Red...

Our little jewel of a chicken coop got a new coat of paint today, the perfect barn red. The white trim will go on next, as soon as the rest of the farm buildings get their red. The door will be dark charcoal, the same detail color will go on the house and garage, too.

With each new addition of paint, we're getting closer to our vision. So far, everything is coming out exactly as we want.



Primer went on the barn today. Tomorrow, it goes red, too!

My space...

The past couple of weeks, I've made notes and measured walls and tables and plotted how to rearrange my sewing space to be more efficient. Okay, truth is I'm plotting to take over the whole basement. Well, most of it. I'll leave the pantry and laundry room and wine cellar alone.

Today I started moving. It's warm outside, the guys don't need me to make any decisions, so this day is all mine.

The room still isn't big enough, but the new layout will be much better. All my fabric shelves are where the sitting room used to be, then the cutting table (raised higher, finally, to preserve my back), and the end under the windows now has my big sewing table, a wicker chair, and a sweet teak garden bench with lots of pillows, where Madison likes to sleep. I lost some of my long design wall, but will be able to put small quilt layouts above the cutting table, leaving room for two big quilts on the full-height wall. The light is better, and the room is more open now.

One of those days...

We had breakfast with a friend @ Testy Chef, then DW and Larry headed to his house to work on the computer. Library then home. Changed guitar strings, and started toughening up my fingertips. Cleaned the house. Sorted quilting fabric. John sanded west end of garage; lots of sun damage on this exposed face. I'm considering a wide border of lavender here come spring, and will plant my Mediterranean herbs along the south side of the garage. I've started a list of plants to look for next winter.

Transformation...

John finished the gable ends of the garage today. This was the biggest update we made, besides brand new paint on everything. We added a belly band and crown molding to both ends, replaced cedar siding with shingles, and added a pair of corbels to each end. Everything we did will help the garage visually match our house.



Of everything we did, the new corbels made the most difference to visually scale down the garage. It's a huge building, and always looked out of scale. Now it looks awesome. The primer went up today, and tomorrow John will start painting the barn, chicken coop, and pump house.

The list is getting shorter...

Having someone here working on the house has been good for us. We both made lists of things to get done, most have been set aside for way too long. It feels great to get things done.


The butterfly bush is in full, spectacular bloom... and the honey bees have made themselves at home

We spent three days in the garage and the barn, looking for candidates for a dump run (like the bed liner for the Aussie family's camper, which has been behind the barn since 2016), and the metal recycler. We finally hauled our huge old CRT television to Goodwill, which made room down the center of the garage for two workbenches that have been in boxes for years.

I went through every box in the garage, making sure things were where they are supposed to be (my husband is more of the "leave it where I used it last" kind of organizer, which makes me crazy).

In the barn, we had to unload all the lumber stored along one end, so John could beef up the joists and nail up cross-bars to support the lumber. With the wood out of the way, DW pulled up the hay storage platform and rebuilt it using joist hangars, and built a framework for storing plywood and other sheet goods.

A lot of patio and gardening chores were also on my list, including laying new stepping stones (a great use for hardened bags of cement), and sanding and oiling our teak deck chairs. I finally tackled this job yesterday, and got both chairs sanded and oiled. It's been a few years since they got any TLC (except for storing them indoors during the winter months), and they were very thirsty!

Battens

Two of the outbuildings on our little farm are sheathed in plywood. Not very appealing or traditional, but they were built from materials on hand at the time, and we inherited them. in their dressed down condition.

I don't know what we would have done without the barn/tractor shed. Over the years it's never held stalls for my horses, but it has housed lumber, a couple of tons of hay, our John Deere tractor, and the past decade, our 1977 GMC pickup truck. I always wanted stalls and a tack room, and even designed a layout in AutoCAD and made a materials list, but we never seemed to find the time.

When our painter/contractor made his first walkabout, he suggested adding battens to the barn to dress it up a bit, and I loved the idea. I was less enthusiastic about battens on my tiny chicken coop. John added trim around the door that had never been installed, and when he held up a board for a belly band, I could see it all "whole. So my cute little rustic coop is now everything it should be.

There is history surrounding our chicken coop, which once stood on the big farm next door. My husband has vivid memories of going there for eggs with his mom and younger brothers and sisters. The little coops dotted the hillside, surrounded by grass and chickens. And when we bought our place, having one of those original chicken coops was a pretty special thing.

