Parlor Before, During and After

I realized I've never shown before and afters, or really, any pictures of my rooms in total.  So since my spring cleaning is nearly complete, and my shoulder is almost healed (see I'm Injured), I'll start with what I call the parlor.  I use it as a den.  See the explanation here.  Here are shots of when I took ownership, first moved in and now.  It looks weird to see the off-white wall color.  It's so not me--I need color!  I just cannot do white.  I'm trying to neutralize my previous choices but the closest I'll come to neutral is gray, sage or yellow.

 

The previous owner used this room for storage and had a drafting table in the archway, with a curtain blocking it.  The floors were dark and filthy before I had them refinished.  I hired someone to wallpaper the room in Waverly "Rustic Life" in watermelon, after my failed attempt and falling off the ladder.  He said my walls were very crooked, which was no surprise, really.  I installed the chandelier (in hindsight I probably should have gone bigger) and bought the Pottery Barn PB Grand slipcovered sofa (I have cranberry twill and white twill).  On moving day my siblings broke the leg off my beloved Domain floral sofa (so sad they were a victim of our "worst economy since the Great Depression"), so I bought two others, since I now had two living rooms.  When I first moved in I just had chairs in here and used it as a sitting room.  Then I got the sage couch a few months later (which is now in the living room) and moved the Domain couch in here.

This is now my favorite room--so feminine!

 

Please ignore the garbage.

I wanted to hang curtains like these in the kitchen but I don't think Ikea sells them anymore.

The Indomitable Dr. Huey

I've written about my "heritage garden" here.  One of the mystery plants that I transplanted was a rose that my mother thought was a David Austin but she couldn't remember which one.  She thought she bought it at Kmart.  Here's what the poor thing looked like after transplanting.  Mind you, this was two years ago when we had an excruciatingly hot, dry summer.

Yes, it's that stick behind the lamb's ear to the right of the birdbath.  Those are Bonica roses to the right of the stick. When my mother would visit she would look at the rose and tell me it's dead.  "No, look, it's finally got a new leaf on it!"  I wouldn't give up.  It grew towards the end of August after all my watering, and I believe it threw out a basal break.  Here it is last year, after a year in the ground.

I had so looked forward to seeing what kind of lovely David Austin rose this was, but, by George, it's Dr. Huey!  Dr. Huey is a vigorous, hardy climber that is used as the root onto which more delicate roses are grafted.  You probably see a lot of these in your neighborhood.  They're what's left after the grafted rose dies.

This is Dr. Huey this year--strong, healthy and vigorous.  I bought a trellis because he really wants to climb.  I don't think this trellis is going to be tall enough, so I found one at Lowe's I'll use instead and use this one for my Abraham Darby out back that really wants to climb.

 

Dr. Huey is awesome.

Roses, roses, roses!

The roses in front look pretty good, but the ones in back, not so much.  I think I didn't prune them enough.  We had an extremely mild winter, so there wasn't much dieback.  Lesson learned:  prune hard for strong, lush branches.

Here's the front garden.  Those are Bonica, Graham Thomas and Lady Elsie May roses.  There are also a couple foxgloves in there as well.  I've been trying to improve my photography with tips I found on a delightful blog called An Urban Cottage.  The yellow roses were looking washed out in my pictures so I slowed the shutter speed (at least that's what I think I was doing).

 

 

 

 This is a bad shot of a lovely rose called Lovely Fairy.

  And this is Red Fairy.

 

 

 Jackmanii clematis.  Seems smaller than last year.

 A pretty oriental lily.

 Rose campion.  I'm thrilled to see this again.  It seemed to have disappeared last year but then popped up about a foot away from where I planted it originally.  It's such a pretty plant, with its hot pink, or magenta, flower and feathery gray foliage.

 

What I Look Forward to in Spring

I look forward to these irises blooming.  They are a gorgeous shade of purple which unfortunately I've not been able to capture yet.  They look a little faded in these pictures.  Note to self:  learn how to photograph flowers correctly.

I also love the old-fashioned mock orange shrub.  It smells heavenly.  It's gotten big and rangey because I enjoy having so many flowers on it to smell but I'll trim it back.  It's blocking light to the white peony next to it.  I'm getting better at pruning.  When I first moved here I scalped many a shrub.

I'm Getting Excited!

The gardens are about to come alive.  I saw two rosebuds on the F.J. Grootendorst rugosa rose.  This is a common beach rose that I love because it is carefree, blooms all season, and is shaped like a carnation.  The leaves are wrinkly and it is extremely thorny.  It's grown a lot and suckers so it can really spread.  Its color is "red," you know, rose red, which is really fuschia.  Reading flower labels is confusing.  Like, they'll say blue but the flower is actually purple.

