Martha stewart does chicken coops.

I got to take home an old martha stewart paint banner from work today. It is now gracing my coop as a makeshift winter door and pen cover!

I think it looks way snazzier than a blue tarp, don’t you?

Meet Starla!

No, Starla isn’t another pet, Starla is a 1970, 17 foot, Nomad Camper Trailer! She is the new love of my life, and the second largest item I have ever purchased. Or rather, my dad purchased her, someday she will be all mine though. And there is Marcus, looking handsome in front of her.

I bought Starla to be my new studio, since my current studio (also known in realty circles as a second bedroom) will soon be the home of my friend Ann and her daughter Ayla. Big changes around here in my house! Brandon and I broke up, and now for the first time in 11 years I am a single lady! Its gonna be interesting.

But its also going to be REALLY fun. Ann and Ayla are great, their dog Leafis is awesome, and the chaos created by all of us in this little house will be enormous. And fun. I am looking forward to it. And I am having a blast with my new projects. You all know how I like to keep busy.

So back to Starla. I found her the day I started looking for a trailer to gut and make a studio. And she was perfect. The girl I got her from had already ripped her down to the studs, which I was going to have to do anyway. She was going to make a studio, gypsy caravan, or food cart out of her, and was so excited when I told her what I wanted her for. Match made in Heaven.

I pulled out all the wiring, and yesterday my friend Tim and I tackled putting in the subfloor over the former septic tank. The wood was all rotten, so we replaced it and tacked down some plywood over the whole thing. Trailers are fun to work on, cause well, no building codes! And it turns out me and Tim have similar building styles, as in, we fake it till it works, and then cover it all up before anyone sees how janky it really is underneath. You aren’t going to fall through though, i guarantee it!
And here’s the new floor! Lovely, I know. This will all be covered with new boards, and stained a lovely red (my kitchen floor color, I still have lots left), then sealed. The walls and ceiling will be wood paneling, and I have a large vinyl window to cut in to overlook my garden and chickens. And lots of built in shelves. Tons of them. Keep posted, there will be pictures!

Maggie

Kitchen Remodel part 2

On Thursday we finally got our butcherblock countertop from Ikea. I say finally, cause we spent six frustrating weeks trying to get one! Its a long story, just let me say, don’t trust the numbers on the Ikea webpage when you go there to see if something is in stock. Call before you go if you really want something! Argh, but we got it, and it was perfect. If you look at the above picture, you will see just how slanted our old countertops were. They floor slants, and it looks as though they decided to make the counters slant MORE by cutting the frame to follow the slant of the floor. Seriously. We have no idea what purpose this served, except to make you insane.

Here you can see how much we had to prop up the countertop to make it level. It is seriously four inches higher on this end than it was before to make it level with the other end. Crazy. I won’t bother you will all my many inbetween pictures, and I apologize in advance for the blurriness of the following pictures, they looked clear on the camera screen!

We went with this fantastic mustardy orange color, its called “impulse.” Its kinda wacky, but we love it, and now want to paint all the cabinets! But we will stop here for now. As you can see, our new sink is bigger than our old one, and stuck out a bit from the cabinets. I decided to play that up by spray painting it red (I love spray paint!). I’m thinking some cute, country flower design in white painted on the red sink one of these days.
And that’s that! We’ve got a few more detaily things to finish off on it, like putting the pull out cutting boards back together, and making the drain stop leaking (plumbing is one of life’s little mysteries, I think, but I will figure it out!). But all in all, we freaking LOVE our new counters! Best part, they feel like they are the right height for us now! Who knew?

Spring is here in the Northwest

Ready or not, Spring is here. Now, I’ve been ready for about a month, circling my favorite sounding squash, picking just the right type of sweet corn to grow (last year my trial corn was indian corn so that I wouldn’t be disappointed if it didn’t grow, instead I was disappointed that I couldn’t eat it, I had so much!), and planning out the few new bushes I’d add to the yard. Also, drawing up the list of home and garden projects I’d like to complete this year. I’ve come to realize why it took my Dad 28 years to complete his list of projects on their old house! The list keeps growing!

