Oh Inez

Inez is back on the market. The house near the Gorge on Inez St., that is. Looks like the sale collapsed. Now I will be tortured anew with thoughts of how it could be transformed. Here are some of the really icky pictures I didn't show before.

Getting wired on Friday night

Presenting The Light Fixture From the Dump:



Rewired, refinished and with nice new antique-reproduction shades. It's another one of my expensive bargains, but unlike many of those, it's definitely not junk anymore.

No more euphorbia euphoria

The last two days I've been trying to get the garden under control here at Fallingdowne. The weeds are rampant, particularly the couch grass (is that how you spell it?) that invades everywhere and defies weeding and smothering. I'm clearing great swathes of fussy things that are hard to weed around, and will try to smother it once again. Almost 49, and I'm warming to the idea of "low-maintenance" gardening at last.

For a while I had a bit of a mania for euphorbias, with their weird colours and big billowing stems and otherworldly flowers. But I've decided to rid the garden of plants that maim and disfigure, and these are the worst offenders. I have several lasting scars where the sap of these plants has burned my skin. I will keep a couple; the "chameleon" with its early spring show of bronzy purple, and the giant in the back yard, partly because it's too big and scary to take on right now.

This wallpaper exploits women

So the fancy new bed frame required a new mattress and box spring. And the bedroom was too awful to even let the delivery guys see it, so it was time after 10 years of squalor to clear it out and fix it up. Scrape off the despised textured ceiling, remove the crooked picture rails, wash off the residue left on the walls by the old oil furnace. And wallpaper removal: Who knew that two layers below the beige stripes on our wall lurked scores of naked young women?

Oh yeah, the dump

A lot of catching up to do on the blogging, obviously. Here's the light fixture I found on the latest trip to the dump. I took it to Water Glass Studio to get rewired and refinished in an "antique brass" colour. So it is no longer free, in fact it's damned expensive. But probably $150 less than buying one of their ready-mades, which are beautiful.
I'll add a photo when it's finished.

Call me Miss Tint

I love the difference you can make with a couple of cans of mistinted stain from the bargain shelf at Home Hardware. Okay, the colours aren't the very best (blue-ish grey and "black spruce", which is definitely brackish greenish.) But it beats flaking fake-cedar-orange.
The deck in Fernwood was in serious need of attention. It's not the most stylish deck, and probably has only a few years left before major repair or replacement, but a good pressure washing and a couple of coats of stain will help extend its life and make it look a bit less godawful. It was a good way to spend a very hot day while thinking about whether we could really take on another derelict house project at this very moment.

A really good (bad) one

Checked out this little house by the Gorge this week. It would have been an ideal project: Loads of charm, and filthy enough to keep the competition and the price low-ish. Vacant for a couple of years, we were told. Needed a lot of work (a bathroom, for one thing), but room in the basement for a nice suite. Cobwebs so thick they hung like mesh curtains in some of the rooms. Much speculation by Morley and me about the source of the stains on the ceilings.
Alas, must take a pass on this one. It's perfect, but the timing is wrong for us at this moment.