A little of this, a little of that...

I thought I would update the blog while I watch the National Spelling Bee. These kids are amazing!

Here is a photo of one of my Hot Cocoa roses. Isn't it gorgeous? It almost doesn't look real!
I have another blossom on my Lollipop Gerbera daisy. It is a variegated pink color with some very deep pinks when it first blossoms - then it begins to fade...
This is the second garden bed near the pool/patio area. It is where I planted the hot peppers, sweet peppers, banana peppers and peas. The supports along the wall will (hopefully) keep the pea plants in line...
Here is my flower bed. This is also in the pool/patio area and has mostly perennials, with a few annuals thrown in for good measure. The plants really shot up the past couple of days with all the rain we've had. I've had a couple of my coleus die, but mostly the plants are doing really well...
DH has been working on installing a TV out by the patio/pool. It will go under the garage overhang so it will stay dry. The TV will go on this pole; the hole behind the pole is for an outlet...
Here is the view of the TV pole from the hot tub...
The bench for the half bath arrived today and I assembled it. The half bath is near the pool and will also be used as a changing area. The bins on the bookcase will provide places for people to store their clothes while they swim. I still need to purchase some large bath towels or beach towels for this bathroom...

The Pens are in the Stanley Cup Playoff game against the Detroit Redwings. The best-of-7 series begins Saturday night, so LET'S GO PENS!!!

My, how time flies!

My apologies for taking so long to update my blog. There hasn't been all that much going on with the house - at least that's my excuse! I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving day. We had some of DH's family down and had an enjoyable time.

I drove to Winchester, VA on Tuesday to pick up DD so that she could spend all her time in the car doing homework. It was the only way she could come home for Thanksgiving. She also did homework pretty much morning to night the whole time she was home, and also in the car on the way back (I didn't have to drive her back - she was able to catch a ride with a friend from OH).

We have been having a problem with water getting into the basement. While DH was up on a ladder outside my sewing studio, he spotted the problem. The flashing in this area is missing, or not done correctly. There is a gap between the gutter and the wall to the right and the water is missing the gutter and traveling down the brick wall into the basement.
You can see the white marks on the brick (to the left of the ladder shadow) where the water has been trickling down the bricks...
DH has made a lot of progress in sorting boxes and things in the basement. Here are all the games - we sure do have a lot! I've gotten rid of stacks of games the past few years at the church rummage sale. We used to go to garage sales and buy games for $1.00, which is the reason we have so many. I'll have to sort through these again and set aside some more for next year's sale. Our family was big into board games, but not so much anymore.
The holiday decorations and textbooks/papers are on shelves, but we either need to get rid of some, or get more shelves...
Here is the corner where the leftover paint is stored...
And here are the empty boxes and luggage...
Our kitchen/family room stools arrived today! I got them assembled (only 4 screws per stool) and I think they look nice there. They certainly are sturdy, not to mention heavy!
Here is a shot of the room where the stools are...
I spent a good part of today sorting through the items behind the French doors in the great room. I arranged the shelves and got all the plaster dust off the shelves from when DH when doing some electrical work inside the closet.
We were very surprised on this first day of deer hunting season that our hunter did not show up to hunt. We figured the hunter set the hunting blind up behind our house 3 weeks ago to stake out a spot for the first day of hunting season, but he was a no-show today. We'll see if he shows up tomorrow...

The never-ending to-do list...

DH spent Saturday installing the gas logs in our fireplace. It's wonderful to flip a switch on the wall and have a fire in the fireplace. I have used it often since he finished installing it...

