The Elephant's Child

Costly Raised Beds.

The gardening blogs and magazines are full of raised bed ideas. 

Much talk on Facebook and email lists and Pinterest about raised beds lately. 

But for those of use who grow vegetables specifically so that we can afford to eat fresh vegetables, raised beds are not that great of an idea. 

Unless you can create them for free, including finding the soil needed to fill them for free, you are eliminating much of the point of growing your own vegetables, if you're growing them to save money for your family. You are increasing the cost of your veggies, sometimes to the point of making them more expensive than buying them in the store. And most raised bed ideas are not permanent; they have a life of a couple of years to several years.  They require maintenance; bricks or blocks must be replaced, paths between them must be re-mulched, even cedar doesn't last forever in direct ground contact. 

Even in a crummy vegetable garden, the plants often bear much more than any one family can begin to deal with, so don't feel guilty if you don't have gorgeous, crumbly soil and beautiful raised beds for your plants.  

Grow what you can, where you can.  You can eat well and cheaply without raised beds. 

(Now, before anyone gets all tetchy and defensive: nothing evil about rasied beds. That's not what I'm saying.  I'm saying that for newbie and eager gardeners on a tight budget, that it's ok and perfectly fine to garden without raised beds. You'll still have wholesome, healthful, economical food, even without a pretty garden.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living Room.

This is the east end of my living room.  Something's wrong, but I don't know what.  No, it's not the clash of patterns, because I'm going to be recovering the couch cusions.  

I like all this furniture, I like the grouping, I like the colors I have.  But I don't sit in this room much.  Maybe the grouping is too tight and I just don't like having to walk over to the cane chair at the back-left of the group.  Or maybe it's because the trunk isn't padded and my feet aren't comfy when I put them up.  Or maybe it's because none of the chairs faces such that I can look out the window.  I'm not sure.  I'm open to your ideas. 

The Living Room.

I've been doing some more thinking about my living room.  

Something's wrong with the room that's causing me to not want to spend time in there.  I like how it looks, but it doesn't feel right.  

It's snowing today and the light is poor, but I'm going to try to take some photographs to post.  Put on your Home Dec hats, people, and watch for my next post. 

So...

Does my living room feel cold and not-cozy because I just don't spend much time there or do I not spend much time there because the room doesn't feel cozy and comfortable?

I think there's some sort of structural problem with my living room and I can't put my finger on what it is.  It's just not a place I like to hang out.

Organizing.

I have some strong opinions on organzing.  Should I write them up, or will they only make you -like it apparently has some on Facebook - tetchy?

It Just Won't Die.

My 1980's Oster Kitchen center:

And even when it does die, I've got another motor-base up in the attic.  I would like something different some day, perhaps the Bosh Universal. The food-processor attachment for this is on the small side. I wouldn't mind a full-size Cusinart instead.   But since the alternatives are really expensive, I'm glad I've got my near-indestructible Oster for now.  

Six Years In.

When we bought this house six years ago, we knew we were getting an old house with some issues that needed to be addressed.  We didn't, however, when we closed on the loan, know that we were signing up for extensive termite damage. But that's what we discovered.  For six years, the kitchen has been in various stages of demolition.  Today we pulled up much termite-shredded pine flooring from the south-east corner of the kitchen.  Many of the boards had been rendered into dirt and shards of veneer-thin sheets of wood.   After pulling up one layer of linoleum and another of sheet vinyl, parts of the floor below looked like this: 

It appears that enough of the subfloor is of sufficient strength to support 3/4" plywood over the top, to make up the difference in areas where we've had to remove the damaged pine plank flooring.  Yes, we'll have a kitchen floor that is part pine planking and part plywood.  

Here's what the whole area looks like after today's work: 

We still have some removal to do.  The center section of solid pine boards will need to come out so as to provide a solid subfloor under the center of the new plywood so that the plywood can span the damaged areas properly.   Do you like the holes? 

The blue is the daylight from the basement coming up through the plastic we stapled to the bottom of the joists to catch debris. The vertical, straight bit in the middle of the hole is the joist itself. 

