Vegetable Garden

Just some updated pictures of the raised bed. Looks like everything is on its way up. It is just a question if we will have enough time before the first frost.

Painting the Porch and the Steps

We have started to tackle painting the porch deck and steps before it gets too cold for the paint to cure. We got out the sander and hit all of the spots that had loose paint first. We were able to get paint on the steps (no picture yet) but it was getting too late to get the paint on the deck.

Painting the Porch Ceiling

Keeping with the victorian nature of the house we choose a light blue/green color for the front porch ceiling. It is nice because the house is perched up on the hill you can see the ceiling from the street when you walk by. It turned out to be a great color choice by Kristen.

Stained Glass Window Update

Well, we spent a good part of last week fixing the stained glass window pieces that I broke when I was fooling around with the window when we were moving in. We had to remove about 15 pieces (which is not easy when they are already soldered in), cut and foil new ones and solder them back into the window. We finally got the stained glass installed in the window using some cardboard shims and some silicone.
We are using the shims and the push pins to hold the window in place until the silicone has cured and then we will place some quarter round wood pieces to trim out the edge.

Fixing some post rot

We are starting to work getting the deck fixed up before the cold weather forces us to stay inside. One of the posts that hold up the front porch had some dry rot in the bottom of it. The hole was cleaned out with a screwdriver and it seems like it went about a third of the way through but only a couple inches high. If it was any larger then I would have cut out the section and scarfed in a new piece of wood. But, instead I filled the hole with wood epoxy (Bondo). It will take a little bit of sanding but then the post should be as good as new.

Install the Chandelier

Kristen and I worked on this one a while ago but Kristen said that there had not been any postings on it. These are some pictures of the dining room with the old chandelier and with the chandelier that we picked up in Atlanta a couple of years ago. We also put up a ceiling medallion to accent the light on the ceiling.


It will be nice once the kitchen changes are finished because then we will be able to put up the other two matching lights.

Cemetery Visit

Kristen and I took a little break from doing house work on Sunday. We visited the Evergreen Cemetery and found the gravestone of the builder of the house, George H. Morseth. He worked was born in Norway and immigrated to the US where he worked in Everett as a lumber mill shipping supervisor. We have still not been able to track down any of his relatives but are still searching with the hope that someone may have a picture of the house in its earlier state.

Garden Bed Update

Here is an updated picture on the garden bed. It was painted white and planted with lettuce, chives, peas, spinach and cucumbers last Tuesday night. As you can see, the nice weather and the rain have really helped everything get off to a great start. Almost everything is up (still waiting on the chives) and some of the lettuce is over an inch tall at this point. Now it is just a race against the first frost!

Updated Yard Pictures

Well, the grass still seems to be getting greener every day still. Looks alot different then when we got the house a month ago!

And here is a picture of the front of the house (with the Poppy keeping guard of her deck). You can see how nice it is to have the hedges moved back so that we have the garden bed in front.

New Lights Everywhere

Over the last two weekends I have been installing new lights to light up the back door, front porch and the front walkway. The back door and front porch lights were standard installations but fishing the wiring though from other junction boxes always takes a while to do. When we were looking at tread lights for the front walk everything was really expensive to put in. Part of the difficulty is that fact that we wanted to put a light on every other step and on both sides of the walk (16 lights total). So we ended up building up fixtures from a simple incandescent, a bayonet fitting, some wire and some drawer pulls for the outside cover. One side of the stairs is done in the picture below and we should finish up the other side tonight. Looks quite nice at night (you can also see the resulting wash from the new front porch lights).

Painting the Doors

Last weekend we painted all of the exterior doors. The color that we choose is a bluish green that is close to the color that the front door used to be. It really made a difference for the garage doors that were not painted before. I also replace the hardware that was on the doors with a oiled bronze finished knobs but Kristen thought that the new knobs look a little too black so we will be out hunting for a different finish color. The previous owner had stockpiled up a bunch of doors and trim in the bottom of the garage and I finally had the time to go through them. In the pile I found the original back door for the house that matches the front! It will take a while to get up to speed but I think it would be nice to put this back on the house.

Updates on Projects

We finished painting all of the visible parts of the garage with the red. We still have the space between the two garages to paint. It looks very nice and should look even better once all of the trim gets painted white.


The paint stripping on the stairs is progressing a little bit at a time. We have moved up the stairs and are working on the top sections now. In addition, we have started to strip the paint from the bottom most tread. It will be a time consuming process but it will be definitely worth it in the long run for the look of the house.

First house party!

