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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Framed at last!
In 2009 I posted a picture of my Grandfather’s silk painting, and the silk painting we had recently found in an antique shop for $20.
Well, here it is a few years later and we finally got the second painting framed, and hung them both in the front room where we can enjoy looking at them. We had the framing done at the local frame shop, and I was really impressed with the way the new frame made the silk painting look so much better than the ratty old frame it had been mounted in. The matt really makes the colors pop! It’s gorgeous now!
I don’t care for all the shadows from the lamp below them, but eventually there will be a couch against that wall, and the lamp will move to an endtable.
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Woodburning Sake & Sitka
Sherry said she’d like woodburnings done of Sake & Sitka, so I pulled a couple nice shots of them out of the Christmas photos, converted them to sketches, and transferred them to wood. The whole project was delayed because I couldn’t find my woodburning kit, but I finally dug it out of the unpacked items in the garage. Once I got the outlines done I added the little details that make them really look like the individuals – that’s where the art comes in! I was really happy with how these turned out, I think they do look like them, and Scott and Sherry love them 🙂
First snow at The Rancho
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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Outdoor lights, Bathroom lights, Christmas lights
We’re having entirely too much fun with lights. This is the story of how we ended up with three bathroom lights for our one bathroom house!
Yesterday we went antiquing with a friend over in Portland. We started out at a place we regularly hit for cabinets and lamps when we are building sets – The ReBuilding Center in north Portland. This place is packed with lights, knobs, cabinetry, doors, sinks, just about anything you can think of for a house that is not furniture! We wandered around for a while looking at stuff, but our big score was a vintage light cover for the bathroom.
It has cool pink ends, and is wide enough to cover our entire bathroom vanity. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a fixture for it. It was only $5, so we had to buy it and hope a fixture would be found later, or we could figure out some way to mount it.
Continuing on towards Hawthorn, we stopped at the Habitat for Humanity store, which is under a bridge. They mostly had modern stuff, but we found this neat little bathroom lamp with a fixture for it. I wasn’t a big fan of the pattern, but it was getting closer to what we needed, and it was only $10.
After lunch we hit a couple more places, and finally ended up at a vintage store (same one we bought our dressers from a few weeks ago) and found complete fixture and cover, the same size as the first cover we had found. It has a bold leafy pattern, but the mounting holes will fit the pink cover as well.
And that is how we ended up with three times as many bathroom fixtures than we can possibly use!
Meanwhile, outdoors, We hung LED Christmas lights around the edge of the patio cover, and installed a new light with a GFI socket to plug them into. Now we can turn them on and off with the switch by the backdoor.
It’s gotten really cold here, so we just about got frostbite hanging this lamp, but Dave did a super job while I handed him tools and tiny screws.
Looks great!
This was Dave’s effort for Christmas decorations this year!
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LIghts out!
Story time: The other night Dave stretched out his foot and bumped the outlet under his desk where the computer is plugged in, and the computer lost all power and turned off. I heard his agonized scream, as he had been working on something, of course. So he reached under the desk and wiggled the plug, and all the lights in the front half of the house went out – uh oh!
He went out to the garage to see if the fuse had blown, and I stayed inside, and after a few minutes the lights came on, and I shouted th news to him out in the garage, to hich he replied ‘I haven’t done anything yet’. Uh oh, that’s even worse!
So we thought about it, wiggled it and saw the lights flicker on and off, and finally threw the fuse to shut it all down, and called our friend Scott, the electrician. He recommended pulling the outlet out to see if a wire had come loose. We pulled it out, but the wires were fine, so the problem must have been in the outlet. It was one of several outlets in the house that were kind of loose anyway. So we headed off to the hardware store.
Half an hour later we were back and Dave installed the new outlet, threw the fuse, and everything was back to working all hunky-dory. We bought a few extra sockets, because I think we’ll need to replace those other loose outlets as well, just to be safe. Glad this was such an easy fix!
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The bedroom ceiling light
Our bedroom came equipped with this enormous ceiling fan:
It was seriously HUGE, and hung down so low Dave could hit his head on it, and we both regularly bumped it when putting on shirts, or doing anything that involved raising our arms above our head. I couldn’t do exercise videos without moving off to the side away from it! I can’t imagine laying in bed and having that giant fan whipping away overhead!