Who's a cute little floor joist?   You are! You are!  Interesting to see how the termites left the Douglas fir of the joist almost entirely alone and yet snarfed up the Southern yellow pine of the subfloor and pine planking as if it was crack cocaine. 

Can I tell you how entirely sick I am of dealing with all this?  I don't mind working on an old house, but this, this is different.  This is gross.  It smells bad, and it looks disgusting.  

 

Space to Work, Or Should I Paint The Dresser Black?

A couple of weeks ago, Mad Musician and I spent an entire Saturday morning cleaning two windows in our house.  Yes, it takes the whole morning to do two windows.  

At some point, likely in the early 1960s, aluminium combination storm windows were put on the house.  They're cruddy, cheap, and they're falling apart.  The only way to get most of them sealed is to screw them shut with self-driving metal screws.  This we did with the east window here in my office (which also serves as a guest room, a reading corner, and as space for a work table for Sparkle Kitty.) It rather stinks that now I can't open the window, but at least it is clean enough to see out of (it really was that dirty.) And the storm window's sections don't bang back and forth in the wind now, like the ones behind our bed in our bedroom still do.  

It's wonderful how much nicer and more pleasant it has made the office to have the window clean and the curtains open most of the time.  It's always been something of an irritating room for me, what with this pale, icy blue paint over layers of wallpaper that I'm sort of stuck with for the time being because of the loads of work we have to deal with in other parts of the house and with SK's messy, disastery desk and shelves in the opposite corner.  

Clutter in my personal spaces makes me angry. It's hard to work on writing when you're angry. 

We moved a different table upstairs for Sparkle Kitty, one that's visually lighter and a bit smaller.  Her corner is much less horrible now.  And I've made progress on making the other corner of the room nicer, too, with bolsters for the bed to make it more comfy for reading and some accents on the wall above.

The two bed pillows will get white pillowcases with a black-and-white print band on the hem.  The two small throw pillows will go, to be replaced by two down square pillows I have in the basement that need to be recovered with something interesting; I don't know what yet.   The lamp has already moved to on top of a stack of cigar boxes.  I like it very much. 

Next is to figure out exactly how to fill the rest of the wall.  I have approximately $0.23 to spend on home dec at the moment, so... I'm kind of limited.  I do have three 8x10 picture frames and flat black spray paint.  

I may be able to find stuff that I can print at home and put in the frames.  I'd like press photos or magazine spreads from the 1968 and/or 1971 24 Hours of LeMans but of course those seem hard to find.  And are probably copyrighted.  But I do need to fill the wall above the dresser somehow.  I'm half tempted to paint that dresser black.  There's other black in the room and it's the "official" accent color I'm using.   What do you think?  That big wall seems too monochrome with the light wall and white dresser.

I want a room that reflects something that I love - auto racing - without looking like a tasteless "man cave" full of NASCAR crap.   Thus the racing flag colors above the bed - black and white, yellow, red, white, green.  And the orange and blue color scheme, which also fortuitiously worked with the already-blue walls.  What does orange and blue have to do with auto racing?  A famous racecar was painted in Gulf Oil colors in 1968 and won. And won again the next year. 

Cutting It.

There's always a dilemma, when you find a length of gorgeous fabric.  You want to use it for the purpose for which you bought the fabric, but oh, cutting into it is such a scary proposition. 

Today, I'm going to cut this fabric: 

It's a very pale yellow linen, 60" wide, and I hope to make curtain panels for my living room.  It only took about an hour and a half of figuring and measuring to decide how to cut the fabric. I'm going to line the back of the curtains, so that adds another whole set of complexities.  I've got the fabric ironed - all 5 yards of it - and it's waiting downstairs on the dining room table.  Wish me luck, because I bought the whole end of the bolt and there's no more fabric like this to be found.  If I mess it up, I'm out of luck. 

No way out but through... 

Downsizing: Before.

This doesn't include the 3-5 blankets that are stacked by the couch in the basement.  It does include my stash of currently-not-in-use curtains. There is also one more bin (I think) in the attic which contains some throw pillows and another couch-sized slipcover.