Baby Sweet Toes

Well baby sweet potatoes! Butters mom and sister came up to visit in the spring and got lost taking some back roads and came across this amazing nursery on a Mennonite farm, an amazing begonia was purchased as a house warming gift from mom and sis, and a promise of "I'll show you where this place is the next time I visit". The next time mom came up she took me over to the nursery and boy was i impressed, flowers, vegetable every where and so affordable! I have a soft spot for sweet potato vines, and I found one I had never seen before and had to have it. The lovely Mennonite lady told me that that plant was a real sweet potato vine, and I thought ok all I want is the vine. Thinking all along there was no way I was going to be able to grow sweet poatos in a hanging basket, well sure enough I was tiding the yard up for the cold weather and took a peek in the basket and sure enough there they were....

Jack is coming to visit

And Frost is his last name. The previous owners of the house, had many kooky ideas, the corks in the floor, broken windows stuffed with rags, and of course duct tape on broken window panes. Slowly I'll be going around the house replacing these panes one by one. There are a lot of panes that need to be replaced. So these are old fashion windows that have weights that help them slide open and closed and run inside on tracks. I watched my dad take the window out and re-glaze while growing up but never had to tackle it myself till now. I found a lot of really great how-to's online from This Old House to Domino Magazine(!) Its rather easy actually, a glazing putty is used and these cool little triangles keep the glass in place. A quick coat of paint and the window is good as new, but the window sill is another thing.....

During

I have lots of projects that are in the 'during' stage as in not a before and not quite an after. Small things have popped up here and there like working! But here are some shots of my studio/office. Its during because I'm still making shelves and finally unpacking. The usual of scraping wallpaper, spackling, priming, painting, cleaning has happened. A special window project was tackled which you will see very soon! ( I promise this time)

One Ton Tomato

I was singing that song while I was picking the first crop from the kitchen garden. A few tomatoes and some mutant cornichons, Lets hope the rest of the crop is bit more umm cornichon like.

As you can see the kitchen garden is quite healthy.....the tomato plants are HUGE!

$1

Butter has a problem with thrift stores, she visits them all too often. And has a new dollar rule, meaning it has to cost a dollar or less in order to come home.....well most of the time. This pair of birds came home the other day....

Early Morning Visitor

5:50am
There is a bat in my bedroom.
Really.
6:20am
He's sleeping in my curtains now, and doesn't seem to have any intention on moving or leaving.really.



8:05am
I called the borough office. Our town doesn't have animal control people. I was told to swat him with a broom. Grrrrrrrr.
8:50am
He's still sleeping.
I dressed up in my best bat-gear.


and then I pulled the curtains down.


He didn't flinch.
He's having quite a nap, I guess.

Okay -- next step -- I gotta go in there with a broom.

9:30am
Okay -- he's gone. SCHWEW! That was an ordeal. He was shaking, I was shaking. We were both scared and nervous and sad and freaking out. I pushed him with the broom and he slid in between the window panes (the top window and the open bottom window). He was just sitting there shaking like a little leaf and I was so upset I had to leave the room for a minute. I came back in and thought he was gone. He had just moved to the side -- the window casings. Ugh. I thought I squished him when I opened the window wider. Finally, he flew out. Holy bat wings, that was entirely too much commotion for me today. I hope he doesn't come back.

Butter hurry up!

Butter's sisters are coming to visit....so progress on her room is going full steam! Check back soon for the final pictures and the saga as to why it took 4 months!

Firecracker, Firecracker, Shish-Boom-Bah! (In which another room comes to fruition and a holiday is celebrated with friends.)

Are you ready to see some Fourth of July fireworks?
Ta-Da!




This probably wasn't the sort of firecracker that you were expecting, and perhaps you don't think that these photos can compare to images of fireworks. If you look at what we started with, however, you may be at least a little bit impressed.
Remember this?


It's the same room!
It took us a long time to chip away at this. We had other priorities: our bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, backyard, etc. etc. etc. This room has been the junk-pile since we moved in. Actually, it is the room that we lived in at first. Between our closing date, January 24th, and the day we actually moved in, February 26th, we were coming out here from New York every weekend to do as much work as we could on the place. This big old empty house was freeeeezing! We set up camp in this here double-living room and hovered next to the radiator in our layers of hoodies and sweaters and tights and long johnnys. . Ahhhh, that feels like ages ago.
Then, when the movers came, this is where we had them dump all of the furniture and all of our boxes. It was a scary mess. We had a lot of digging out to do before we could even get to the walls and the floor and the ceiling.



It was slow going.
You saw what we went though with the ceiling. That wasn't too bad, but it was all a process. As soon as we finished with the ceiling, though, it all came together relatively quickly.
We thought that we were having some NYC peeps come to spend the July 4th holiday with us, so we busted a move to get the room primed and painted and furnished before our guests arrived. We were behind schedule when we found out that no one was actually going to be making it out here. Although we would have loved to have spent the time with you, friends, we can't say we were completely disappointed. It gave us the time to actually fully pull the room together.
As with everything in this house, there is still more to be done, of course. For now, however, it feels pretty fantastic to have a room in which to sit and relax.