And the weather outside made it all the nicer to have a fire in the fireplace. We had snow flurries all day Saturday and Sunday, but fortunately only a bit of it stuck to the ground.
DH's other project for the weekend was to work on the broom closet. The builder only had one shelf in the closet and it doesn't hold much. DH will add a couple of more shelves for cleaning supplies, an outlet for plugging in chargers for phones, etc. (he actually installed it before I shot this photo), and an outlet to plug my Swiffer sweeper vac into to charge it.
While he was at the store to get a longer pipe to install the gas logs, he picked up a couple of thin sheets of metal to put in the bottom of my spice drawers to keep the magnetic tins from sliding around.
DD asked me to take some photos of her room and post them so her friends at college can see her room, so here they are. There are still a couple of piles of things laying around that didn't go back to college with her.
The dresser and closet side of the room and the all-important golf ball collection...
The desk area and entrance to her room...
The bookcase...
For those following the saga of the hunting blind that someone set up on our property, we still haven't seen any sign of the owner. The winds were strong on Saturday, so the blind collapsed but didn't blow away because it is staked into the ground. Gun season for deer hunting begins the Monday following Thanksgiving here in PA, so my guess is that he set up the blind early to stake out his territory. He'll be really surprised when he comes back to hunt and finds the Posted signs that we've hung up around our property!
A good part of this weekend was spent searching online for some stools for the bar in the kitchen/family room. I sent DH a long list of possibilities and he sent back a list of his 3 favorites. This one is the Tommy stool - I was a bit worried that the legs on this one would mar the wood floors and they were so narrow at the bottom it wasn't obvious that felt pads would work on the legs...
This one is the Hillsdale Cierra stool. Part of the problem with all the stools we looked at was the risk that the reds wouldn't coordinate with the red chairs that we already have in the room in front of the fireplace. They came in other colors, so the second dilemma was trying to decide on color.
We finally decided on this stool. It is the Hillsdale Venus stool and we bought 4 of them for the kitchen bar area. The online reviews were very good - very well made, sturdy, and comfortable...
I think this stool is really fun, but DH didn't care for it. Maybe I'll get it for my sewing studio. I'm planning to get a stool to sit on at my cutting table while I work on my scrapbooking. I need to get the counter-height cutting table in there first, then a 26" stool should work well.
I spent Saturday doing some cleaning and cutting shelf liner to fit the shelves and drawers in my kitchen. I didn't do all of the cupboards, but wanted to get the ones done that might get water or dirt on them. I mainly did the cupboards where I store my glassware and the drawers where I store my spices.

I also worked on a set of placemats that I'm making for our family room table. I finished one last week and yesterday I almost finished a second one. It may be a while before I get all 6 of them done! The embroidery takes 45 minutes to an hour per placemat and the handstitching around the embroidery takes about an hour per placemat. I hate handstitching, but it really adds to the details on the placemat. Photos to come later...

Christmas is coming!

So, we finally found the right size light bulb for the glass-topped coffee table that sits between the 2 red chairs in front of the fireplace, and now that there is an outlet in the floor, we were able to see how it looks when it's lit up. It's a fun table!
Last night I decided to finish a UFO (UnFinished Object) in my long list of quilting and sewing UFOs. I'm also probably procrastinating on finishing DD's window seat cushion because I'm not exactly sure how to go about making it. :-D

I started this quilted wall hanging back in 2004, right after I'd taken an online quilting course (Starting From Scratch) at http://quiltuniversity.com/. I embroidered all the reindeer and Santa squares and sewed the top together. After that, it sat for quite a while because I had never done machine quilting before and I wasn't quite sure what my next move would be.

The green squares were embroidered after I put the quilt sandwich (backing fabric, batting, quilt top) together so that the stitches would help hold the 3 layers together. I was having an issue with my sewing machine back then and the tension was really loose on the back of the quilt, but I didn't realize it until I had embroidered most of the green squares. I set the quilt aside for a while (which turned into a couple of years - I didn't like going down to the basement to sew in our former house). Last night I got the quilt out and "stitched in the ditch" in the blue squares, in the two text squares, and around the outer border. Then I trimmed the quilt up and sewed the binding on the outer edge.

I like how it turned out. I designed the quilt from scratch, using embroidery designs from http://emblibrary.com/. Here are some close-up shots of some of the squares. Here is Dancer and the Christmas tree outlines...
And here is Donner and the Santa hat outlines...
And, of course, Rudolph had to be embroidered on blizzard fabric instead of the snow fabric that all the other reindeer were embroidered on, since Rudolph had to save Christmas in the midst of a blizzard...

I still need to make a label and sew it on the back, but it's nice to finally have it done (and it's only been in the making for 4 years!).

Golf balls and outlets and deer, oh my!