I feel that this year’s warm weather project list is a bit more manageable that previous years. The big one is replacing the kitchen countertops, which I know will mean that I also sand and repaint the cabinets the counters sit on. Thats fine, and really, great, cause they are in bad shape. We would have already done this, but silly Ikea is currently out of the countertops!

There is also the addition I want to put on the henhouse. This will perhaps make it so I can have more chickens (please Brandon? I want a polish and a silkie!) but the real reason is that I am tired of the chickens roosting on top of the henhouse, causing me to have to clean dried chicken poo off it once a week. Ick. If i build a second story, they will have to sleep inside of it!

More water barrels everywhere! Got one started this week, I WILL finish it today! I swear. If I don’t make it down to visit the Saturday Market, that may take up all my free time today.

Keep that lawn I started growing. This one will be hard, I may actually have to learn something about lawn maintenance! Between two dogs and some Doug Firs, its hard in the hot summer months.

And, of course, all the little projects you think up for yourself as the season progresses: canning, brewing beer, and moving plants around. And fun larger projects at my parent’s new house: Building fences, gardening, painting. Its a good thing I love having stuff to do!

Hope you have fun with all your home projects this summer too!
Maggie

I love Craigslist!

As I mentioned before (above) I love the Craigslist! Its been particularly good to us lately. Last week we put the canopy from our old truck up, and a day later, sold it to a nice girl who had just bought (also on CL) a 79 toyota longbed pickup! Ours had been a 78, so I was really happy it went to a new old toyota. Brandon even installed it for her, we were super excited to get it the hell out of our driveway!

And then just yesterday, I found this beauty in the furniture section!
Isn’t it great? Okay, so there are MUCH better leather couches out there in the world, but this one met my requirements of a) not looking like the cushions are melting (I hate those couches with the layers of flabby cushions) and b) being brown, and c) having arms and d) brandon can lay down on it, e) its comfy, and most of all f) the dogs can’t make it smell all funky. Which our other couch had turned into the funky dog smell couch. To be fair, it was a fabric couch, and the dogs did alot of quality loungin‘ on it. But it smelled BAD. And I’ve been searching for a good leather replacement for a couple of years off and on on the CL. So happy are we! Its also our Christmas present from my parents, that we are getting paid back for (thanks mom and dad!)
From the other side. Good stuff. Our old couch we put out on the curb at 1 this afternoon, and by about 4 it was gone. Thanks again, Craigslist! And that one didn’t even have any back cushions on it, and I advertised that it was kinda stinky. Hey, it has good bones, and you can clean it up. Hope they like it.

Since it was so pretty today I took on the job of yard cleanup. Cleaned out the coop, swept, and raked up all the pinecones and whatnot that falls in the yard. Thought I’d take a couple pictures of the ole’ place while I was at it! The lovely orange fence (formerly to hold chickens) has been reused to keep the dogs out of the “lawn” I am growing. I am particularly excited that it started growing since I seeded it late October!
The girls out pecking around. Their feathers have grown back in mostly from the moult. Dear lord, i cleaned out some serious feathers from the coop today! Hope they are happy, ungrateful little birdies!

And Henrietta, looking all pretty and red. Shes a good lookin‘ bird!

Thats all, Happy Thanksgiving everybody! We will be celebrating our last one at my childhood home this year, My parents have officially sold theirs, and as of today, have had their offer accepted on another one all the way in the west hills! We’ll never see them again, since it is well known that Eastsiders don’t go that far West!

Organization of the Image Drawer

I’ve been working on a reorganization of my bottlecap images for months now. It involved cutting out all the stuff I didn’t like anymore, and then better organizing the images I did like into pages of similar items. You see, when I did this the first time 3 or so years ago, things were not organized on the pages at all: nerds hung out with cats and bikes, peace and skulls and bug cars all on the same page. It didn’t really bother me, I got used to it, but it drove Brandon CRAZY whenever he was helping me fill an order. So this year when I reworked my catalog, I decided to rework the cabinet too. Heres how it all finally came together:

This is my bottlecap image drawer:

Ohh, here it is open! The files have tabbies now that give you the gist of whats inside. This is a new addition to the filing system! before, only the holidays had tabs, for some reason. Don’t ask me, it might be my system, but I don’t know why that is so.

