The Big Reveal

When we first visited our home back in February it was pretty much love at first sight. At that time it was like we were just starting to "date" our house. The relationship was extremely new and we didn't get to see each other as often as we would have liked. We even got a little desperate at times and did drive-bys just to be reminded of what the house looked like. Everything was bright, shiny, and new and the relationship was blossoming. Then we made a big commitment to the house and things jumped from tentative to extremely serious in a matter of days. Our courtship ended as quickly as it had began and now we find ourselves in a life-long commitment to it (literally!) As with all relationships, we were beginning to get nit-picky and we were noticing things we didn't notice before. After all, it was love at first sight. It didn't take long before little things we just brushed off before started to really bother us. That brings us to the beginning of the first hurdle in our relationship... The Living Room.

As corny as that may have seemed, I couldn't have come up with a more appropriate way to describe our feelings about our home. We truly love it and could not be happier, but not everything is perfect so we really have to work to get things to the way we want them. The living room walls were such a disaster.
They were covered in this awful texture that seemed like a cross between stucco and popcorn ceilings. I couldn't quite pinpoint what it was. Not that it matters though because whatever it was, it wasn't going to be staying long.
The project first started back when I was in AZ for a visit. We hadn't even moved in yet so Glenn and Janke decided to work on the living room, but not before tarping up every possible opening in the room.

They spent a long day scraping the walls, learning tricks and techniques along the way. Sadly, this project did not turn out to be a weekend project, but rather an eight weekend project.
From the tales I heard over the phone, it was an extremely arduous and exhausting day for the both of them. I'm still impressed with what a good friend Janke is. We're lucky to have him as a friend.
We didn't spend every weekend working on it. In fact, we didn't mess with it for a while. I took a stab at it for the first time one day while Glenn was at work. I barely made any progress despite working for a couple hours and I was quickly discouraged. The particular wall that I chose to work on happened to be the worst wall in the room.
The texture was so stuck that if we scraped anymore, we ended up pulling up the wall! You can see lots of brown, cardboard looking spots in many of the pictures. That's where the scraping went a little too far and we started gouging the wall.
Time went by and we finally decided to work on it again. I was all set to go and determined that we were going to finish that day.
Scraping makes a HUGE mess. This picture is actually an example of what the texture looks like when it is cooperating and coming off fairly nicely. It didn't do that very often. It's nearly impossible to contain, even with tarps covering the floor and every entrance. That dust is just a nightmare.
It's incredible how difficult and labor intensive this project actually was. On our final day of scraping we were both so sore we could barely move.
We were covered head to toe in dust. Glenn's gray hair and my blonde hair ended up looking about the same color by the end of the day. It was very frustrating trying to keep the rest of the house clean while I tracked dusty white footprints everywhere.
I was certainly not prepared for all of that work. I wanted to cry from being so sore. After we were done scraping we admired our handiwork and stepped away from the mess for a while before returning to patch some seriously big holes and clean up the disaster zone.
Before we were able to continue we needed to caulk all of the edges between the walls and the trim. It was my first experience with a caulking gun. It was pretty easy to use but it did take me some time to get even lines.

The next step was to cover the walls in joint compound. Maybe this is not the proper way to do it and we probably should have just hung new drywall but this was the route we chose and no one was going to tell us otherwise.
It took us a while to get a good rhythm going but we finally covered the walls. It took us a couple days. Our major mishap along this portion of the project was my pouting. After working so hard to cover a wall I noticed that huge cracks were beginning to creep up and down the walls. I was truly upset by this and thought that all of our hard work was wasted. Glenn tried really hard to explain that everything would be okay, but I was just not having any of that. It took me some time but I finally got over it and we were able to continue later.
Buckets of joint compound later, we were nearing the finish line. It was finally time to sand down the walls. Glenn insisted that sanding down the cracks worked just fine. He demonstrated on a particularly nasty crack and I watched it disappear. Satisfied with the results, I started sanding as well. Thankfully sanding was not the most difficult task but it was one of the messiest. At this point we had given up hope of maintaining clean floors while we worked in the living room and we just did our best to make an effort to contain the mess.