I saw a couple of deer down behind the house today. When I walked back from the mailbox, there were two deer (not sure if they were the same 2) at the end of the driveway. One ran but I was able to get within about 10 feet of the other one before he ran off. (Click on the photo to see them better.)
There were only 2 guys working on the patio today. They only worked on the travertine tile and are almost finished. It will take about another half day to finish, I think. Here is what they have done...
And here is what they have left to do...
So, my sewing studio is almost done. Here is the closet...
It still looks messy, but I only have a couple of boxes left to empty, plus these 5-6 boxes that need to be carried down to the basement. The two on the right are packed with things for next year's rummage sale at church...

This pile in the corner will stay in boxes for a while. DH's grandfather built a corner cabinet years ago from trees on his property. The cabinet needs some TLC before it can be put to use in my sewing studio. DH's list of things to do is very long, so I'm guessing it will be a while before he gets around to working on the cabinet. Most of the items that will go in the cabinet are crafting supplies that I don't use all that often, so it's OK for them to sit in boxes for now.
Here is the photo of my sewing studio chair that I promised to post...
And I also said I would post a photo of the black outlet covers in the kitchen. They blend in with the granite much better than the white ones that used to be there.
This last photo collage is for DD. She has been collecting golf balls from the property ever since we bought it last year. Here are 4 more for her collection, but she has to find them herself when she gets home on school break. :-D (Hint: they are all along the driveway...)

Getting ready to finish the patio area...

The wood has arrived to finish the deck. It is Brazilian Teak (cumaru) which is the same wood we have on the floors in the great room, family room, and DH's office. The landscapers will be back tomorrow to do some more work. I don't know whether they will be pouring the concrete around the pool tomorrow, or working on something else. Here is the cumuru...

The travertine pavers have also arrived. Here is one up against the brick on the back of the garage. The colors in the travertine don't show up well in this photo and show up better when you wet the stone.
Here is a photo of the patio which shows most of the yard. The area that is currently covered with concrete will have the travertine pavers on top. The area around the pool will be exposed aggregate concrete.
While my mom was here we stopped at Joanns to buy fabric to cover my hope chest which is in the guest room. This is the old fabric that I took off the chest...
And I recovered it with this striped fabric...
We went out and found a mirror for the guest bathroom when my mom was here. Today we went out and found a mirror for the powder room. We struck out on finding mirrors for our master bathroom however, so I'll have to keep using my little pink-handled hand mirror, leaning against the wall. It makes doing my hair very interesting...

I've been doing some more sorting and unpacking in the sewing studio. I also spent some time trying to figure out what to do for a cutting table and a pressing table. I need some more book storage, so I think I'll try to find a couple of short bookcases and use them as the legs for a tabletop and use that for my cutting table. For the pressing table, I'll cover a piece of plywood with batting and muslin and figure out something to use for legs. I've seen some table legs at IKEA that might work well.

And the most amazing thing that happened this week...local gas prices are down to $3.49/gallon!

Don't you love vacuum tracks?

I'm back! The pool looked good enough to jump in - well, almost. And I didn't jump in it because DH had said he was going to shock the pool and I didn't know whether or not he had already done it. The landscapers have prepared the pool for the concrete (exposed aggregate) surround...
The retaining wall for the flowerbed is in now. The white pipe in the foreground is what the water from the pool and patio will drain into. It will become more obvious after the concrete is poured and the pavers are in. Just trust me for now - it's a drain...
The pool equipment is all hooked up and the pump was running when I got home...
The vacuum even works! The pool was so dirty that I could see the tracks that the vacuum made as it wandered around the pool! DH used the net to get most of the stones out of the pool before he started the vacuum, but every now and then the vacuum would stop because it choked on a stone.
And the satellite dish was installed while I was gone. I'm hoping we will have better reception than we had with the cable. I missed parts of many Olympic gymnastics routines because the TV program would break up right at the very worst possible time! :-(
I think the next few days will be spent working in my sewing studio, unpacking the boxes (I'll make my mom help me!). My chair arrived, but I didn't get a photo of it yet. I'll wait and take a picture once DH and DS carry it upstairs to the sewing room...