Thursday, December 13, 2018
It's hard to believe just how quickly this year has flown by, but given that holiday decorations are popping up around town I suppose it really is time to deck the halls for the holiday. Each year, I try to have most of our decorations and two trees up by the annual Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend here in Old Town.
Many people near and far come to Old Town this weekend to enjoy the festivities, and I like the exterior of our home to be ready for the occasion.
This year's Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend kicked off on November 30 (the parade is always the first Saturday in December), so it felt super early to be buying our trees. But it also served as a great deadline to get us motivated since we also throw a formal scotch tasting and dinner party on the Friday night of this weekend! With all of the work on our basement project it's been tough to divide our time between fun and function, but by our party that night we were in pretty good shape as far as holiday decor goes.
Just like with our fall decorations this year, I tried to make use of as many fresh greens as possible. Our home in Maryland is a great source for fresh greenery, so I made a quick trip there to snip some evergreens and boxwoods, and cut a few berry-lined twigs.
I'm not sure what the berry branches are exactly (my guess is some kind of invasive plant that while choking out surrounding vegetation, happens to look pretty this time of year). With my stash from the other house, the branches we trimmed off our live Fraser firs, and two dozen roses and a bunch of berries from the grocery store, I was ready to start making fresh arrangements.
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Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Have you ever had a project you've badly wanted to work on, but you never thought it would actually happen?
As long as we've owned our homes we've always had a project list a mile long. Some of those projects are things we are going to work on in the near term, and some of those projects are things we dream about eventually tackling, but have no real concept if we'll actually get to that point. But if there's one thing you need to know about Wendy and me, when we set our minds to something, we don't like to stop driving toward that goal until we can make it happen.
Over the course of the summer, and now into this fall and winter, we've been planning and working on one of those projects we've always really wanted to take on, but weren't sure would ever happen. That project? A complete overhaul of our row house's dark, musty, dirty, crowded, and inefficient basement. You remember this gross space, right? The room in our house that could most easily pass for that of a hoarder's hideaway.
Back when we purchased our home we didn't have any sort of budget to put into the unfinished basement. The walls were covered in failing waterproofing paint, portions of exposed mortar were crumbling, and the ceiling height of the basement ranged from 6'11" at its tallest point in the center, to 6'3" at its shortest at the back wall.
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If I've said it once, I've said it a million times, fall is my absolute favorite season of the year!
After what has felt like an endless summer of intense rain and humidity here on the east coast, fall's cool, crisp days are more welcome than ever. And while I'm not quite ready to drape our home in the traditional orange and black of Halloween (give me another week for that), several seasonal touches of autumn have begun to make their appearance in our home.
Given all of our rain this summer, our gardens are looking remarkably lush this year. As a result, my pre-Halloween decorating approach has been to bring the outdoors in, and to celebrate the change in seasons with cuttings from my garden and small pumpkins purchased from a local farm stand.
When hatching my decor plan I took a few minutes to walk around my garden to snip florals and leaves that I thought would make an interesting statement. This included a few stalks of pink sedum and branches of deep purple weigela.
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Friday, September 14, 2018
Have you missed us? Were you worried about us? I bet you were! ;-)
First, not to worry, we're here, and we're all fine. Second, wow have we had a lot going on! Over the last month we've wanted to write several blog posts but it has been so crazy the last little while we've just not had the time. Don't know if you know this, but it turns out topical blog posts require some inordinate level of time and concentration that we just haven't had the last few weeks.
Rather than trying to do a topical blog post about window glazing, a project that took months but we creatively make it look like a weekend, or a new recipe that we can't get enough of, we're going to get back on track by kicking it old school blogging style. "What's that " you say? We're going way back to the chronological journaling style roots of blogging, back before blogs were all shooting for compelling linkable content angling for pins and shares. Yes, we're going to look back over our last six weeks or so and summarize some of our highlights. If you follow us on Instagram there's a chance some of this may be familiar, but it will certainly have a bit more detail and far fewer hashtags. One thing's for sure, we haven't just been sitting around doing nothing the last several weeks. More on where these guys fit into the story in a bit.
Our last blog post was back near the end of July, when we did a little video home tour of our foursquare. Since then we've continued on several projects, experienced a few cool events, and we went on a handful of small trips.
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Who doesn't love a good home tour?
We've been in our 1908 Foursquare for just shy of four years now. Throughout our time in the house we've completed projects, both large and small, hatched plans, and had a lot of wonderful opportunities to enjoy our time in the house either on our own or with friends and family.
Now that we're a few years into the project, we wanted to give you a little glimpse into our home with a video home tour. Seeing the flow of walking room to room, how the spaces work together, and where we are in the process should give you a good idea of how far we've come, and how much we still have ahead of us.
VIDEO
This home tour video gives a pretty complete picture of our house. The only rooms not in the tour are the utility and laundry rooms off of the office. We have a ton we hope to accomplish in the near future and hope our video gives you an idea of the direction we're heading.
If you have any questions about our home's layout, our plans, or anything else, be sure to ask below and we'll do our best to answer. We hope you enjoyed our video and found it to be interesting (thought it was admittedly a little long). And we hope you have fun following along on our progress as we keep moving through our giant list of projects.
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