So today we took it down and replaced it with a nice ceiling fixture. We picked one that had a sort of clean, retro look to it, with a cloth shade. I quite like it.
It lights up the room very nicely, I just had to take a very fast picture to get the color of the shade to show up without the picture being overexposed. And no one will be bumping their head on this!
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The last major pieces for the kitchen
The kitchen is where we spend a lot of our time, and so we wanted it to look just right. I’m overjoyed with the cool vintage cabinets, and we needed some nice vintage furniture to go with them – mostly a hutch to handle overflow because there’s not enough storage, and a nice vintage table to sit under that awesome UFO light.
We actually found the hutch a couple weeks ago, but waited until we’d looked around a bit more. Since we didn’t find anything we liked better, we went ahead and bought it.
It replaces the honey pine bookcase which we gave to a friend. This has a lot more storage, and the dark walnut formica matches the dark cabinets nicely. I like the open shelves for my cookbooks, and I can display some of my pretty vintage bowls and cups. I had to set my mixer and food processor on top because they are too big to store in any of the cabinets!
It has these neat space-age drawer pulls. Love it!
Dave was out doing some shopping during the day and spotted a dining room table he really liked. He called me up and said it was great, and he was going to buy it. I wasn’t too sure, since I hadn’t seen it in person, but I think he has a good eye, so I said ok. Of course he’d already bought it…
I love it! Mouse loves it too! It has a nice pattern on top. The formica isn’t too dark, and the chairs are in excellent condition. Since I plan to paint the kitchen yellow, I think they will fit in perfectly.
So that’s the last major addition to the kitchen. Not room for anything else anyway. Now I can concentrate on cleaning the cabinet doors, fixing the dings and scratches, and then getting a nice coat of wax on them. They are already starting to glow.
Dave says The Rancho is like the Airstream – about the same vintage, same type of cabinets, and feels about as small – so we have to keep everything organized and neat! It’s great. Just like the Airstream, it already feels very much like home.
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More vintage lamps
First of all, no 70s home is complete without a swag lamp. Lets take care of that.
Dave found this neat lamp on Craigslist, and went and picked it up in NE Portland, where it had spent the last 40 years or so hanging in a lovely 60s house. It was a pendant lamp, and wired directly into a box in the ceiling. So all we needed to do was turn it into a swag lamp. Luckily getting a swag lamp kit from the hardware store, and a new socket was no big deal. We reassembled it and tested it out and then hung it in the living room.
Hey that looks great! Wait a minute…DOH! Can you see the problem? Back to the workbench.
After disassembling it, moving a few pieces around, and reassembling the socket again, everything was back where it belonged. Now we can sit back and admire our new swag lamp!
For lamp #2, we have a special lamp which I have been trying not to break for the last 7 years or so, since I found it in my Aunt Margie’s basement while clearing out her estate. It is a Plastco Chalkware lamp.
Why is this lamp special to me? Well, it’s cool. Plus, take a look at this picture of my Dad on his wedding day:
Check out that awesome lamp on the table behind him! That’s my lamp!
Unfortunately I can’t find an awesome lampshade like that for it, at least without spending a fortune. I cleaned up the lamp, rewired it with a new socket and cord, and set it aside. Today I was walking through a store and happened to spot a shade I thought would do the trick. Maybe someday I’ll get it a proper vintage shade, but for now, I thought this looked pretty nice.
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Pictures from the new camera
I’m getting the hang of my new camera. It does all sorts of things the other one didn’t do, and sometimes it just beeps at me and refuses to take a picture. Hey, it’s digital, I should be allowed to take bad pictures if I want to! It’s not like I’m wasting film! So I’ve been taking lots of practice shots to get the hang of using it.
Hey Dave, look over here!
Navi
Cute head-tilt!
Barclay wants me to finish playing with the camera and pay attention to him!
Navi and Mouse
Smilin’ Barclay
He’s tired of waiting for me to finish playing with the camera, so he’s going to sleep.
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Steff Does Stuff! 