Images of a Little Boys Summer

Images of my little boys Summer. It's the end of the summer and he's not such a little boy anymore. The summer went way to fast. School has already started. I'll look back on these pictures during the middle of the Winter we are getting our 10th snow storm and there is 3feet of snow out our windows. Father and Son

Summer Toys

Time to pick and display!

Get to enjoy the fruit of all our labors. They won't last long in our house.

Show off your Spring and Summer Flowers.

This is a great time of year to cut some fresh flowers and show them off in a unique container.

I love using old water cans!

Recycle your glass vases with your own flowers, or return them to the florist if your flowers came from them. They will appreciate it and it's one less thing in our land fills.

Free flowers from the road side or my garden are the best.

Impatients never seem to disappoint. My grandmother has always grown big beautiful Impatients. Her secret is to water them both morning and night. They also don't like a lot of sun.

I also like to use the following to arrange flowers in:

• Mason jars
• Old crocks
• An old wash bucket
• An old boot or shoe
• Mini maple syrup jars
• jelly jars
• baby food jars

Get creative with your flowers.

Have Fun!

Inexpensive Window Boxes

I finally got my window boxes. We've lived here for 5 years and I have always wanted window boxes on the front of the house. I love looking at houses with beautiful over flowing window boxes. My husband was worried about damage that the water might cause to the house. I came up with an idea that puts the boxes far enough away from the house that their should not be any damage.

I got all the material from the Mill Store. The unfinished boxes with plastic liners were only $14 a piece. Most window boxes I looked at were $75 and up. The brackets were $5.00 a piece. This was a very inexpensive project that added a lot of character to the house.I originally wanted to buy antique brackets but I couldn't find enough that matched. I needed 8 brackets. I have four windows.

First thing I did to prepare the boxes was:

1. Drilled about 30 holes in the bottom of each box


2. Sand the boxes before painting


3. Primed the boxes


4. Used exterior paint ( I used 2 coats of left over paint from the house trim)


5. Re drill the holes (paint can clog the them)


6. I cut huge holes in the plastic liners so they would drain easily


7. Placed one layer of newspaper on the bottom of the liner.


8. Fill with potting soil and compost.


9. Fill with plants. ( Choose filler flowers( I used pink Becopia) Usually small buds, trailing flowers & vines( Vinca or Potato Leaf as an example) and then a main flower ( I used ruffled Petunia)
   

I placed the brackets on the house with the long side faced up. The window boxes sit right up to the end of the bracket. ( I wanted a 2 to 3 inch gap between the house and the window box. )Once the flowers fill in you really don't notice the gap. The window boxes were drilled to the bracket from underneath.

Notice the Whimsical bug. This was from the Kith & Kin Studios a few years back. My sister-n-law designed the wings and I designed and painted the body. We had them in all kinds of playful colors. Someday I'll post the Fat Fairies we made. They are adorable.
You can really change the look of your house with this project. Next month I'm going to replace the summer flowers with Mums and Decorative Cabbage, and this winter I will have Holly berry, mixture of greens and red berries.

Have fun with them.

Snowball Effect of Home Projects

Shorty really enjoyed helping out. He told my dad "he couldn't wait to rip the carpet out because he was a junk yard dog." My son. I Love Him. He was a great help. We paid him in baseball cards for all his hard work.


Soon this Island will be gone and an old table will replace it.

We have been very busy getting ready to put in wide pine flooring. As with any project; it seems to grow. Putting in the floor means:

1. Paint the walls, because the rooms open up into each other, it means more rooms get painted.


2. Floor trim has to come up and all the other trim has to get painted


3. Island in the middle of the kitchen has to come out.


4. Every thing in the Island has get packed up.


5. Finish the large library reference table that will serve as the Island in the Kitchen. (Salvage yard burnt down a month ago, so now we have to find another place that sells old wood.)


6. Need to match up old wood to make a few missing draws on the table.


7. Try and match up old paint we liked. ( Didn't happen, so I had to rethink the colors in the hallway. Three trips to the paint store and a couple re dos on the walls. We finally ended up with a harmony of color we're happy with.


8. We now have to add a chair rail because I wanted to use both the paint colors I picked for the hallway. (Hubby is a very Patience man. I love you Honey).


9. And it all has to be done before Shorty goes back to school.

The floor goes in this weekend so I will not be blogging very much this week. A lot to do for just a floor! Has this happened to you? When I was doing Interior Design I would tell clients to be prepared for these headaches. I need to listen to my own advise now. We now are living out of one room . ARRGGGHH!

Here are a few pictures of my faux finish I did. The color is a happy accident. I wasn't sure how I would like it . This is about all the creating I'm going to get to do for a while. Though it was fun to play in the paint.

I know it will be ALL worth it when it DONE!

This was the first color I painted. We thought it was a little to bright, though my son loved it. So while hubby was at work I thought I would try to do a faux finish.

I had some glaze left over from a table I worked on a while ago. It was a dark brown. I used a rag. I had another rag that I used to blot up excess glaze. At the very end I got the rag damp and went over the wall. I didn't like it. Then I had a little paint left over from the original hallway color. I put this on with a damp rag. I feathered out any hard edges. I wasn't sure if I liked it yet. This is when Shorty and I went to the paint store to buy more paint. We bought two shades lighter from what we had put on the wall.

<
p>When we got home, the wall had dried. I Loved how it looked.
Then I moved on to the hallway. Two paint colors and a roll of painters tape later I was finished. That's when hubby came home and I told him we were going to have a chair rail. (Like I said , he is very patience.)
Have a great week & Have Fun!

New Products in Etsy store

Hi everyone,

I feel like I'm behind in my posts. We've been busy getting ready to put flooring in. As many of you know; when you start one project it ballons in to a whole other ball of wax. So to begin with I have added two new postcards to my Etsy store. I will be adding more pictures sometime this week.

Hope all are enjoying this great summer!

Have Fun!

Pictures from Castle in The Clouds

The name of the estate is Lucknow

Yeah, we finally made it to Castle In The Clouds. Here is the breath taken view from the front lawn. The estate covers 5,500 acres. Original the estate bordered on the edge of the lakes you see in the picture. Thomas Plant built the property in 1914. His niece introduced him to the lake region. He fell in love with the area and had this home built for his second wife Olive. He lost all his money in bad investments and the stock market crash of 1929. His creditors let him live out his life at the estate until his death in 1941. The house was turned over to them and Olive went to California to take care of her parents.

Beautiful views from every window. I've lived here my whole life and had never ventured up here before. There are over 40 miles of hiking trails. We stopped at the "Falls of Song" on the way up the winding two-mile road. Look at this huge bolder that was named "The Pebble"

Falls of Song

The home is made out of stone. He had employed over a thousand stone masons, mostly from Italy. Thomas Plant requested that each stone be cut into a pentagram to represent the 5 major World Powers at that time. You can tell, when he wasn't around the stone didn't always get cut right. It would take 1 mason 1 whole day to carve out 3 stones. A lot of work, but the craftsmanship is wonderful.


Almost every window had these beautiful hand painted glass

windows. Stone flower boxes lined the front lawn wall.

Library window over looking the lakes region. Shorty wanted to just look at all the books. He got out his magnifying glass to read some off the titles. You couldn't pick them up.

The Castle in the Clouds is managed by the Castle Preservation Society. They are working on the house and hope to have it fully restored by 2014 to celebrate the homes 100Th birthday. They are opening rooms as they finish them. They are trying to put it back to it's original state.

It was a great and informative day. Very interesting place. Shorty really enjoyed it as much as my mother and I did.

Have Fun!