I love the inside of an iris--so intricate!

This is from last year, I think in the front garden.

Here's the garden all dreamy-like in the late afternoon sun today.  I'm happy to see that the view from the neighbors in back is still hidden.

First Iris

My first iris popped out today.  It's one of the ones I transplanted two years ago from the row in my front garden.  I fertilized the front and back and planted two planters and the impatiens in the front.

I also sprayed my Fairy rose again to rid it of the dreaded rose midge, which has prevented me from seeing any significant bloom.  The first spray was on April 21, when my mother arranged a "donate an hour" gardening session among my family members.  I have bone spurs on my shoulder and am in physical therapy three times a week for an hour.  It's helping but it's still hard to put in a good day's work of gardening or cleaning.  Plus it doesn't help that we're at least two weeks ahead of schedule due to our mild spring.

Here's the front azalea:

And the Blaauw's Pink azalea in the back.

And here's a beautiful pink parrot tulip with green stripes.  Lovely.

The wisteria is a little sparse this year.  Did I prune it too late?  Too little?  For heaven's sake, that thing is high maintenance!

Perfect Houses, or When is it Good Enough?

I'm finally coming to grips with an imperfect, old, crooked, old, worn, old house.  When I moved in I was determined to remove paint from the woodwork and the outside clapboards.  Really?  In this lifetime?  I've come to understand that it's usually not necessary.

My clapboards were covered in asbestos shingles and the lead paint had basically turned to chalk, leaving very little chipped or peeling paint.  For some weird reason I don't get, some doors and trimwork inside had been stained a chestnut color.  The trimwork is pine so I don't think it was ever meant to be stained, just painted white.  I did try to remove some paint and stain inside.  It came off fairly easily with an infrared paint remover and a heat gun.  I don't like to use liquid removers because they're so caustic, and slow.  The paint on my porch, however, has been very difficult to remove.

The trimwork in the kitchen is dented and worn so I'm not sure the work I put into removing it was worth it.

This is during construction.  I stopped removing paint a year later when I still hadn't painted the trim!

I think I'm the only one who can tell which parts were sanded down to bare wood and which weren't.

I get some relief from the pursuit of perfection when I see other old houses, with their trim and clapboards sporting many alligatored, uneven layers of paint.  It's old; it's supposed to look like that, right?

I also wonder how painted trim can be so perfect in houses online or in magazines.  I have a friend who is wealthy, and has a fairly new house.  I sneaked a peak at the trim in her beautiful living room.  Guess what--not perfect!  So my new goal is to have everything look okay from about three feet away.  It's good enough, I have to keep telling myself.

I remember reading or hearing somewhere that Shakers always left some little imperfection in all their crafts in order to acknowledge in humility their own imperfection, and God's perfection.  This seems to be the only perfection we'll see on earth:

Some roses in their first flush in the backyard.

Gardening humbles me because I can't control it.  It teaches patience, wonder and gratitude.  Nature has its own rhythms, order and beauty.  It isn't static.  That's why it's so compelling.

The Stairs Are Done!

This was easier than I thought in terms of actual painting.  However, every time I thought I'd chipped away as much paint as I could, there were more pieces.  Also, I kept finding nails that hadn't been removed.  And missing many, many nail holes that needed to be filled with wood putty.

The color is Benjamin Moore Rockport Gray.  I had seen this color in two blogs, In the Little Yellow House and Frugal Farmhouse Design, and loved it.  It's a warm gray.  It looked beige when I opened the paint can.  In fact, I had to check it against my swatch because I thought they'd given me the wrong color!  While painting it, it looked beige, then green, then gray.  I'm really pleased with it, though I could stand for it to be a tad shinier.  It's floor and patio paint; it's thin and goes on easily.  I painted the trim Sherwin Williams Extra White in semi-gloss acrylic latex.

Now I want to swap out Neighborly Peach with Revere Pewter, but that'll have to wait--a season of outside painting awaits!  I'm also dying to paint the upstairs floors as well.   Back in the day (1875ish) a "workingman's cottage" had cheap, random-width pine floors, not the pretty heartwood pine that looks good refinished.  These floors were meant to be painted, or just the perimeter painted if the family had carpets.

I ripped up the rug on these stairs in January 2007 but couldn't decide whether to re-carpet, stain or paint.  I read that pine doesn't stain evenly or look that great.  Also carpeting isn't practical when you have three cats and allergies.  So I decided to give it the historically accurate treatment.  Hopefully the paint will last a long time.