It wasn't until I was preparing to prime the walls that I noticed something was amiss. I decided that the best way to get the remaining dust of the walls without using water was to vacuum the walls. It worked great. So great, in fact, that it sucked the dust right out of the cracks we thought we were sanding down. Apparently we were just sanding dust right into them and filling them. I was so over it at this point that I didn't even care and I just finished what I was doing. Luckily I was able to find the humor in it this time around and I started priming the walls. Glenn got home from work and helped me finish.
Looking at the walls all clean and smooth and white was certainly a sight for sore eyes. We had something that resembled a normal room with normal walls! You wouldn't believe how good it felt to see (mostly) finished walls after all this time. What a relief!

With the walls primed and the room cleaned it was time for the final step. Color! I really enjoy painting but my last experience painting in this house did not end so well. Between a disaster of a gallon of paint splattering everywhere and paint bleeding through my very thorough taping job I was less than enthusiastic about painting this time. I was resolved to do something different, to do something I had never done before. I was going to paint an entire room without taping anything. Of all the shows I have seen on HGTV, I have seen them use painter's tape maybe once or twice. Well if the professionals who get paid to paint can do it, well then so can I!
I watched a handful of tutorials on youtube about how to "cut-in" while painting and decided that I was ready. It took me about 2-3 hours to edge the entire room but I did a pretty awesome job considering I don't really have any perfectly straight surfaces. I was very pleased with myself.
The color on our walls is a beautiful gray called Flagstone by Olympic Paint. Glenn actually chose the color after I gave him some parameters and I was really impressed for someone who claims to not see differences in shade. I just love the color in the room and I think it is absolutely beautiful. While some people go for tans, beiges, and off whites for their neutrals it is all about the gray for me.
I've been surprised at how difficult it is to choose paint colors! We currently have 6 different color swatches in the kitchen right now. I never thought Glenn and I were indecisive about color, but then I realized that the condo in Phoenix had so few walls to paint! Naturally it would be a little overwhelming to have to choose colors for so many walls. We're doing fine though.
After painting the walls a lovely shade of gray we were left with a couple nasty reminders of the previous life the living room once had. Sitting in strategically placed locations were big ugly electrical boxes with outdated switches and switchplates. That was going to change.
After a couple trips to ReStore and Lowe's we were able to round up a nice clean white set of outlets, switches, and covers. Glenn taught me how to install a switch and I managed to not electrocute myself. The same cannot be said for him however. Don't worry though, he's fine. We quickly replaced everything and marveled at how ugly all those outlets and switches really were.
With our walls painted, outlets and switches matching, and some new draperies hung (excuse the inappropriate, too short length of the curtains) we often find ourselves standing in the middle of the room smiling at our work. It has been an extremely long and difficult journey but we made it through and could not be happier or more proud.

CSA Share Week 7

It's been pretty hot here. So much so that I figured I would preface my post by letting you know how warm it has been. Glenn was just telling me the other day that we have only had 78 minutes of summer so far this year. "Summer" is being defined as temperature at or above 80 degrees. I have no problem with that and have found our incredibly mild and cool summer to be absolutely dreamy. Imagine my dismay when it hit around 85 degrees. Normally this wouldn't really be that much of a deal, but when you do not have air conditioning and chose this particular day to do housework, things don't look so pretty. In any event, it was hot today but it should cool down for the rest of the week. Yay!

Our produce this week is very similar to what we got last week. Some things we got more of (raspberries, YAY) and other things we got less of (shell peas, boo). Our entire haul this week included eggs, chard, cauliflower, summer squash, rainier cherries, raspberries (notice how I had already eaten half a carton by the time I took the picture), fava beans, lettuce, and some more shell peas. At the time I write this I have finished off a carton of raspberries and hoarded the rest with the intent to make muffins with them.

