Today is a house post and is heavy on the visuals. It’s one of those this room used to look like this — but now it looks like this deals. I hope eventually, to do this for every room in the house that we’ve altered. I’ve already done the kitchen and the hallway posts, now I just have my office, the bedroom and the back porch to go!

The Dining Room:
When we first moved into the house, the dining room did not look like the above picture. It had a light, floral wallpaper and lacy curtains. Which, I’m sure some people really like. We, however, hated it. One of the main problems, besides the fugly wallpaper, was the fact that ivory, faint wallpaper next to off-white crown moulding provides no contrast. It seriously begs the question, what’s the point? If you have nice moulding and trim around . . . → Read More: The Saga of the Dining Room

The Wildwood review isn’t quite done yet, so this is a garden post (otherwise known as filler …) No, not really! The garden deserves its own post. Hey look — I have purple basil growing out of a Greek head planter!

Seeing that it’s September, the garden is finally getting into full swing. Actually, that’s not quite true — we’ve had butter lettuce, herbs (basil, oregano, thyme, sage, parsley, rosemary and others) and strawberries throughout most of the Spring and Summer. Now, we’re just starting to really pick the tomatoes. These are a mix of Early Girls and Romas that I harvested last week.

I’ve already made a tasty salsa out of this bounty and am trying to come up with ideas for the next crop of ripe ones. Should it be a Tomato tart? Tomato sauce? Or this tomato sauce? Tomato soup? Hmmm…I need . . . → Read More: The Garden: Completely Worthy of its Own Post

Maybe if he’s reading this today, he will be reminded to put the new ones up. A girl can dream, can’t she? . . . → Read More: It’s a House Post! (in which I complain about boring color schemes and my love of merry cricket)

Since I haven’t downloaded the pictures of any of the food I made this weekend (Curry, Strawberry & Spinach Salad, Grilled Chicken w/ White Nectarine Salsa)…and we didn’t eat out anywhere, I thought I would post some pictures of the flowers in our yard.

One of the nice things about living in a house (as opposed to an apartment), is having free reign to dig up the yard and plant all manner of things.

We have tons of poppies and they mainly bloom in the spring. They’re huge and red and in the front and back of the house. Some of them were there when we moved in, but I also went through a crazy poppy-phase and planted tons all around that first summer we lived here. (Not to be confused with the out of control mint-phase of 2003, which has reached epic proportions).

Lat . . . → Read More: Summer in Portland: Flowers!