Rhodie Season

We'll have to catch up on project photos soon, but for now, flowers...

The previous owners of our house planted a lot of rhododendron bushes, and they're in full swing right now....

Some views of the rhododendron bushes from the house...

The salad greens in the deck railing boxes are doing well (and are delicious).

Calendula is blooming too...

The hammock is extra pleasant in the presence of all the blooming Rhodies.

A Floor for Christmas

Our Christmas holiday project was installing the bamboo flooring in the upstairs bedroom!  After we got our mise en place and got our system down it went pretty quickly (thanks also to the wonderful floor nailer).  The floor is lovely and smooth with lots of natural variation.  The special touch in the room are the dark walnut thresholds at the doors.

Some detail of the bamboo, with the walnut threshold in the foreground.

Work station shifted over to start the other half of the room.

The red stuff is 1/8 thick foam that claims to be an effective sound muffler and moisture barrier.  It was, at least, nice to kneel on.

Almost there...

cutting the last row of boards to fit the space

Ari just installed the last piece

All done!

A whiter shade of pale

You'd think it would be easy to pick out white-ish paint for a room.  We put a shade called "salt water taffy" in the bathroom downstairs which looked just right, so we bought extra for upstairs.  Painted one wall up there though and it looked totally different way more buttery yellow than we were going for, especially when the fluorescent bulbs were on.  So, back to Rossi to pick out a whiter shade - but not too glaringly blue-ish white.  It's surprisingly challenging.  Finally settled on the aptly named shade "new canvas."  

Done with painting except for touching up the black on the beams (which we have since done, just didn't get a photo yet)...

 PS: Here's a preview of the new floor...

It's going to look great!

Firewood moving day

Here are some photos of the firewood that resulted from 2/3 of the Grand Fir trees we had taken down early in the summer, as well as some of the redwood, hemlock and tanoak.  My folks helped with the splitting on a weekend visit (thank goodness for gas powered splitters!), and I finally moved the pile from where the trees fell to the area where we're stacking the wood.  A lot of energy goes into producing heat energy, eh?