you know how every once in a while you go in for a regular old hair trim and you accidentally tell the hairdresser to give you mia farrow-esque pixie cut?

and then you go home, pick a fight with your sweetheart, cry about how you look like a chubby boy and wake up the next morning feeling somewhat reassured by the fact that hair does grow back...

well, we kind of gave our house an accidental pixie-cut last weekend.

our back bedroom windows had some work that necessitated repainting. we taped, filled holes, caulked gaps, primed everything and built a new grate for our attic window...it took 2 looonnng days.
and then on day number 3 we got a little crazy....
spurred on by a seething hatred for our trashy white security gate and the recent revelation that we could paint the gate (gasp!), we eschewed the white in favor of color! bright color! beautiful, rich, robust purple cornflower blue!
I'm working on a fancy photoshopped mock-up of what the back will eventually look like when we are finally able to repaint the entire house (yes, we know trim should be painted after the house...) and landscape a bit. We'd like a little sheltered area above the back door and I'm thinking that some sort of climbing orange/red flowering vine (nastursiums?) would look great...

oh and the original project? the inside of the back door? meh...not so great. i'll post a photo of the new color but i'm not excited about it. might need to repaint it. it only took us 2 years to get around to it the first time!

for some reason when we went through the hell of slapping gallons of paint all over our wood-paneled kitchen, we missed the back door. not sure how it happened, maybe we were so focused on getting the paint snuggled in each and every damn crack...
in any case, we're fast approaching our 2 year anniversary of becoming homeowners and the door is in dire need of a face-lift (see above). we're just having a little problem picking out the paint color.

i was leaning towards a slatey grey but C has requested that it be bright and cheerful.

yellow seems like the natural choice, but I'm kind of on the fence.....though I do love this photo:

image: australian vogue living, june 2007

i also really like this blue color:

image: domino mag, march 2009

thoughts? suggestions?

just a few shots from around the garden. hard to believe that we planted most of this hillside just one short year ago. everything has established itself so nicely here that we barely need to water anymore.

here's the only photo i could find of the area freshly planted:

just found this photo of the garden from last year. this photo was taken one week later than the photo in the previous post.

we spent saturday working on getting the new and improved (take 4) vegetable garden up and running. it's mostly up at this point but no plants in place. sunday's heat wave threw us for a doozy and killed off our big plans to finish up the drip irrigation system. i hope to get a few plants in the ground this week.

more details on the garden coming this week. for now, we have the boxes, soil, tomato trellis and tent frames for the cages built. the cages will be covered with bird netting...

oh and just for fun, i dug up some of our earlier garden incarnations. same area....hard to believe what it used to look like!

it took us nearly 2 years to decide what floor we wanted/could afford in our bedroom.
here's how the debate played out:

me: i hate carpet. carpet sucks. i will never have carpet in our bedroom. never.
him: some carpet can be nice. wool carpet can be nice.
me: nope. no way. i hate it.

we looked at refinishing the old cork floors that were there already: not worth it.
new cork floors: too $$ and not as nice as we had hoped. oh, and they seem to fade quite a bit over time.
fake hardwood: we both agreed this sucks beyond belief. worse than almost anything.
real hardwood: could never come close to being half as gorgeous as our newly refinished old old wood floors
linoleum: eh, not so much in the bedroom

which explains the 1.5 year interlude and why our bedroom was the last room with no baseboards, door or window trim and random paint footprints still left on the wall.

and then we saw nice carpet at a friend's house, it convinced me and we bought some here. simple as that. sort of.

the installation:
1. emptied room and jammed all of our furniture in to the tiny living room
2. cleaned floors, rafters, ceiling (lofted ceiling is really pretty but a major pain to clean). oh, and we did NOT remove the cork flooring. did it once, done with that. no way we were going back there...
3. hammered in strips of floor tacks. wear gloves.
4. put down padding. totally worth it...huge difference. good we listened to our floor expert on this tip. we used our favorite tool to tack it in place. 5. used the carpet stretcher to get the carpet nice and tight. possibly the worst designed tool ever. just plain dumb. the jammer is not so bad...still need some more door molding and window trim. finished pictures to come....

oh, and i love the carpet.

oh man, i'm sore. after a weekend of digging, shoveling, digging, shoveling, painting, raking and shoveling, my body is sore. curt too. i'm no lightweight. and look! for reals this time: ta da!
but let's go backwards first: we poured the steps last weekendthen inscribed and decorated (some seashells from various travels and a stone that curt found in our yard that looks like africa). we capped the wall off with a lovely finishing touch (we call it german finesse)of a little ledge all around.pulled yanked coaxed chainsawed took out the funky old stump that stood between us and a clear path in front of the wall,shoveled loads of dirt,and then busted out the painti don't even have pictures of the rose bushes we battled or the battle scars endured, but trust me. it was rough....luckily we still had enough daylight to fawn over the new colors on the persimmon tree, the hawks circling above and our perfect california light. not a bad sunday, eh?
and a quick before and after (click for a larger view):

i swear, at some point i really will do a legitimate "before & after" post. but for now, here's some fun bedroom photos to gasp at (note: no, trim is not up yet, molding hasn't even thought about making an appearance, and we couldn't decide what to do with the cork floor so we just painted it white. yes, it scuffs quite easily but for now it works.).

before & after. part 1.
the kitchen: