A Very Sweet Kind of Valentines Day

I'm just wondering how many people buy Valentine's Day presents that say THIS on the bottom of the box??

Lol lol lol

I thought that was so absolutely funny!!! Steve and I decided to buy each other a Valentine's Day present. We needed a new mattress for our bed. Vodeeohdodo! (In honor of Shirley Williams who passed away last week).

We decided that our memory foam mattress was going on 8 years and could probably stand an upgrade. It was getting a little too soft and too saggy.  So we decided to pick up another 12 inch thick memory foam mattress, this time made by Nectar. The reviews were good and we decided this would be our gift to each other. This sucker is really heavy!!!  A king size in the box weighs 90 lb. We had to use the dolly cart to get it into the house and up the steps to the bedroom.

Once we got the old mattress lifted up and off the bed and hauled out into the dining room, then we were able to open up this one. The very explicit instructions also came with a little cutting device, similar to a letter opener. It's to make sure you don't cut into the mattress when cutting off the plastic. This thing is shrink wrapped and compressed into a wrapped up tube. I made a video of us unboxing it:

It worked out wonderfully and our other mattress got a new home with someone who really needed one. It is better than filling up a landfill. A single mom who works hard at two jobs needed an upgrade. She lives nearby and we even hauled it over to her house for her on our flat trailer. She was quite grateful, and we were happy to pass it on.

Also on Valentine's Day, my darling Steveio surprised me with some beautiful flowers and a heartfelt message in a thoughtful card. I love the pussywillows in the top as accents.

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What would be a more fitting thing to do on Valentine's Day then attend an event called "Stitches of Love"??

I belong to the Oconto County HCE Homemakers, HCE stands for Home and Community Education. It is a division of the UW Extension Office from the University of Wisconsin. It's origins were a rural gathering of farmer's wives who meet regularly. They share educational skills, tidbits of hints and helpful information, homemaking and gardening skills, recipes and usually a nice lunch. I have belonged to them since 1997 when we lived out in the country on the river.  We get together on a monthly basis, but also we gather with a larger group from other areas as well. 

Two or three times a year we have a gathering called "Stitches of Love". We create fleece tied charity blankets that are given to hospice and cancer patients. We also sew book bags for a program called BooksR4U. This program supplies small rural schools that maybe don't have a lot of funding with extra educational materials for the children. They are given these book bags that are chock full of things like their own very own set of 2 hardcovered reading books, coloring books, notebooks, crayons, rulers, pencils etc. The little schools that are short on funding really appreciate when we bring these in to their students. It's a lot of fun making these and all of the materials are donated.

I bring a sewing machine and work on the book bags. Usually there are three or four other ladies that sew with me, but their main driver lady from their district had a medical emergency and couldn't come. So I was the only one with a sewing machine this time, kept busy working on the book bags.

The ladies spread out, putting groups of two tables together and work on double layers of fleece fabric. They cut slits into the edges all of the way around into tabs that are then slowly and carefully tied into knots.

There's a lot of chitter chatter and laughter going on, while we work on the fleece blankets or cut out fabric for more of the book bags. We take a break for lunch... someone makes a pot of soup, and everyone brings a sandwich cut in half.  We put all the sandwiches on a platter and we all take different ones than what we brought.  Someone also brings desserts and we have coffee and tea. 

There is always something to keep everyone busy.

I managed to get eight fabric book bags completed before lunch time. I hope the children that get these enjoy the treats inside and read their books over and over again.  Some of the rural schools up on the reservation land say some of these kids never owned a book of their very own until they get these from our program. They get to take the books home and they are able to get 2 new books for each child every year.  This is in addition to all of the other supplies that are included too. 

Most of the blankets have one side that is brightly colored printed fleece and the other side is usually a coordinating solid color. This one is so cute with the kitty cats scattered all over the front of it.

On my way home, I dropped off some little Valentine's treats to our kids and grandkids. Who wouldn't love a chocolate brownie adorned with a great big Reese's peanut butter heart and little jelly beans? 