Oh, and here is a blurry picture of the front of one of the files. This was how they were labeled in the past. The images on the papers inside of the file are shown on the front.

And here are all the different colors the images are printed on! Used to be more, but my most favoritest paper company in the world has succumbed to this economy and is no more. So now I have to find all new paper, and well, the color choices aren’t as yummy. So sad for me. But I’ll make it somehow.

And some bottlecaps all waiting for resin in the cookie sheet. The images get punched out of the above papers and plunked down inside the bottlecap.

And thats how my new improved image drawer is organized! I’m pretty proud of it, and I thought it might give some of you studio organization ideas.

Cheers! Maggie

My Magpie Chandelier!

So a few posts ago I mentioned the lovely Magpie Chandelier from Anthropologie. And how I was going to make it, cause I didn’t have an extra $5000 sitting around in a fancy lamp fund. Its more like I had $20 of change I scraped together, and a serious need to make something frivolous and fun for myself. Since I believe that we all need to take a break from work sometimes and recharge the batteries by making something completely different, that’s what I did that week. It was also a week that I really should have been working, but well, when the inspirations strikes, who am I to say “hey, kinda busy, come back later.” I am pretty much never that person. I am happy when inspiration comes knocking!

So here is the finished product: I’m feeling its pretty rad. It’s a bit smaller than the original I think, and a bit more flamboyant. I used only beads and junk from around the house, most of it are beads I got back in high school, in my hemp jewelry days, so it was really fun to get those out and make something out of them that I would see every day. The rest of it is from various bits of vintage earrings, necklaces, and bracelets that I had collected over the years and hadn’t found a use for yet. It is a true magpie lamp in every sense of the word: I filled it with shiny bits that I had been collecting for years.

This is is humble beginnings: everything is hung on wire bead cord and attached with crimp beads or wire to the hoops.
Here’s the support structure; six wires more or less the same length. These got tweeked alot as the weight was put on. The bottom wire thing is a wreath form spray painted gold to match the brass rings on top.

Heres some beads added. Oh, and chains too.

A close-up of the main body of the lamp. see all the different things on it?

And of the bottom. All the strings came together on a round wooden doughnut in the middle.
And at the very bottom, a bit of chandelier that my fellow magpie collector (and also Saturday Market cohort) Ben gave me!

All in all, I am seriously in love with this light. The light cord itself is a three dollar and ninety nine cent Ikea cord. I really did spend less than twenty dollars on the whole thing. The thing that cost me is time. It took a whole season of the wire (season two, excellent if you are interested) to make, all told, i spent about 13 hours on it. So if I were to make this to sell, it would end up costing someone about $500. Which is a pretty screaming better deal than $5000! So if anyone out there has $500 in their fancy lamp funds at home, look me up!

I’m gonna make this

I am in LOVE with this chandelier. I saw it in my newest Anthropologie catalog yesterday, and I immediately called my friend Anisa to discuss it. She always gets the catalog, I was sure she had seen it. But her catalog hadn’t arrived yet. So sad, I did not discuss, but she is on the lookout for it now! The picture above doesn’t really do it justice, the one in the catalog had it hanging outdoors, with a green background so you could really see the pieces. I’m gonna link to it here so that you can take a close up look if you want, their website lets you scroll over the images and zoom to really see close up whats in there! Its really cool.

The Magpie chandelier also costs $4800. yep, almost five grand. Its made in South Africa out of corks, plastic flowers, bottlecaps, chains… sigh, its beautiful. But I can’t have it. So, it seems, whenever there is a really cool light fixture out there that I can’t have, I figure out how to make my own!

