Front Yard Fencing and a Mailbox

I've kind of stalled-out on the yard work for a while, but we've made a lot of progress building a ranch fence in the front yard and (finally) a proper mailbox.

 The wood is pressure treated and (for those of us sick of staining/painting)  it's pre-stained. HOORAY!! We found these at Home Depot.

Still working on this side.

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Screwing new mailbox to post.

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 Talavera house numbers.

 I bought the mailbox at Signature Hardware. It will be interesting to see how it ages.

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My cabinet guy, Rodney,  is coming this week to get measurements for laundry room cabinets. I wasn't sure how I wanted to do this room and I wanted to live in the house for a while to get a feel for what I needed. I was going to put a freezer in here, but now I don't think I need one.

Laundry room as it is now:

Some of the inspiration photos I sent to Rodney.

The drawing he came up with:

Tall cabinets on the left, sink in front/center, and the washer and dryer on on the right with cabinets and hanging bar over the top. This room got SMALL real fast! I'm going with the same shaker style of white cabinets that I have in the kitchen.

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Bamboo Blinds

I'm not doing any window treatments for most of my windows. I like a bare window. But I do have a few windows that need something and the perfect answer is bamboo blinds! After spending everyday the past year at Lowe's I know everything they sell! And I had walked by the Levolor "custom size now" section a zillion times and thought I would give it a try when the time came. Well that's what I did. Here's how they look. This is a pretty quick, easy, and painless DIY.

You need to decide if you want to hang the blinds inside the window frame or outside. If you're hanging them inside, take an exact measurement and tell the store clerk that is running the cutting machine that they will be an inside mount. The cutting machine will automatically take off 1/4" so that the blinds don't rub the sides of your window frames. Outside mount is cut to the exact size you give.The cutting takes about ten minutes per blind.

There are stickers and warning cards everywhere telling you that the cords are a choking hazard, so try not to strangle yourself while completing this project :)

 They are cut in the box they come in and are full of sawdust. Opening them outside would be a good thing. I picked the darkest ones called Mahogany. Above is a picture of the back side(top) which is the dull side of the bamboo and (bottom) the front side, which is the shiny side of the bamboo. The stain is the same on the front and back it just looks different because the front/shiny side of the bamboo absorbs the stain differently than the back/dull side. They are great at filtering direct sunlight. They are not privacy blinds. They do make some that have a brown fabric lining if you want a privacy bamboo blind.

The hanging brackets are designed to be used inside or outside the window frame, but when inside the window frame there ends up being a visible square of the metal bracket-if you look from the outside. I like my window coverings to look just as good from the outside as they do from the inside so I cut that piece off with a hack saw.

Outside mount.
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Inside mount with extra square hanging down.

below After cutting off not-needed square bit for a cleaner look

 The wood support slides up over the hanging bolts and gets tightened with wing nuts.

Looking just as nice from the outside.

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The longest the Lowe's blinds go is 72". I have a sliding door that needed 63" wide by  98" long that I wanted the same blind for. When I tried to special order that size on the Lowe's/Levolor website it said that that size was too big. They don't make it. I found bamboo blinds on Overstock.com that let me pick that size and it was the same color as the Levolors. I have to admit that it is huge and pretty heavy. Not the easiest to lift with the cords.

 These are in a bedroom that faces the street so I added curtains for night privacy.

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Randomness

Vestibule

Office

Except for the office chairs and prints, this room's furniture is from Ikea. Two Malm desks and three table-tops from the table bar system with Alex storage underneath, fit like customs into this room. The arm chairs are Ektorp Jennylund with Blekinge White slip-covers .

Master Bedroom

Added hardware to kitchen cabinets

I've purchased all the local nurseries' oleander, boxwood, and lantana so I'm waiting for them to replenish their inventories. This is how it's looking so far.

orange jubilee on the side yard

Above: I've put down extra pavers to keep the grass from growing into the boxwoods. I plan on putting in a border of aged brick to separate the grass from the planters, but I haven't found the right bricks yet.
 Backyard below.

Building closets

Hers (in progress)

His

 

Before I hung the art I was trying out different chairs for this room. Not crazy about these two options, but I like taking photos of different scenarios to look back upon later to remind myself of what I liked and didn't like about the furniture's layout, size, colors/patterns, etc...

Hanging Art

I come from a family of artists and art collectors so I've ended up with a ton of art. Most of it is original, much of it is valuable, and all of it is sentimental. The thing about this is that if you take some of this art and place it by itself......it's not necessarily a piece I would buy or that is my taste. But I have found that when I group them together to form a gallery wall or walls, they create a cozy, lived-in, evolving, eclectic bohemian look that I love.

I must confess that pounding a nail into these new pristine walls was not a nice feeling and after living without anything on the walls for a few weeks I was getting used to the white minimalist look. All of these pictures came from gallery walls in my last house, so I was just going to do the same thing here in the new house. I don't really have a process, pattern or plan first. I do set a height limit and a  general spacing size between each picture and try to evenly spread out the big/small pictures and then I just go for it.

I wasn't going to keep this sofa....but here it sits :) 

Pictures, waiting to be hung, still on the floor in the hallway...