My mother and I spent a couple of hours clearing out all of the remaining weeds and grass in the garden. I feel so inspired! She also helped me to come up with a pretty great new design for the landscaping, and I’m going to try to break it down into stages so we can move forward with the whole thing at a manageable pace.

Oh! And I think we have a new tile guy, which is very exiting. Evan and B spent the weekend rebuilding the subfloor (and the sub-subfloor) in the bathroom, so things are moving right along…

I really love this rug. (I can’t wait until Fritz is 100% with the housebreaking so we can have rugs again.)

Irish Blood, English Heart (Tuesday, 4/30)

All You Need is Me (Monday, 4/29)

The pots are saying: “Hey ya!” Make your neighbourhood more alive

I love this idea! These flowerpots are by Maija Louekari (I’ve mentioned her before). So fun!

What would you make pots on your windowsill spell? I’m thinking “Go away!”, personally, but that’s not very nice of me. Maybe this is an idea better reserved for the back garden for those of us who are less…gregarious.

Look! It’s a fence! We knew we couldn’t do it ourselves, so we broke down and paid someone to come and install a fence for us. It makes a massive difference, despite the rest of the garden still being no more than a few clumps of grass on a plot of dirt. I can’t even describe how wonderful it is to go back there and not have to look at anyone else’s plots of dirt and patches of grass, and to just be limited to our own.

I know it’s not some incredible modernist construction, but it’s a little bit of privacy and containment. Fences are expensive to have installed (much more so than you’d think), so there was no way we could do a great horizontal cedar one or anything like that. This one will go gray eventually, since we’re not going to treat it with any preservatives. I’ll like it more when it’s gray.

This is the other side of the yard, warts and all. The cement that I want to cover with pea gravel, the too-small (yet also too large) fake-old porch, the awful white door with the fake muntins (oh, how I loathe fake muntins!), etc. Gross. This needs a lot of work, I know. It’ll get there.

We also drove out to Westchester to pick up a couple of original Knoll Hardoy/BFK butterfly chairs that I found on Craigslist. They have new covers made out of Mechoshade that’s safe to keep outside. The cloth has a really nice weave that reads as a light gray from a distance. I love these chairs! They’re going to look great with our new table.

A little at a time…

We spotted this Knoll/Saarinen tulip-style knockoff inverted on top of a pile of cabinets. The top is wood-grain laminate and the sides are peeling, but it looks easy to remove. We figured we’d bring it home and keep an eye out for a round marble remnant to replace it with. Not 5 minutes later, though, we found a piece of black marble in EXACTLY the right size (!) just hanging next to some coffee tables. Sold! (At a “just get it out of here” price, of course.)

I still have to unscrew the old top and get rid of it. It’ll look great when that’s done. The marble is heavy enough that I don’t think I’ll need to do much more than put a little Velcro underneath to get it to stay in place on the base.

I’m pretty excited about the shiny metal base, and the scratches don’t bother me at all. We’re planning to use this table outside, which I’d probably hesitate to do if it were the real thing (platinum base + black marble top = $759, or about 20x what we paid for ours).

Hooray for scavenging!

Fritz is 50% larger than he was two weeks ago (which means he weighs three pounds!), according to the vet! He’s also done with his shots, which means he can learn how to walk on a leash instead of being carried everywhere.

Fritz has turned into a MANIAC. A teething maniac. Sigh. I know it’s all part of being a puppy, but WOW. I don’t remember Bruno being this crazy. Bruno doesn’t remember being this crazy, either, but he’s dealing with it.

Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg narrows the divide between residents and their communities with projects like Edible Estates, an international effort to convert front lawns into working food gardens.

Watch it all the way through. It’ll make you feel great, I promise. (From Dwell.)

Yes, really! The roughing-in work is FINALLY done on the upstairs bathroom. Everything incoming and outgoing has been replaced, so even though this photo doesn’t look beautiful, this is serious progress. This week we’ll do some work to reinforce the joists, then next week (hopefully) the tile guy will come to put a new subfloor and our marble hexagons in place.

The clawfoot tub has also been flipped over (no easy feat, the plumbers did it for us!) so I can get started on getting the outside of it repainted before it’s time to have it put back in the bathroom. Frankly, it’s been in the “guest bedroom” (HA) for so long now that it will be weird to have it gone. And, you know, filled with water instead of plaster dust.