The items we got in last week's share garnered mostly positive reviews. The cherries were great, as were the raspberries. I cannot get over how deliciously sweet and tart these raspberries are! I've just been eating them all by themselves. The eggs went the route of hard boiling, like they usually do. It's nice to just be able to grab an egg for a snack or smash a couple into egg salad for a yummy sandwich. As a side note, our next door neighbors brought us a few eggs from their chickens the other day. I thought that was so nice of them. Glenn and I (mostly Glenn) chatted with them for a little while. They're pretty cool people and laughed a lot at whatever Glenn said - it was pretty funny.
Anyway, I forgot we even had beets until now. Then I remembered when Glenn started slicing them up for his salad and I was astonished at how beautiful they were inside! They had these gorgeous pink and white stripes. They were so pretty I just HAD to taste it. I immediately wished I hadn't. Glenn thought they were great. I thought they tasted like dirt with an awful aftertaste that seemed to affect the taste of everything else I ate afterwards. I haven't eaten anymore of them. They are actually an heirloom beet from Italy called Chioggia Beets (the things you learn from Google.)
The shell peas were my favorite item in the share. I really enjoyed shelling the peas for some reason. We added them to some pasta a couple nights and they were just so firm, sweet, and delicious. I hope we continue getting them. Glenn has been enjoying the zucchini, but I have not. I don't like zucchini unless it is fried and covered in cheese like this restaurant in Puyallup makes them. The greens we got were hit and miss this week. The red leaf lettuce was okay, the cabbage was pretty good, but the unidentified bunch of greens that was like 3 feet long was just gross. Neither of us liked it and tried to eat around it in our salads. Live and learn I guess. The onion is still by its lonesome in the fridge. I don't really know what its future holds.

Strangely enough, after my mini rant about the lack of email newsletters from the farm in last week's post I got an email just minutes after my post. I guess they read my blog (or not.) They still are not regular with the newsletters, as we got one for week 5 and week 7, but not week 6. We'll see about the upcoming week.

Hope all is well with all of our friends and family. Love to all!!!

CSA Share Week 6

I have to admit, I am getting more and more irritated over the increasing ambiguity in terms of labeling produce with our CSA share. Every week Glenn brings home our bounty and I inevitably hold up a bunch of greens banded together and I ask what it is. Every week the answer is the same, "I don't know. It just said greens." You can understand my frustration when I am trying to learn about new foods and I don't even know what I have! Then, to top it off we began the share with a weekly email at the beginning of every week that documented what we could expect to get that week along with a selection of recipes that correspond with our produce and a few other random notices about farm related things. It was nice. The last email was June 24. Not much I can do now.

Unfortunately this week my descriptions of the food we received are going to be pretty vague and/or my best guess derived from extensive (the first page of google images) research. This week's share contained another lovely batch of rainier cherries which are decidedly brighter and tastier looking than last week's. We also have eggs, raspberries (of which I already ate half), beets, and onion, shell peas, zucchini, red leaf lettuce, some other kind of lettuce, and some kind of greens. My preliminary review of the raspberries is that they are amazing and I cannot wait to grow my own if they will taste this delicious.

As for last week's share, we didn't do so hot. The curly kale was a disaster. We both truly hated it. Glenn usually eats anything and isn't nearly as picky as I am, but he flat our refused to eat any more of this stuff. It was disgusting in both flavor and texture. It also had a very dirty taste to it, and it wasn't from actual dirt. We use a salad spinner to give all of our greens a good thorough washing before we eat them. I actually didn't eat any of the cherries or strawberries from last week. Glenn enjoyed them. He finished off the rest of the strawberries tonight with his salad and they were so intensely red on the inside! They must have been awfully sweet. It was nice having snow peas around. I prefer snap peas, but snow peas are good too. We have these chinese meals that we make and it was a nice addition to put in a big handful of the snow peas. They were very crisp and yummy. The spinach and romaine were great as always. I would be happy if those were the only greens we got for the rest of the share! As for the kohlrabi, summer squash, chives. and turnips... we have yet to do anything with those. I found a recipe for a type of cole slaw using kohlrabi and apples so I think I might try to do that when I have time. The squash took a tumble or something because they look awfully pitiful and bruised up but I'm sure they taste just fine. We still need to grill those, but that will have to wait until Glenn fires up the grill for some chicken or something. Who knows if we will ever use the chives. I don't care for them, but if Glenn disguises them really well, I may not even notice! I'm still clueless on the turnips. Anyone have any ideas on what to do with turnips? Anyone??? Oh well.

So there you have it. Hopefully by this time next week we will have used up the remainder of both shares. We're starting to fall behind and the food is building up pretty quickly. I am normally a night owl and I feel like I have a ton of things to do right now, but I am way too exhausted so I am going to bed. I hope that everyone is doing well and that monsoon season is treating our Arizona friends and family nicely. Love to all!!!