With the leftover frosting I made a special treat for my darling Steve. He likes the leftover frosting spread between graham crackers. It was a fond memory of a childhood treat when he was little. His mom would make them for him and his siblings as a snack. On top of each graham cracker sandwich I stuck in extra jelly bean with a dab of frosting!

So that was how we spent our wonderful Valentine's Day together. And the big bed with it's new mattress in place is going to be a wonderful treat to sleep on each night.

Vodeeohdodo!

~~~~~~~~~~~

We finished painting the living room and the dining room as I mentioned in my last blog. I still had some trim paint left over so I decided to give a fresh coat to all of our kitchen cabinet doors.  

The first step is that Steve needs to remove every single door handle and drawer pull so I can neatly roll a new layer of fresh paint over the top surface of the doors.

 

I was not about to paint inside and around every cabinet. Just painting the front surface of the doors where the grimy little handprints land. That's what happens when grandchildren and a certain husband who don't use the handles and drawer pulls. They shut cabinets and drawers with the flat palm of the hand, usually wet or full of food!   LOL  When you have white cabinets, this is kind of a yearly event!

After they dry,

then Steve puts all of the

handles and pulls back on.

I did manage to pick up two little sample jars of two different colors of a soft sage or mossy green color. I chose a lighter tone and a darker tone. I want to get rid of the same beige mauve color that was in the dining room and living room. It's also in our kitchen and the upper portion in our master bathroom.  

So I painted both samples onto this extra hunk of wood and set it up above the beadboard in the kitchen. I think the darker looks better. I was worried the lighter might be too light.

I also set it over on top of the wine cabinet by the coffee bar. I think the darker color harmonizes quite well with the counter-tops. So the winner is the darker color called Mossy Meadow.

During the next few days I will work on one little portion of a wall at a time. Everything will require two coats and some taping off around the cabinetry. But it will be nice to brighten it up and get a fresh color there. Kind of like we're doing spring cleaning before spring has sprung?

But amazingly, all of our snow is melted with this warm weather the last few days. There were a few flakes floating down today but everything on the ground has now melted away. This is so absolutely unusual for February in Wisconsin!

~~~~~~~~~~

On the quilting side, I have been working on this really bright fun multi-colored quilt. I think I'm going to call it something like Summertime Picnic in America or something like that or Picnic in July? It has such fun colors. These are fabrics from The Pioneer Woman series.

I put together 20 large blocks and actually I did 21 by accident. So there's one left over. Then I flip-flopped and switched around and arranged the blocks on my bed until I made sure there were absolutely no two pieces touching that were of the same fabric.

I think it's going to be a really cute quilt, and it will go up for sale later in my Etsy store. So keep tuned in to my blog to see when it is completed if you are interested.

Once I got the quilt all laid out, then I had to mark each 16" section with a number and a letter so I knew the order in which they needed to be joined together. 1a, 1b, 1c, and then 2a, 2b, 2c etc.

Then I take them back down to my sewing desk in the She Shed and work on my cute little antique Singer Featherweight machine. I put together all of the blocks into rows. Then I join the rows into one large quilt top. I will go around with a couple border pieces to set it off with an accent color and make it into a queen size quilt.

See my helper???

Well, that's about it now on my blog today. Just as I was finishing this up the mailman came with a big box for me????

One of my wonderful blog readers by the name of Linda, (you know who you are!) sent this beautiful box full of very interesting historic quilting and needlework books. What a delightful thing to read by the fireplace in the evenings as we finish out the rest of winter and wait for spring.

On a health update,

our family member is doing as well as can be expected, 

and we are doing what we can to help. 

Home Projects and Appointments

We aren't wandering anywhere this week in the motorhome. Instead, we decided to stay home because the weather looks really lousy all week long. We each have haircuts scheduled for today and a dentist appointment for me scheduled for tomorrow.

The venetian blind that we ordered for the smaller window on the side of the bedroom finally came in. So we were able to put that into place and install the brackets. Then I hung up one of my sets of Heritage Lace curtain swags. Not sure if I'm going to do a lower panel on a cafe rod or not.

