The garden got a little neglected during the past month while I was on a busy inpatient rotation. We have been having great lettuce for a while now, but it has recently turned bitter and I pulled it up today to make room for spinach and arugula. We could harvest the beets at any time and I pulled up a carrot today that was very tasty.

I think the zinnias are my favorite thing to have come out of the garden so far:

 

We have learned a lot with this year’s practice garden. Our biggest mistake was probably getting behind with watering. Next year we will have to do soaker hoses.

Having a whole house to decorate and update has been overwhelming. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what projects we’d like to do, some big (e.g. completely redo the roof to make it less steep and allow us to expand the footprint of the second story) and some small (e.g. hanging coat hooks). We are finally feeling ready to tackle a whole room and have decided to start with the ugliest: the bathroom. It’s our most colorful room, but we’re just not fans of the former owners’ choice of combining hunter green (tile floor, bathtub and trim), brick red (counter top), and peach (walls and ceiling).

We do like the teak toilet with its funky flush mechanism and the claw foot tub. We’re talking about repainting the tub since it’s covered in paint bubbles that have been bursting and we’ll have to move it anyway to get to the paneling behind it. But we’ve been back and forth about whether to put the tub back in or use the space for some more storage.

We’re not planning on any huge overhauls but we think some paint will go a long way in here. Our current plan:

• paint the wood paneling, trim and cabinet white
• paint the walls some undecided color (probably a shade of blue)
• paint the ceiling white
• put in a white tile backsplash behind the sink
• change out the formica for a more neutral color
• remove the old heat lamp by the shower that doesn’t work and patch the ceiling where it was
• fix the fan that has never worked

I finally got a workbench up and running in the basement this past weekend.  Since the design was super complicated*, I started by modeling it in SketchUp (I found some video tutorials at Sketchup For Woodworkers):

 

 

I think it turned out pretty well:

 

 

It’s basically some 2×4’s screwed together with a solid core door ($45 at Lowe’s) on top, and some hardboard over that.  I’ve had that vise for something like ten years now and have never used it until now.  But I’m not a hoarder*, really.

On a related note, the space where it’s located is where there used to be some not-very-useful shelves which I spent a good portion of the previous Saturday knocking out with a 4lb hammer and a wrecking bar (and a dusk mask and my inhaler).  There is still a lot of old shelving and cabinetry down there that needs to go (don’t worry, the secret train storage compartment is staying)—the shelves that came with the house are about nine inches above one another, which is not enough space to store most of the stuff that’s currently scattered about the basement floor.

I had a nice neighborhood moment last week though… Shortly after we moved in I was walking to work and some folks were banging together a wheelchair ramp outside a house a couple blocks down the hill.  A few weeks later, I saw that the ramp had been disassembled (I am assuming that whomever needed the wheelchair got better…) and the lumber was stacked in the driveway.  I must have walked by it thirty times on my commute before I finally stuck a note on it a week ago saying that I would haul it away if they didn’t need it.  A few days later, I got a call and scored about about a hundred bucks worth of free lumber!

So, soon, the less-than-functional shelves will be gone and a neighbor’s wheelchair ramp will have a second life as our basement shelving.  Lots and lots of basement shelving…

*Seriously, not at all…