The Outbuilding at Dawn

My views to the right and left from bed at dawn in the outbuilding. Makes me want to stay out here indefinitely.

Flora and Fauna

Early September is really pretty awesome at our house. The other day, the sunflowers called me out of the house, and then I realized that there was a crowd out in the garden - bees:




and a tiny little frog on a gigantic pumpkin leaf:



...and I think nasturtiums are one of the best flowers around (love those leaves).

Soapstone!

Here, Kees Shadley, the soapstone guy and his lovely wife (off to his left behind the ornamental grass) are preparing the soapstone slabs for installation into the kitchen. All of the cutting is done onsite - I don't know how. I also don't know how one guy can move and place such giant honking boulder-pancakes of rock without a small army. (I had to leave to teach Jazzercise while the first slab went in, and then we left for the weekend before the second was placed.) It may involve magic. But, for me, everything about soapstone is kind of magical.


On the way home from a trip to see Grandpa Joe in Tacoma, we stopped and picked up a bottle of mineral oil so we could continue the whole soapstone magic thing when we got home. Here is how the stone looks without oil.


Here we are beginning the decidedly low-tech magical finishing process - rubbing mineral oil onto the slab to darken it and bring out the fabulous contrast of the veins and blobs of color.


Here you can see the oiled counter between the dining room and kitchen behind the still unoiled island slab.


Here's the fully oiled counter. The texture and look is all that we had hoped for. I want to go rub it right now.

3 Weeks and 1 Day

We have crossed the three week mark on the remodel, and we are living in the outbuilding. The floor guy finished up about an hour ago, which means that in five hours, we can re-enter the house. Doing the floors meant that we had to completely vacate and have the entire great room, office, dining room and kitchen devoid of furniture, rugs, doo-dads, etc., etc., etc. Here is a sampling of how the old floor and new floor looked after the new wood was installed. They will not be an exact match, but the old floor has since been sanded and both have been finished with the same stuff to minimize any differences. I am avoiding the house because I am pretty fume-phobic, so I haven't seen how they look now.


I know how lucky we are to have alternate quarters on-site - complete with TV and DVD player, thank goodness! Maggie has insisted on sleeping in her sleeping bag on the hard wood floor for the last two nights. Ellie has taken the air mattress, and Jay, Happy Cat and I have slept in the bed. Basically, it's going as well as could possibly be expected. And yet, I think we are all suffering a bit from remodeling fatigue.

Cabinets are pretty much in. Before they were in the kitchen, they were in the driveway.


Have to buy a few faucets. Knobs and pulls are figured out. Laundry room lighting not completely resolved. Need to find chairs/stools for island and dining room - I'm thinking Cost Plus World Market for that. Glass tile for backsplash got here yesterday - I designed the blend, and it was pretty darn fun if you ever want to try such a thing.

Soapstone guy comes tomorrow. We are super-psyched about that. (We love soapstone! We LOVE soapstone!)

Of course, since we are totally displaced, I can't find the cord to hook the camera to the laptop, so these photos are from last week.

Goodness and Light

I love photos of my kids having fun. Fun that doesn't involve sharp knives, electrical outlets, Sharpie markers or scissors. I also love the outbuilding. So happy kids on the bed out there is pretty much as good as it gets. Although those same kids NAPPING on that bed would be right up there.

Noggin, the Walla Walla Sweet

We're growing Walla Wallas this year in the garden. They are a yummy onion, and can get rather large. This particular specimen showed unusual promise - so much that we were tempted to enter it in the Clark County Fair. They have a category for "largest onion," but what with school and kids and kitchens, we just couldn't find a way to get over to the fairgrounds to enter it at the scheduled time. So, we left it in the garden. When we went to the fair, we made sure to see what the largest onion (not counting ours) looked like. I'm not lying - it looked like someone had gone to Freddie's, trolled the produce section, and grabbed any old onion. Sure, it was big like a sweet onion compared to say, a shallot. But, it was just an onion. Our onion was as big as a human head.

So, the other day, I left the children playing for five minutes and the next thing I knew, they had gone in the garden and yanked out at least half of our onions, including the Pride of Brush Prairie that you see above. So, when life gives you onions, what's a girl to do? The options are limited, so we named it Noggin and took some pictures. We haven't figured how we want to use it - I'm voting for cooking it up in some sauce and enjoying little Noggin bits every time we eat spaghetti for the next year.

Gone, Gone, Gone

Some sunny day, baby

When everything seems okay, baby

You'll wake up and find that you're alone

'Cause I'll be gone.

Gone, gone, gone - really gone...

Gone, gone, gone, cause you done me wrong...