We will see what it looks like once I get the other curtains up around the big window. Steve has started cutting up the trim wood and shellacking the knots. Then I will get all of the trim wood painted. We are adding the top crown molding and the egg and dart trim to the big window to make it match the same as the original window and doors.

Steve also reattached the rows of coat hooks that we keep behind the door. It's a handy place for bathrobes, jammies or things that we are going to wear again. Out of sight, out of mind.

It stopped drizzling for a while this morning, so we went outside and decided to tear down all of the tomato vines and remove all of the cages. I invested in heavier stronger cages for next year. So these I think we'll get put on Marketplace for someone else to buy in the spring. It was time to empty the rain barrel and put that away for the season. We will remove the rain chain and pick up some new downspout piping and route the water away from the house for the winter.

These are the last of the tomatoes picked off the vines. We will let them ripen and I will process the last of these up into a jar or two of salsa. I dread having to buy store bought tomatoes again for salads, but at least I have lots of jars of processed ones for making into chili, casserole, or sauce.

Steve decided that it was time to do a little rearranging in our yard. Two years ago we put in these two boxwood bushes on each side of the Korean lilac. The Korean lilac is doing well and getting larger each year. This is right in front of the 3 western windows of the She Shed. So he decided it was time to move the two boxwoods up to the front of the house. He got the one out on the right. Boy oh boy did that thing have a lot of roots!

We stuck it up in the front flower bed, to the right of the bird bath. We will do the second bush to the left of the birdbath, but we ran out of time. Steve had to leave and get his haircut.

We still have to clean out the rest of the flower beds of all the dead stalks and blossoms before the winter snows come. The window boxes are still full of geranium blooms, so we will leave those for a bit. Geesh, I feel like winter is coming up fast, so it will be good to get these things done. 

We dug up a bunch of the evening primrose plants to get that bush into place. That stuff grows like crazy and makes kind of a nice ground cover. It blooms almost all summer long, and the leaves turns a nice red in the fall. So we took clumps of it from the front and brought it out to the backyard for around the flagpole in that flower bed.

In the springtime, this bed is full of irises which are beautiful. But the rest of the summer is kind of blah. The rhizomes of the iris have woven into such a heavy mesh underground that it's hard to dig into.  Steve was able to get a bunch of the evening primrose clumps dug down just enough. Hopefully they will take root and take over. They can stay contained in this circle, and the weed eater will keep them at bay from spreading into the lawn.

He took a load of all the dead stuff off into the woods and dumped it. We've had a few things we brought back in the woods sprout up and grow there too. That's okay. I snapped this picture of him coming back with his wheelbarrow. I told him that I just love looking at a man who is working! LOL

Now it was my turn to get ready to leave to go for my haircut. I decided that I've had this long straight hair all throughout the whole covid pandemic. I did chop away at some of it myself one time last year. Also granddaughter Chelsea trimmed the ends for me last summer. But I decided I would go in and get it cut. I have been wearing it up in a bun almost all summer.

Here is my "before" photo:

And here is my "after":

I asked for about 6 inches taken off the bottom, and some nice layers that let my curls bounce back up again,  especially on the top. It's easy to just tousel it up with a little bit of styling product and a few curls on top with the curling iron. I was pleased with the result and Steve said VaVaVaVooom!!

Now you know what I look like! 

 

It's been drizzling all evening so we didn't get the other boxwood bush moved. Maybe tomorrow.  Before or after my dentist appointment. It's just a cleaning, so won't take long. I think we are done with outdoor chores for the day.

I tossed some frozen pasties from The Pasty Oven 

into the microwave to thaw. 

Next, they go into the oven on 400 to bake them 

with a flakey crust and steaming filling. 

I think tonight is going to be a lazy evening, with maybe watching some HGTV shows, maybe doing a little sewing or weaving. I think we are winding down from a couple whirlwind weeks of camping.