The 3 Trip Pantry

Glenn and I are blessed to have such a wonderful, large kitchen with TONS of cabinet space. In fact, none of the high cabinets have anything in them. Unfortunately for us though, we don't have a dedicated space for a pantry. Until now.

Most people with newer homes have an entire section of their kitchen dedicated to a pantry whether it be a small closet type space, a giant walk-in pantry, or a lovely section of floor to ceiling cabinets. We had neither, but we wanted something. Luckily for us, we are also blessed to have a kitchen that came from IKEA so all of our cabinet frames and doors (as well as countertops) are regular stock IKEA items. This meant that Glenn and I were able to create something that would be exactly what we wanted. IKEA has cabinets that are meant to be pantries. Unfortunately these cabinets are kind of a funny height and we really wanted our pantry to match up to the top of our refrigerator because it would be going directly next to it. This is where we had to get creative.

All of the wall mounted cabinets at IKEA are only 12" deep and we wanted something with more capacity. That led us to look at the base cabinets. These cabinets are 24" deep. Sounds great right? The problem here is that the base cabinets come in one height only, and that is 30". We needed 68" high. Okay... How about we stack two base cabinets on top of each other? That sounded like a good idea, except base cabinets don't come with a top because it is expected that you would add a countertop to it. We weren't planning on that. Instead I just flipped it upside down so that the open part of the top cabinet was lying directly on top of the open part of the bottom cabinet. That brings us to 60" tall. We needed 8" more. I was pretty sure that IKEA only made 4" legs, but I was wrong. They had some stainless steel 8" legs. That gives us our perfect height!
So right about now you might be thinking, "Well great! They figured out their pantry, so what's the problem? And why does she call it a 3 trip pantry?" Well when we first bought all of our supplies to make the pantry, IKEA was closing so we were in a bit of a hurry. Everything looked fine and our prices seemed to add up to what we were expecting. That was Trip #1 However, when I went to assemble the pantry while Glenn was at work (in case you didn't know, I am the official furniture builder/assembler of the Darby household) I noticed something was off. The frame itself came together beautifully, but the doors were wrong. Doubly wrong. Not only were the doors about 4" too long, they weren't even the right style! UGH.
IKEA can be pretty draining on a person so we didn't go and return our doors right away, but instead waited a week or so. We ran in with our incorrect doors and got store credit to go get the right ones. In case you are wondering, IKEA is fantastic with returns. It's a completely painless process. We went over to the right section and grabbed the proper doors after triple checking to make sure they were right. That is Trip #2.

A few days or so after our most recent trip I began to attach the hinges to the doors to prepare them for mounting on the cabinet. I had installed the set of shelves we bought in the top cabinet only. I then realized that we didn't have everything we would need again. Shelves wouldn't be feasible for the bottom portion of the pantry because the depth would make it too hard to see the contents. Instead we thought drawers would make a good addition. I wanted to get the normal solid bottom drawers but they require special hardware for the hinges and we didn't want to do that. I checked the IKEA website and found that they have wire baskets for the size we wanted (we also have wire baskets in a couple other kitchen cabinets) so we decided that those would have to work. That left me with a still unfinished pantry. This was getting a little old.
Finally this weekend we made our 3rd and final trip to IKEA.
We picked up 3 wire basket drawers and a pair of half size shelves to create better visibility on the top portion of the pantry. Today I installed the drawers and the half shelves.

I also drilled holes for and installed the front of door hardware. Luckily for us, the previous homeowners had a leftover door handle in its original packaging that we were able to match on one of our trips to Lowes. Now everything matches perfectly.

We are really happy with our pantry. I'm quite thrilled actually. It's also a pretty big relief to have it done considering it has sat half finished for about a month now. Now you understand why I call it "The 3 Trip Pantry."

CSA Share Week 5

This week has been a little crazy for me, and that explains why all the blog posts are being lumped together today. I've been working the past three nights, so I haven't been able to keep up like I normally do. Anyway, as you can see, this photo is a little bit different because I was working and wasn't able to do my normal staged photo. Glenn of course was thoughtful and took the picture with his phone :o)

This week we have RAINIER CHERRIES!!!! We're so excited about that! We also have strawberries, eggs, a purple kohlrabi, summer squash, curly kale, spinach, snow peas, romaine, chives, and turnips. It's really nice to be seeing a more interesting grouping of our veggies and fruits now. So far the only plans we have for our stuff is to grill the summer squash. I haven't liked any kind of squash prepared any way so I am hoping that maybe grilling is the way to go. We've already had some of the kale and it was disgusting, but more on that next week.