But they never looked as cute as ours does now. In a couple of weeks, it will be painted and I'll post final photos.

New doors...

One part of our painting project is to replace a damaged door. It isn't a door we use, but it is drafty and completely unpaintable. And since this whole project leads to painting the house and all the outbuildings, a new door was required.



The reason we don't use the door is obvious when you see it, but there is a backstory. Before we bought this place back in the 80's, the driveway came straight off the county road and up through the front pasture, leading to the front door. But after the surrounding farmland was subdivided into 2+ acre lots, a new private road was built on the opposite side of the house, so it made sense to start using the old kitchen door as the main entrance.

We made matters worse when we moved in, and discovered that a wrap-around porch was mostly rotten. One of the previous owners had built it using tongue-in-groove boards, and one day I came home from work to find DW in the middle of tearing it down, one board at a time. We ended up building a much smaller deck off the kitchen door, and with no deck leading to the old front door, it became unusable.

But the door still needed to be replaced. So one morning we set off to the door store in SoDo, and in five minutes flat we found the perfect door for our Craftsman farmhouse. So perfect, in fact, that we bought two of them, deciding to replaced our perfectly OK front door. It helped that the doors were fiberglass (which our painter recommended), and were half price because the leaded glass windows were set in crooked (which turned out to be a pretty easy thing to fix).

So I now have beautiful Shaker doors with leaded glass windows that bring light into the house. From the inside, I can look out to the patio and the gardens. And from the outside, the reflection of the trees is beautiful. I will have to wait until the end of the project to see them painted, and can hardly wait.

Let there be dragons...

There is spoon art in downtown Kent (also forks and knives). The first sculpture went in several years ago, an 8-foot-tall penguin with feathers made forks with bent tines, and a baby penguin made from spoons. It stands on the corner near one of our favorite diners.

Today we came for breakfast, and there was a brand new sculpture:  a dragon with red and gold wings, a body made from spoons, and tail and legs made from silverware handles.



It was too bright to keep my eyes open while DW framed the shot, but I tried.

This afternoon, I escaped the never-ending yard work, and hid out in my basement sewing room. We had a late dinner, and headed for bed early to read. But when the windows lit up by fireworks just across the county road, I got up and opened up all the windows, lay on my stomach on the bed, and just watched the show. There was a big party across the road, and above the hill across the valley, we could see a bigger display. The show kept on going for hours, so I didn't get much reading done. And since I was too lazy to get out a tripod, all my pictures turned out blurry. But I didn't really care.

Adventures...

I am pretty sure that there will be no adventures for me in July.



Unless you count going out each day to find our daily geocache. And at nearly three years of caching every day, we're having to drive around 20 miles each way to find one, because we've done all of them near our house.

Or the adventure of having work done on the outbuildings at the farm, which is pretty exciting (and long overdue), but can't hold a candle to setting off to explore new places. My feet want to press the gas pedal and the clutch, and head off in the MX-5 with my camera, to see what views I can find. But that will have to wait for autumn.

I want to hike in the mountains, and feel the sand between my toes on an ocean beach. And I want to sit on the deck at our cabin, with a glass of wine and a good book, and watch the sun go down.

Instead, my wandering feet will have to stay close to home, so I can be on hand to make decisions about trim and paint colors and whatever else comes up each day. But that's OK, this is going to be fun!

Lavender...

Sequim lavender. All through this small town, it's planted in medians and front yards and in flower beds that surround local businesses. My favorite grows here in wild abandon. All around town, this dark purple lavender thrives, and is the most common lavender planted in the Sequim valley.

Sequim is the epicenter of lavender in Washington. The home of that fabulous scent. The home of that wide shelf of land that runs from the Olympics to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, filled with farms and barns and fields of lavender, ponds and parks and glorious green.



Lavendula Intermedia Grosso... 16-20″ stems; perfect lavender for the Northwest. It is the most frequently planted Lavandin in the Sequim Dungeness Valley because it nearly has it all: dark color, strong fragrance, and disease resistance.

We came up to pick up wine at two of our favorite wineries, a few weeks ahead of the annual lavender festival. It was wonderful to find the lavender in full bloom and we got to enjoy the fragrance and beautiful color, without the crowds. 

Lucky uss!