Day 60 - Serendipity

It's day 60 of our coronavirus self-imposed quarantine. We are having a little bit of contact with lots of social distancing.

The word "serendipity" comes to mind. Even though we could be lacking things, and commiserating, and complaining, instead we will try to look on the bright side of things.

Which is exactly what happened to us on Thursday. Serendipity!

Remember in my last blog I said that we had gravel and topsoil delivered from a local landscaping and excavating company?

Thursday morning, Steve's younger brother was going to bring up his tractor from Menasha and spread it around for us. Unfortunately, those plans didn't work out as something had come up and he would be unable to come, and didn't know when he would be able to make it in the near future either.

Oh well, that was fine with us. We had other things we could do.
We ALWAYS have other things we can do.

The first thing we did was drive out at 8:30 in the morning to the little Mennonite garden center greenhouse called the Garden Spot. We went exactly at their opening time and there were no other customers there. We put on our masks and our gloves and headed into the large airy open greenhouses. We were able to zoom in and pick out four beautiful clematis plants for my Mother's Day present! I wanted two red ones and two white ones to intertwine and work their way up and over the pergola.

Steve said we could splurge. At $15.95 a plant, that's quite the splurge with $64 plus tax!!!  Since there were no other customers there, we also grabbed a dozen beautiful geraniums of the deeper red color, some white ones and spikes, as well as 20 tomato plants. Now we should be all set for spring. That is, if it ever comes???

We are terribly cold in Wisconsin right now as part of the polar vortex. We actually had snowflakes falling yesterday and this morning it was down to 25 degrees. The wind chills were even lower.


Once we got home from the nursery we decided to work a little bit on our front steps. Steve had bought six boards to install as kick plates and I started painting them in the garage.

He leveled out the existing steps a little bit, because they were slightly crooked.  I also  cleaned up the flower beds and straightened up the edging bricks.

While we were standing out in the front yard admiring our work, we happened to notice a truck pull up across the street in front of our neighbor's house. It was towing a big flat trailer with a skid loader on it. It happened to be from the very same Carlie's Landscaping and Excavating that had previously delivered our gravel and dirt.

We gave the guy a shout and it turns out he is the owner of the company. He was just over to do a little job across the street for the neighbors. Steve asked if he would consider coming over and spreading around our gravel and dirt for us and what would it take? He replied he could have it done in about an hour and would charge us thirty bucks???

Serendipity!!!

If we hadn't been outside by the front steps, we would have never seen him, never talked to him, and never had the opportunity to hire him at such a bargain rate.

He was done in no time over at the neighbors, and he zoomed over and went straight to work. You sure could tell this wasn't his first rodeo!

I made a few video clips for the grandkids.

I made the videos for me too, because I find it really neat watching this type of machinery at work.

He even brought a bucketful around to the front to fill in where the old original driveway had been. This was the old driveway that led to the garage door which is now my she shed. I was going to haul the dirt over there, one wheelbarrow full at a time. He just scooped it up, brought it around to the front, and dumped it.  He then slid backwards with his blade, smoothed it out and it was done. 5 seconds, tops.

True to his word, he had all of the gravel and the dirt spread around within the hour. He also jaw-jacked for a while with Steve and I. At a safe distance.

It turns out, he is the guy who did all of the original gravel work and prep work for our driveway and garage when it was built by the previous owners two years ago.

He talked about how deep down the foundation rock bed goes for underneath the motor home and also underneath our concrete slab for the garage. It is 3 ft down of layers of huge rock compacted over and over, before the upper layers were made.

His company also hauled the many many loads of fill dirt for the backyard and graded that all off. That's what makes us have such a big beautiful backyard instead of a swamp.

We handed him an envelope, not with $30 cash, but with $60 cash because he did such a fantastic job.

Serendipity!!!

He loaded up and went on his way, off to do 16 other stops that day he said. Lol.


Steve then took our Tracker and drove it back and forth and back and forth to smooth it out --- even though it was kind of packed down already from the skid loader.