Kristen invited over all of her dental hygiene classmates for a house warming/check on everyone party last Friday. We still have a ton of stuff in boxes but it was good timing because it made us pick up some items to make the house a little more presentable. We figured that we wanted to use the patio because it is the best place in the house to see the sunset so I made a quick set of steps to get from the back yard onto the patio and we bought a small firepit to keep warm around. We strung up a couple of strings of Christmas tree lights along the fence and that provided just the perfect amount of light. It was nice to relax for an evening for a change.

Raised Bed Vegetable Garden

Kristen and I worked this weekend on building a small raised bed (4 feet x 8 feet) for growing some late summer vegetables. The box is made up of 2x6 sides and 4x4 corner posts along with some decorative corner post caps.
These are the pictures of the box on Saturday and on Sunday we started painting it white so that it would match the trim on the side of the garage. Right now it is placed on the sunny side of the upper patio but I think we will move it once we finally figure out (in the future) what all of our long term plans are.We'll post a couple of other pictures on the blog once we get all of the soil and the first plants in the beds.

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Kristen's parents left this weekend and unlike the top picture shows they were very helpful in getting alot of projects finished for the week that they were here.

One of the last projects that we used there help for was to stack the washer and dryer.

Looks pretty good right.......

Well, since Kristen cant even reach to turn the dryer on I don' think that this is the best arrangement. So, down comes the washer and now we have the regular side by side units.

Paint Stripping

Kristen and I are planning on stripping the paint from all of the stair treads as well as from the hand rail and the newel posts on the stairs. We began this process over the weekend using an orange oil based (non-toxic) paint stripper. It seemed to work well but it is going to take a while to get all of the paint removed to the point where we want to apply polyurethane. Here are some before and after pictures of some of the handrail stripping.

Moving the front Hedges

The house originally had hedges that wrapped around the front deck but they were about 6 feet from the front of the house. I think that this was done when the hedges were small so that there could be a garden behind a row of small hedges. Well, the hedges are really big now so you cant put anything behind them without being hidden from sight.

So, the thought was to move the row of hedges back closer to the house and putting a flower bed in front of the hedges. We thought that this would be a very time consuming if not an impossible task. But, Paul and I attacked it late last week and went down the hedge plant by plant and moved them back. Only took a couple of hours and it looks alot better now.

One advantage of doing this is that we end up with a couple hedge sections that we were able to move off to the other side of the stairs to even out the look of the front.

Kristen wanted to get a little more color in this bed than the other so we have filled it with some perennials but mostly annuals.

Getting in Trouble with the Law

Last week the code officer for Everett came by and talked with Kristen about the 10 foot drop off the concrete pad in the back yard. She had a concern that a person or a vehicle could go off the edge and hurt themselves. We were planning on putting in a fence along between our garage and our neighbors but it was not at the top of the to-do list. Well, now it was moved up the list a ways. So, with a long weekend we decided to build a fence......

On Sunday I rented a hammer drill and drilled holes for mounting brackets as well as drilled all of the holes in the front walk for tread lighting (another future project). The drill worked quite well but I had a ton of holes to do and it was pouring down rain so it took a while.

I fastened all of the post mounting brackets using concrete anchors and installed the posts. The brackets hold the posts very tight to the concrete pad so unfortunately I had to use the un-levelness of the concrete as my datum point. Because of this you will see that the top of the fence follows the grade of the concrete.

It all went together real well and the fence was finished up by Monday afternoon. I will work on the gate tonight and try to get that finished up and installed. The patio that is created by the fence will be a nice place to put some furniture and deck chairs. Now, we just need to figure out how to get up there!

Nice Sunset

With the house facing West over the water we get great sunsets almost every night. This is a picture from the "concrete pad" next to the garage at the back of the house looking out towards the water. You can see that the lawn is getting better and better, or at least greener everyday. It will take a lot of work but I think it will get there sooner or later.

Painting the Garage

Now that we have additional help from Kristen's parents the garage is getting painted. The color that we chose is a historic red-brown color that is used on Mark Twain's house. We are not really doing much to seal or redo any of the trim when we are doing this but are just trying to get a little color on the walls. We bought some white paint for the trim but may not get around to that for a little while because it is already a shade of white.

Front Garden Bed

Well, we finally have our first flowers in the ground. We made a small garden bed in front of the fence on the side yard. We removed the top turf layer and turned the ground over to about a foot deep. The ground was mostly clay and very hard to get though. We incorporated about 8 cubic feet of peat moss 8 cubic feet of compost and 4 cubic feet of vermiculite into the soil to help aerate it and get its organic matter percentage up. We are aiming for a "English cottage garden" look so that helped us in choosing the plants. The bed looks nice now that the edge is cut in hard and the mulch is spread on it.