Alameda Flea Market Find!

I found a beautiful rug for my dining room!!

And I found this cute kid.

12 Month Goal

In 12 months from now I want to be in Thailand, traveling alone for the first time in my life.  That's my goal. 

Oh Yeah...

And I've done some stuff:

Recycled Concrete Patio

Sulfur Buckwheat

Native Grape Vine (it produced 10 lbs of fruit and the best grape jelly ever)

First vegetable garden I've had in years.

Bread and Butter Pickles from my garden.

Inherited an espalier apple tree from a design client. 

My tomatoes were beautiful this year. 

Rusty nails and old wood.  That's my dad for ya!

Made a cake.

My dad can take credit for 95% of my new water heater shed!

Working on the recycled concrete patio.

Overwhelmed But The End Is In Sight!

Agh! Nine months since my last post? What have I been doing?! Oh yeah, working. A lot. Work is good, but too much work sucks my energy and turns me into a zombie when I get home. My poor, neglected dog is lucky to get a walk around the block and my house, well, my house is a disaster. For the past year and a half I've been dividing my work time between landscape design and my internship with the water district. Both jobs held the promise of offering me steady, full time work, but neither could follow through. For a while it worked. I scraped by, but at least I had time for myself, my friends, my house and my dog. But then both started demanding more and more of my time and I found myself working 15+ hour days. One week I worked nearly 70 hours, pulling 3 all nighters in a row. Some people can do that. Some people thrive on it. I'm not one of those people. It bums me out and makes me resent what I do. But just when I thought I was going to snap, something wonderful happened. I was finally offered a full time position with the district as a water conservation specialist! I struggled a bit with the thought of giving up landscape design, but in the end, the instability and inconsistency of the business and the constant need to sell myself and my ideas to people was too much. Oh yeah, and I was tire of being poor all the time. But now, starting next month, I will work normal hours, have normal days off and my free time will be my own! And I get to work in conservation and run a landscape rebate program and use my environmental studies degree and my landscape horticulture degree! Maybe I'll do landscape design on the side as well, once things settle down. A design here and there would keep me happy!

An Ode To My Dad

Can I just take a minute to say that my dad is awesome? I mean, this man is a workhorse. Now he has not one, but two daughters with fixer uppers who basically have no idea what they are doing. And so he spends all day at one house then the other the next day. And he loves it. He calls me and asks if he can come work. And he works while I'm not even here. This past month or two he has helped me put up peg board in my pantry and then put more up on his own in the garage, built a dutch door in my pantry to keep out my crazy dog, spent hours unclogging my bathroom sink, broke up old concrete in my backyard and now we're building the coolest enclosure ever for my water heater. And when I say 'we' are building something, it generally means he is building it and I'm providing general assistance and logistical control. And who else's dad hoards saves old barn wood and nails for decades in the hopes that it will be used for a cool project? Mine does. Most people would look at that pile of old wood and take it to the dumps, but me and my dad pick through it for the oldest, gnarliest, knotiest pieces of wood to use. This love of old stuff obviously runs in the family. Yup, I may not have appreciated him much when I was a teenager (aka angry brat), but I do now! Thanks Dad.

ps, my mom is pretty awesome too, but I'll save that for another day.

Pantry Project

This weeks project: Installing peg board in the pantry. I had thought about it before, but was re-inspired after seeing it in the Design Sponge at Home book by Grace Bonney. I'm so excited! It freed up a ton of space in my tiny kitchen AND it looks awesome, if I don't say so myself. My dad and I (or maybe mostly my dad) did it in one afternoon. Not bad.

I still need to paint it to match the walls. I should have done that before hanging it on the wall, but I didn't have any more paint on hand, and if I know anything about myself it's that if I don't do something that minute, it will never get done.

My inspiration.

New Bed!

I got an early Christmas present. I love it, and now I want to spend all my time in my room. (ps. I totally copied my older sister Amy. I guess some things never change, haha.)