Garden

Last Friday, I mailed off our renewal of our community garden plot - except this year, we are switching from the City Farm at Light and Heath St. to the City Farm at Charles and Heath, which is all of two blocks closer to our house. However, it's half the distance, so it feels justifiable, and we are upgrading to a plot that hopefully will get a lot more sun, so that will be nice and maybe prove fruitful. 

What are we going to plant this year?  Well, last year we had very good luck with Roma tomatoes and I had a lot of fun making my own pasta sauce and pizza sauce, so we are definitely doing Romas. We also had excellent luck with small Japanese eggplants, which were fruitful and delicious, so I think we will do those. We don't do squash because of the squash borers. I think this year I will grow cucumbers, even though my husband doesn't particularly care for them.  We had excellent luck with our beets last year, so we will be doing those again, and I think this year we are going to plant a lot more greens, specifically kale. 

Spring has Sprung!

March is always weird here in Maryland, and the weather oscillates between springly sixties and oh-my-god-this-winter-will-never-end-it's-so-cold.  But! Daylight savings time means we can get some projects done in the evenings, and soon our weekends are freeing up as well. So it's time for some Spring To-Do listing!


Checking out our house to dos, there are a number of outdoor projects that have been put on hold that we plan to tackle this spring.  Spring is also when we were planning on redoing our upstairs bathroom and possibly build a deck, so we need to start calling contractors. 


Outside:

• Paint side and rear door - I no longer have any desire to paint the front door, but we do need to paint the side door and the rear door is pretty ugly.
• Install doorbell
• Weed front sidewalk/steps
• Add something decorative to the left of the steps
• Add window boxes
• Clear excess plant pots, etc. from parking pad
• Powerwash cement in side alley
• Remove concrete post and wall (phase 2)

Master Bathroom

• Renovate to add double sinks, narrow door, large medicine cabinet, heated tile, insulate wall behind sink to avoid frozen pipes, resurface tub. 
• Build cubby into wall behind shower for additional storage
• Replace radiator with exhaust fan
• Hang curtains
• Spray paint washcloth basket - I made a very sad attempt at this once using acrylic paint and it did not come out well, so we've been waiting for it to be nice enough outside to spray paint

We are also going to be doing some large scale spring cleaning.  When putting away my winter outfits, I'm going to have to admit to myself that I have a very large number of sweaters and I wear like, four of them, and I'm also going to have to downsize my hoodie collection from four to perhaps two.  I'm considering consignment as an option for my nicer pieces that I haven't worn, rather than donating them, but that means storing them through the summer to consign at the beginning of the fall. 


I am also continually downsizing my considerable fabric collection, but recently learned of an opportunity to donate homemade baby quilts to children who are taken from unsafe homes by CPS here in Baltimore City, so I'm hoping maybe my mom and my sister, who have been sewing together recently, might be interested in a little quilting party to help me stash bust and do some good. 

New mantel!

Our fireplace, sad and mantle-less.

A mantel has been on our to-do list since we moved in.  I looked at a few tutorials, but the first time my friend Kelly came over, she commented, "we have an extra mantel."  Four months later, we finally got measurements to them and she and her husband confirmed the size of their mantel.  So we took our corolla the five blocks to their place and tried to get this bad boy in the car.   

It took several tries.

 It may have gotten a bit ridiculous. 

 But! We got it home and here it is, in front of the fireplace, fitting perfectly.  I was absolutely thrilled when we first saw it, since I was expecting a plain, generic mantel, but it's beautiful and fancy.  I especially like how the center part comes to a point.  We are going to paint it and do some repair work.  We're not sure how many layers of paint are on it, but hopefully it's just one layer and can be sanded down pretty eaisly.  Ideally we would sand it and stain it to be wood-colored, but I think that it might be best to go ahead and paint it, but we aren't sure what color.  We could go with the same espresso brown as most of our other furniture (does Ikea sell black-brown paint?) or possibly the same latte color as the walls in the living room. 

Anyone have any color suggestions?