house chronicles

a new outside

I realize I'm a little late in posting this and many of you have been asking for these photos, but now I'm finally posting the results of our holiday-time painting job.

As a reminder, here are the before photos:

And, here's my beautiful house now:

who says it doesn't snow in l.a.?

After a very gray and wet week, we had about four hours of sunshine on Saturday. This is what the view looked like out of my backyard. I've been here for 21 months and I've never seen snow like this on these mountains. It was so pretty! But, then it got gray and started raining again. I haven't seen the tops of these mountains since.

sofa king comfy

My new sofa was finally delivered today! I'm very excited about it. In these photos, the sofa looks a little gray, but it's a nice sage green linen. I completely dig it. And the seats are pretty deep, so there's lots of curling up space.

Yes, yes, yes, I know the living room is too small for this sectional AND the TV armoire, but my shallow pockets can only handle one issue at a time. First issue: to have a seating arrangement that allows for more than one person to clearly see the TV at the same time. Second issue: to replace that big, fat armoire with a nice, sleek wall-mounted LCD TV. That mission commences now.

The living room is definitely a work in progress, but baby steps have started.

front yard action

So, I decided this weekend that I wanted to redo my front yard. It's small I thought. I can easily tackle this by myself in a long afternoon. Well, yes, it's small. But, it took the whole weekend to do this by myself, not just a long afternoon. I'm sore and ache all over, but I do like the end result. You'll see I need just a few more pieces of sod.

Before:

After:

veggie tales

My first garden!

If I had to plant my veggies in 5-gallon buckets, I wanted them to be cute. So, I painted them.

I also have a first blossom on one of my creole tomato plants!

Cucumber plants, not pictured, had a battle with a roly-poly troop. Plants didn't fare too well. Dead.

yeah christmas!

A little late, but a photo of the first Christmas tree in the new house!

This is a nice photo, but by Christmas Day, this tree was a pathetic, dry matchstick of a mess.

writing on the walls

Well, the door actually. Last weekend I finished painting the chalkboard paint on the top panel of my kitchen/garage door. But, I just bought some chalk today to be able to write on it. I've wanted to do something like this for a long time, so I'm pretty excited about it.

it's home

So, the summer o' work has ended and Mom and Dad are currently packing up the truck to pull out of this L.A. tomorrow morning, heading toward the other LA. We've accomplished quite a lot this summer (and by "we" I pretty much mean "they") and if it wasn't for them coming here for three busy, work-filled months, I definitely wouldn't be in this house. But, it feels cozy now, and the potential I saw when I first walked into this old, messed up house is now a reality. Sure, there are still a few boxes that need to be unpacked and things need to be organized, but it's definitely liveable.

I was going to make this post a recap of the entire summer, posting tons of before and after photos, but we have a party to get to with fireworks and everything, so that'll have to come later (or you can just browse back through the blog). But, here are our after photos...

Living room (with too much furniture!):