Right now I am in the drawing phase, but I have compiled a huge list of things I want to hang from it. I’ve already got most of them, being as I am a bit of a magpie myself. Seashells, corks, bottlecaps, fake flowers, keys, prisms, trade beads, little plastic people and animals… Its gonna be awesome. I got my light fixture for it from Ikea yesterday, and I just need to go to Micheals to get the hoops and some tigertail to string it up with! I can’t wait to get started.

I’ll try to remember to take some pictures of it in progress so you can see for yourself how its getting made. I love Anthropologie, I get great ideas for making my own stuff from their catalogs. I also try to buy one sweater from them every couple of years because they sell wool sweaters that last for years, and never go out of style (Just so you know, I don’t use Anthropologie only for ideas).

My light is going to be a bit shorter than the one they sell, and I already know exactly where its going: above the yellow leather chair by the window. The light already hanging there is going to move over above the woodstove, and that light that is already there – well, i don’t know where thats going yet. Perhaps back to my parents where I stole it from in the first place… I mean borrowed.

Hee hee, keep posted!

Ummmmmmmm stuff?

So above is a picture of a little bathroom mural I just finished for a client. Wow! It sure is fun to do this stuff, I wish it happened more often. She wanted a couple fish and some plants, nothing to crazy or it would look out of place in the simple bathroom. I hope she likes it, I drop it off tomorrow!

This post is a bit of this and that, and THAT. Lots of random stuff happened around here, like the above fish painting. Below are pictures of the maple tree being taken out by Brandon and Senna, and what went in afterwards. To start, its a picture of the two espaliered pear trees we got to replace the maple. On is three kinds of asian pear, the other, three kinds of regular pear. And all the plants replanted in the raised bed that were in the bed that was there before.

Brandon cutting down some limbs.

Wow! Brandon up high! Glad I was at the saturday market working, to be honest, I think I’d really worry myself if I was at home watching.

And the other news around here: Opal the foster pit pup. I just picked her up a couple hours ago from some friends. Their next door neighbor had some crazy family drama, and well this little girl was suffering because of it. They couldn’t take her, but well, I CAN’T say no to pitbulls in trouble, so she is here. I’ve renamed her Opal, and we are going to start packing the pounds on her, she is way underweight. I’ll keep you all posted on her progress, I’m hoping to have her a few weeks and then find her a new home (where hopefully I’ll have visiting rights!)

This pic shows how skinny she is, although nothing compares to how she looks in person. I think she could give marcus a run for his money in skinny (when he showed up at our door he was half his 76 pounds, and just as tall as he is now). She is a love though, and already knows sit. Keep an eye out to see the changes!

I know, I’m a sucker for the pits. What can I say? They always seem to get the short end of the stick!

Backyard projects!

For starters, a super blurry picture of Katee Sackoff (Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica) and Fatboy Roberts talking at the Bagdad Theater last friday night. Yep, we loves us some Battlestar, and are lucky enough to be friends with Fatboy of KUFO (we totally knew him when he was just a dorky call center worker so there) and his radio show has been putting on free showings of Battlestar at the theater every Friday night. They got Starbuck to show up and watch the show with us, and then answer questions afterward! She was great, is friendly and will answer pretty much any question. My only beef were the weird hecklers standing right next to us making fun of the questioners AND then talking through the answers! I mean, they stood in line for HOURS to see her, and couldn’t be bothered to listen! Jerks. We don’t‘ have to stand in line, we got us some VIP treatment. But we still sat in the back, and this was the best picture I could take, without getting up, which I just wasn’t going to do! If you want to watch the interview, they recorded it, I’m sure its on Youtube somewhere.
But on to other things! We have started doing some homebrewing, and realized that our tiny kitchen (and tiny kitchen sink) were not conducive to the making of beer. It involves big pots and lots of cleaning, and that would make a wet kitchen. So we decided to build some outdoor sinks! I got both sinks free from the Restore, and Brandon paid for the rest of the wood. He pretty much built the whole thing (but from my plans) and I did the finish work. If the weather holds today I may install the faucet!

This will be Great for parties too, I am picturing the bar being out here, and not my kitchen!
And the long shed is mostly finished, just needs some firewood stored in it! We are SO ready for spring!