfectly in here somewhere!
And the outdoors/geese theme bedroom is complete. We love it!
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We have been having so much fun picking up art for our new home, decorating it with little fun things that make us happy. Really, to me even the furniture seems like art, since it’s all old and unique – it’s unlikely to find similar pieces to the ones we’ve found.
Let’s start with the centerpiece of the bedroom – the geese painting. We found this at an antique store in Portland, but I went home and thought about it for a day before going back to buy it. It wasn’t expensive, I just wasn’t sure about it. I’m glad we got it though, the colors are great for the bedroom, and it started giving us a nature theme to decorate around.
I like the style of it – it feels 70s to me. The way the clouds are just shapes with no definition but the geese look more realistic. The trees and brown grass and reflections in the water, well, that all reminded me of our home in the country and our visits to the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge.
It appears to be an actual painting, not just a print. That’s kind of cool to know we have something which someone actually created with their own hands. Good job, ‘Jane’, whoever you are!
Now we have a goose/nature theme going on in the bedroom. We were buying our couches at another antique store when I spotted these wall plaques, and had to have them:
A closer look:
These were probably part of a triptych, with the center piece being a clock, but the clock is gone. I saw a very similar set with flowers instead of geese on them. But I’m happy to have these, they look great on the wall behind the TV.
There are more bedroom geese coming, but I have one more wall to paint before I show those off. Maybe this weekend.
In the front room we have the Japanese silk paintings, which I’ve shown off before, and the picture of Barclay, and I just added a matching picture of Navi, so these two make a cute set on the wall.
And then there’s the Matador…
Every 70s home needs a Matador! Dave grew up with a Matador painting over the fireplace in his parent’s house. We saw this one on CL for $40, but it was about an hour away. Eventually we saw it in an antique store for $100 and we thought, well, they must have bought it and marked it up and now it was way out of our price range, which was too bad because it was pretty impressive in person. It’s a print with painted highlights. Then we saw it on CL again the next week! There were two of them in town! So we ran out to the folks selling it for $40 and bought it. As the lady handed it to us she gave us a funny look and said ‘Are you sure this fits into your décor?’, in a way that indicated she didn’t think it could possibly fit into ANYONE’S décor! Oh yes, we assured her. And it fits very nicely into the living room, particularly with the yellow couches. We LOVE the Matador!
My latest acquisition was a Goodwill find. This afternoon after volunteering at the barn, I went back up to Battle Ground to order food at our favorite Thai place and bring it home. I had a little time to kill so I went to Goodwill to look for frames I could buy and put my own photography in, and spotted this:
Hmmm, I thought, that’s pretty groovy. It says John Eastman, 1973 on it. I couldn’t decide if I should buy it or not though – fully framed and behind glass, it was a whole $4. Maybe I am a little cheap!
So I called Dave after I picked up our food and asked him what he thought, and he was like ‘duh, for $4? GO GET IT!’ So I went back, and poking around found another one! (the lines down the middle are reflections)
And yeah, they are pretty groovy. I hung them in the kitchen, which is the only place we still have some bare walls!
So that’s it for now. We’re having so much fun decorating our vintage house. Just wait until you see what I have planned to finish off the bedroom!
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I finally scored a set of nightstands that will fit into our vintage bedroom. Turns out finding sets of nightstands from the 60s is harder than you’d think, because we were told having a set of nightstands wasn’t popular back then like it is now. So we’ve been searching for a couple months without any luck.
Yesterday I went to a consignment shop in downtown Vancouver on my way home from rehearsal. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was on the lookout for nightstands and a couch. As I wandered through, I spotted a couple little nightstands, dark wood, little legs – perfect. The couple ahead of me looked at them first as I hung back.
‘I think they’re sold,’ the wife said. ‘They’re over here with all the other sold stuff.’
Indeed they were in the sold area, but they didn’t have any stickers on them one way or the other, so I went straight to the first employee I could find and asked about them.
‘Oh yeah, they just came in, we haven’t priced them yet. The person who prices them will be in on Wednesday.’ I’m sure I gave her a look of desperation that said that was much too long to wait! ‘Let me go ask..’ she offered.
I hung around waiting, until she came back – ‘$40 each.’ Oh yeah! I’ll take them. I called Dave to bring the van down immediately! We had considered paying more than that for nightstands that weren’t nearly as close to what we wanted in style, or needed to be refinished.
I think they go very well with the headboard. Now we’re talking about painting the wall behind the bed an accent color, and finding a piece of wall art for it. We’re still looking for a perfect bedspread too.
A week or so ago we got our special order pull down shade for the window, and got a nice heavy curtain to go over it with a fun vintage-looking pattern. That helps keep it dark so we can sleep in on the weekends, and keeps it warmer by insulating the window. My guitar is hanging in the bedroom too. I like having the guitar hanging up because it keeps it safe from dogs, but makes it really convenient to just grab off the wall and play.
And I’ve shown off our pretty vintage dressers before, but I don’t think I’ve shared the cool vintage painting we picked up of Canadian Geese landing on a lake. I really like it, and it has an interesting style that matches up with the rest of the room.
Overall I’m really happy with how the bedroom has turned out. So much nicer than our previous style of looking like we still lived in a dorm room with mismatched furniture! For once we’ve actually purchased furniture on purpose, and tried to match things up. I feel like such a grown-up!
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We didn’t have room for the microwave in the kitchen (vintage kitchens don’t have built-in microwave ovens!) and so we kept it on a shelf in the garage, right outside the door to the kitchen. It was close, but awful cold and inconvenient. We had a little table we replaced with something more ‘period’ and I stuck it in the corner of the dining room and put the microwave on it. I didn’t realize I was inventing a new dog entertainment system.
A couple weeks ago we took advantage of a mild afternoon when it wasn’t raining for a short time, to try out our new firepit.
Our primary reason was to get rid of a whole box of old financial papers which we couldn’t recycle, and it would have taken forever to shred. The fire made short work of them, and also gave us an afternoon of entertainment.
Towards the end I brought the dogs out but kept them on leash. Navi isn’t as close tot he fire as it looks. Barclay actually just laid down in the grass and took a nap. It was quite relaxing to just sit and look into the coals and watch the flames dance around, and the red light as they burned from within was fascinating. I could sit and watch a campfire all evening.
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Complete chaos at our house with four little peski-mos all barking and chasing cats and wanting attention and cuddles at the same time!
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First snow in our new house! Not much of a snow, just a dusting really. I went out first thing in the morning to explore the frozen backyard with my faithful companions
Two faithful companions, reporting for duty!
I was first attracted by the apples that still hung on the tree, capped with snow
Frozen birdbath
I went to the frozen fountain, and thought it would be fun to photograph a contrasting pebble across the expanse of ice. So I picked out a pebble and tossed it out there.
Thanks, Barclay! You’re a lot of help!
The statues looked kind of haunting, draped in frozen cobwebs and snow
Snow and cold marked every part of the yard.
The little birds who visit the birdbath every morning must have been disappointed to find it frozen over. One hopped across the snow and left tracks for me to find.
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Steff Does Stuff! 