I thought I'd share

Since I've been a bit down lately, I have been up late (LATE) at night, surfing these beloved series of tubes we call the interwebs, and found some truly magnificent blogs. They are inspiring (teacup birdfeeder) and funny, and full of great ideas. I won't lie and say I don't covet the houses and their decorating budgets from the core of my being, but at least they share their design techniques and thift store finds, as well as lots of step-by-step projects...with pictures. This is key, since I need to "read the pictures" often to figure out what's going on!
Here are a few of my favourites. And their blogs have links that will take you all sorts of interesting places:

Butteryum. Lots of great recipes here. I made the stuffed shells and they turned out great. I can't wait to try the spaghetti sauce recipe.

Homebody.She's all about the thrift store furniture. I wish we had as good a system up here as craigslist seems to be for them (kijiji doesn't come close here).

The Pleasures of Homemaking. Check out her deck. I'm not sure if it'd work up here (the sea salt might eat it) but it looks great!



Living with Lindsay. She recovers a chair and it is magical. I wish I was this fabulous.

Southern Hospitality. Thanks for introducing us to beadboard wallpaper!

The image here is from Lavender and Roses.
Hopefully you'll visit these and be inspired too. :)

What I've been up to while The Owner is away

It's been a busy week here, with lots of time to get things done. And by that, I mean tackle all the projects that have been sadly lacking in completion until now.
So, as a brief rundown, I have:
1) Put up a curtain to hide the mess in the half-finished cabinet, which looks pretty fabulous if I don't say so myself
2) Put together a post for my mailbox
3) Stained the stairs
4) Finished painting around the front door, ceilings and living room touch ups
5) Installed a new peep hole
6) Retouched the paint on the door
7) Found and installed a brass mortise lock doorknob for the front door
8) Done a really cute project involving a teacup birdfeeder I found online

However, I only have photos for a few of these things because I only have my iCamera and it's dark here.

So here's some evidence of what's been happening:


The Peephole! This is the old one, I haven't taken a pic of the shiny new one yet. It is brass to match the new knob set.


The Stairs. The bottom one is unfinished, the top one has a coat of Varathane in "Cherry" on it. Because the stairs are pine and in kind of rough shape, they're not taking stain evenly, which I hope will be less obvious with a couple more coats. Also, it's so humid here that it takes about 3x longer to dry than usual.



All the stairs. The risers still have to be painted to make it look crisp, and I think it's an improvement, but only The Owner will decide.