Last week's share was pretty great. The eggs haven't been used yet, but Glenn and I enjoy having them hard boiled so that will probably happen with those. Besides, it is better to wait until they are older so they're easier to peel. I am getting really good at hard boiling eggs, almost to the point of perfection. The strawberries were good of course. The carrots are pretty sweet, much sweeter than carrots I have had before. I read somewhere that when carrots are grown in smaller quantities and in really good soil, they get quite sweet. I shredded a bunch of them last week, and a little bit of my finger as well. I'll probably eat the rest of them plain. All of the greens last week were really delicious. Nothing was too bitter, in fact everything was pretty mild. The snow peas were really yummy. We have these frozen Chinese dinners that are pretty short on veggies so we threw all of those in there and it definitely made it way better. We haven't tried the kohlrabi yet, but now that we have two of them I think I might try and make some sort of mash out of them. I've seen quite a few recipes for it that look good.

Hopefully we continue to have shares that are as yummy as last week's. We're still enjoying having a weekly grouping of farm fresh food, even if it does get a little overwhelming at times. It's always great to support your local economy and your local farmers!

Happy 4th!

Believe it or not, this was our 3rd 4th of July in Washington! All three years we have been watching the fireworks on a hill in the North End of Tacoma. They shoot the fireworks off of a barge on the water. It's always a wonderful show, we really love it. Last year we were in Seattle and had a long drive home afterwards, so it was really awesome to only be a few minutes from home this year.
We didn't take any pictures of the fireworks this year. It's really difficult to get any good pictures without a tripod. Instead we took some pictures of the sun setting and of Rally hamming it up for everyone around us.

We also tried a new place for shooting of our own fireworks this year. As we were driving somewhere for dinner we noticed a billboard for a place called Firecracker Alley so I looked it up so we could go after dinner. The place was pretty cool, a lot like the Boom City we went to last year. Thankfully all the stands were set up on asphalt so it wasn't nearly as dusty. It also wasn't quite as big, but to be honest all the stands end up looking the same after a while. We were going to buy a box but they didn't take cards so we just decided to go back the next day. We brought Janke with us the next day and we bought our box.
When we got out to the open area for setting of fireworks it was a little terrifying. It was jam packed with kids, teenagers, and adults pretending they were directing a Michael Bay movie. Unfortunately for us, Mother Nature decided to get a little crazy with the wind effects. Just imagine a bunch of people in a confined area shooting off explosives with wind blowing so hard that you have a hard time lighting a fuse. It got kind of scary. To top it all off, I got hit in the foot with a firework! It didn't really hurt, it was just startling. It felt like somebody threw a ball at my foot.

Our box of fireworks was pretty lame though. There was a handful of really cool ones, but half of the box was full of these really stupid little things that practically exploded in your hand and when they launched they just made an irritating noise with a quick spark. We ended up giving them to some random Indian girl who was scrounging around looking for leftover fireworks. She seemed pretty excited about that.
Meanwhile, the week leading up to the 4th and even until now the neighborhood kids are still launching of fireworks in the alleys, despite the fact that they are in fact illegal in the city of Tacoma. On the actual night of the 4th they were going until the wee hours of the morning. Then when I woke up the next day for work, they were still going! I even heard some more just this morning. Hopefully they stop soon because it is getting kind of annoying.

I hope that everyone had a safe and happy holiday!!!

You Look A Little Uncomfortable There

I was just going through the photos on my Bloggie when I came across this photo that I took of Rally. We had been working on the walls in the living room and decided to take a break. I was sitting on the stairs and I noticed Rally came down from the landing to sit on the stairs too. Unfortunately for all of us, our stairs are pretty narrow which makes them relatively uncomfortable to sit on. Rally wasn't having any of that and was going to sit on those stairs whether or not they were comfortable. His expression is just so funny. He's just so cute, sometimes I can't stand it!