We did have some company on this Independence Day; our favorite in-town friends Molly and Dave came over for dinner. Butter put to use the lessons that John gave us a few weeks ago and grilled up some barbeque chicken, corn, and pineapple. And Thread whipped up a festive red-white-and-blue tart,


which we ate while seated in the new living room.

Um, yes, those of you who have been paying attention must have noticed; while we are extremely pleased with the progress we've made with the living room, this is, indeed, only half.

Illinois in the Living Room

Same story wallpaper, wallpaper, wallpaper covered in paint. One side of the living room has its walls beautiful and bare, although the ceiling was a little saggy, and the plaster buttons didn't really do the job so down it came. You see the ceiling is a hybrid of old plaster and umm we aren't really sure, but in our novice opinions it looks like cement, and boy is it stuck up there. But we needed to fill the hole with a piece of drywall ordinarily you would cut so it looks like a big square or rectangle, but this one ended up looking like Illinois.


So Thread climbed up and traced the shape of the hole onto a piece of paper, so we could transfer it to the drywall. Butter cautioned her to remember to flip the drawing since the white part of the drywall should be showing........Thread said yeah yeah I got it!



Well Butter went to install this piece by herself when no else was around to help, and being that we only have one giant ladder it would have been tough to have both people up that high, since the ceilings are twelve and a half feet high.So Butter was trying to fit the drywall into place and couldn't figure it until...she realized that Thread never flipped the drawing! So Butter found a cardboard tube, cut to to the right length and used that to hold the drywall in place while she screwed it into the wall.




We are off to get the Trim paint this morning .....so check back for peek into the living room!

Kitchen Garden

Well its hot, and the garden is growing. Butter wanted to have a garden for things needed in the kitchen, herbs and vegetables. But we have rabbits and other small critters that would eat the vegetables! So a raised bed had to be made. Using the left over wood from the built in closets that were torn down on the first day of home ownership, a box was made. Using some L brackets and screws.There was this really horrible space between the two side porches full of moss and a gross plant we didnt know the name of. We kept one plant to help hide ugly porch and put the garden bed in the other space. The tomatoes, basil, peppers, rosemary, are all doing great, and the cornichons are very happy here on the side porch as well!

Fire King

Friends John and Heather came out to visit us for a little country retreat yesterday and while they were here, they bought us such a terrific and generous house-warming gift:


Our very own new shiny grill.
Along with the grill, John also gave us some lessons. Hey, we're ladies -- we usually have men to tend the grill for us, but since we're fending for ourselves out here....





We felt that this was also the perfect evening to mix up some dark and stormys. mmmmmm.

Thread stumbled across Jamie Oliver's recipe for "easy peasy ginger beer" and we've been wanting to try it out for weeks. We've had this fantastic rum, that Butter received as a birthday gift from friend Jocelyn's recent trip to Puerto Rico, and all of the ingredients for the ginger beer on the ready and were just waiting for an excuse to mix them up. Butter tried and played with the recipe last night. she did some tweaking and those cocktails turned out delicious. click on over to thread and butter recipes to get the details.

all apologies

we've been pretty bad about the updates, huh? the truth is, we took a little break from the big-time house projects...
but now we're back at it!
butter kicked some serious butt in the garden and she's made progress in her bedroom.
we've made some progress in the living room, the attic, and the studio.
we're going to be taking photos and putting up some more posts this weekend... don't give up on us -- check back soon, you'll be impressed!

Rolling Stones Sometimes Do Gather Moss...

... but then they use it to make terrariums.

Thread went home to South Jersey to visit the folks and did some moss-gathering while there. She impressed herself with the accuracy of her memory; the field of coral moss that fascinated her as a child was still exactly where she remembered it to be.



Seeing as that field is about to be dug up and plowed over with a new house, she didn't feel one bit guilty about digging up some of the moss and bringing it back to the Royal. It sat on the dining room table for about two weeks, living inside a plastic bag, while we were both busy with work, and our visits to NYC, and some much-needed downtime.

This weekend Butter made it happen to create some little environments for it.


Now we have terrariums gracing our entryway.

We still heart NY

Thread and Butter are both taking a break this week from the Royal.....we are catching up with friends eating ethnic food whenever we can and getting our city fix! Check back on Monday for more Royal updates!

Thanks to Milton Glaser for a really great logo!

log

We live in a college town, all three traffic lights worth of a college town. The last two weeks have been a challenge with the students having no idea of a 'inside' voice when walking down to the local watering hole to blow off steam from studying. Well they are now gone! The town is quiet, with no traffic and simply divine. In the wake of the exodus the students just throw things away they don't have time to deal with properly. So while taking Oscar out for his walk this weekend Butter had spied a few choice pieces. The small love seat with ball and claw feet was still there once she got Thread rousted to go collect the treasure. Once that was dropped off we decided to drive over to another large grouping of student housing; where, we as students at this same college ventured to ONCE to party. We went once and vowed to never go back ever again. Well we went back to this Levittown like development and it was a ghost town, no treasures in the garbage well except for Mr. Log here, who will be joining us in the living room just soon enough.