That little stick shift really had to work to keep going back and forth and back and forth. Here's a video clip:

Next project up was for me to make a crock pot of calico beans, and a bowl of my favorite potato salad.

Serendipitously, Steve's older brother and his wife were on their way with a trailer full of 16 ft long pieces of siding. It is the same fibered cement smart siding that we are using on the home. He had 76 extra pieces left over from another project and was hauling it over to us, he said mainly to get it out of his garage.

They would be arriving around dinner time, so we decided to socially distance ourselves and grill outdoors. I set up the food on the picnic table in the backyard. Steve grilled out burgers and brats. It was pretty windy and cold coming down from the Northeast, so we changed that plan a little bit and ate on the front porch instead.

The guys unloaded the siding into our garage in no time flat, and we have a nice little visit. Then they had to head on out to deliver a cabinet to their daughter's home in Green Bay.


Now the paint on the wooden boards for the kick plates on the stairs were dry. We put them into place and Steve screwed them in securely.

I still have to touch up over the screw holes with dabs of paint. I'm also going to paint that top grey board so it matches all of the rest.

Another job done... And the doggers signaled their vote of approval.

By the time this was all done, we sat back in our rocking chairs, and looked at each other and smiled.

ser·en·dip·i·ty

/ˌserənˈdipədē/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

   "a fortunate stroke of serendipity"

Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle - The Second Window Box

My oh my, it certainly cooled down. We are probably 20 degrees cooler than yesterday. It is 71 degrees in Wisconsin today! It is cloudy and damp and humid but at least the temperature has dropped.

That crazy 90° stuff of the last for 5 days has just been insane for May in Wisconsin.

Steveio scavenged through the leftover treated wood from our fence project last year. He figured he'd have enough to design and make four sturdy brackets to hold up our window boxes.

I love it that we are recycling from the storage area of the garage and not using any new materials to build these window boxes boxes and brackets. Recycling at its finest!!

He looked at the design of our bracket that holds up the rear shaker porch on the second story. Using that same Craftsman Design he manufactured his own heavy duty planter box brackets.

These will be mounted directly through the siding into the studs, using five heavy lag screws on each bracket. They should easily hold the weight of the window boxes.

I stained them with the white solid colored stain, just like our fence, and Mr Antsy-Pants had to get the first ones mounted up on the house before they were barely even dry. He made sure that the brackets were level and straight and true and got them secured into place. Before I could even snap a pic, he had the box lifted up and set into place!

Locating the studs on the front of the house was a little tricky. He actually had to offset the window box a little bit from from centering it underneath the porch windows overhead. But on the other hand, with the hydrangea bush being so full on the right, it really is centered in the space. With a 6 ft long window box, I don't think it needed to be exactly symmetrical under the windows anyhow.  In the winter, I leave the hydrangea up with the dried heads being a feature.  And I plan to lay pine boughs and bows in the window boxes too.

Then we went to the store... $68 later we came out with enough materials to fill two window boxes!!! In all fairness, $30 of it was the special potting soil. It's a moisture control soil with fertilizer in it that helps to keep the roots moist for longer periods of time.

Because these window boxes will be located under the eaves, I will be watering them from my rain barrels with a watering can, probably every other day. I divided the flowers in half, so we could fill the first box up in the front of the house.  Love using our little red wagon for this purpose.

After the inner rubberized coating was dry in the boxes, we covered the drain holes with pieces of mesh tape, used for seaming drywall. This will help prevent the dirt from leaking out with the excess water.

Again, keeping with our Recycling and Reusing theme, there were five old styrofoam rose cones from up in the attic of our garage. They were left there by the previous sellers. So we chopped them up into little pieces, enough to fill the bottom of each window box for the first layer. This way I'm not filling the first inch or two with heavy pea gravel. It will help the boxes drain if we get a downpour rain angling in from the east.

NOTE- be careful if you decide to use packing peanuts to do this,

 because many of those new ones are made to dissolve.

Once that was all in place we carefully filled each portion with the new dirt. I love getting my hands dirty and feeling it between the fingers and smelling that earthy musty smell of new dirt. Steve dumped in the bag and a half while I spread it around and broke up the clumps.

Now it was time to arrange the plants. I put the taller plants to the back and the shorter plants to the front. I clumped them in groups of three in various colors. I tried to balance them from side to side so it will be somewhat harmonious from the edges to the middle.

I hope it will look interesting as they fill in and grow up. Along the front edge I put white alyssum and scopia that looks like tiny daisies that will cascade over the front. In each corner I put an interesting dangling vine called lysimachia in a bright chartreuse green.  The rest is filled in with colorful versions of petunias,pansies, marigolds, impatiens, and some small variegated coleus.

I topped off the dirt around each plant and we gave it a careful watering for the first time. I was trying not to disturb any of the fresh plantings but trying to get the potting soil to settle around each plant.

That was enough for Tuesday night. We were both soaked to the gills with sweat and what we needed was a nice cool shower.

The rest of the evening was spent out in our front porch because the temperatures were starting to drop. It was still humid, but the temps were dropping fast over an hour.  It's been the first evening in a week that we could sit in the front porch with the windows open and enjoy the fragrance of the lilacs blossoming outside on the front corner of the house. We stayed out there until almost 11 p.m. I was reading a good book and Steve was relaxing, with the dogs curled up at our feet. Very, very peaceful.

Wednesday morning, Steve had to leave early to do his driving job. It was raining outside so I had some time to work on my quilt. I'm almost done with the blocks--- soon it will be assembled and ready to be loaded onto my quilting frame.

He came home at noon while the rain drops stopped long enough for him to mount the other two brackets on the side of the house. This is on the south side located underneath the windows to my loom room. He located the studs and this time and they lined up exactly perfect underneath the window.

Once he had the brackets into place, then we could figure out where the box would set so he could cut the little notches and drill the drainage holes.

Those are crank out windows on each side but we only put them out a couple inches. The windows are not able to crank out too far or otherwise they bind and cannot be cranked back in anyhow. We normally just crack them open a bit for some fresh air.  Someday I would like to restore them back to the three double hung windows that were on the house originally.

Before he left to go back to work, he gobbled down his lunch, and then he helped me lift the second window box up onto my rolling cart. From there I was able to start filling the box with the styrofoam bits, the dirt and the rest of the remaining plants from last night.

It's almost 4 p.m. now and he will be home soon. 

Then we can lift it up and put it into place. 

 DONE!

It's a bit dreary in the pics,

due to the cloudy skies and 

rain on and off all day. 

I think it really starts to dress up this south side of the house.

Next, I think all the windows need either shutters,

or some other blue trim around the windows? 

As an added P.S. Speaking of dressing up the house--- earlier in the week, we removed the painted green squares of soffit material that had been put across the front of the house between the windows and the porch roof.  It was probably done the same time they did all the vinyl siding. Five years ago, I had painted the green squares on every other section, to cover up the textured areas that would trap dirt and look icky,

Now Steve removed them all....  it unearthed the old imprint of the house numbers from many years ago. We didn't know what we would find underneath, or why it was covered up with the tin soffit material?  Other than just not wanting to have to paint the wood, it didn't make a lot of sense to cover it up.  The frames and windows on the porch are all wood and need to be repainted every so often, so why not the flat header board above them?

I painted across it all fresh new white on the nice flat wood underneath. Back to the way it was originally.  I would love to go back to all natural wood siding on the whole house, but for now the vinyl siding will have to stay.

Steve took down the light fixture that we put up five years ago. There had never been a front porch exterior light before.  This one had such pretty leaded glass when we bought it.  It had a black frame and top which I had painted green, and now I painted it blue!   Then he put it back up again in it's proper place.

We added a trim strip of thin wood (also from the attic of the garage that I painted blue too) where the soffit meets the newly exposed white header over the windows.  Ahhhh that looks better!

Soooo I wonder what our next project will be???