Today's blog:  Holiday Decorating on a Dime!


It's nearly December, and around this time we usually begin decorating the house for Christmas.

Because we are going away this year, I wasn't sure if I'd bother. But tonight my daughter and I suddenly felt the urge to pull out the seasonal glitter, and we realized that you don't need a tree to make your house feel happy and festive. Sometimes less is more.

Here is my holiday table-scape. This is a little wooden "tree" that I bought at The Bay last year for about $15. I planned on bringing it to the cottage, but tonight I pulled it out of storage and dressed it up a bit....

Two strings of lights and a wicker star on top and voila...I think this makes a pretty acceptable holiday tree. Here we have a sofa table from Craigslist, a lantern from Homesense, a wooden tree found at a Boxing Day sale and a couple of candles. It's all you need, and it didn't cost very much. Decorating should never be costly - use what you have, look for bargains...




Usually I decorate the fireplace mantle with fresh trimmings or holly borrowed from my neighbour's tree, but this year I just arranged some Christmas bulbs with candles in between. The big glass bulbs are actually light fixtures. I found them at a yard sale - I thought they were so cute, and I have a weakness for amber-coloured glass; it is the warmest colour...

A dime-store tea light placed in front of a tree decoration that has a little mirror in it makes a sparkly show piece...

So, candle holders from the dime store, inexpensive Christmas bulbs, and tea-lights from Ikea. (no one makes better tea-lights than Ikea). Just place shiny glass things together of a similar colour, add some candles, and you can make a very merry mantle...

Here's another idea that is practically free. Find some interesting twigs and branches. I collected mine from our property on Mayne Island...

Throw them in a vase, and hang a few decorations on them. Place some bulbs around the base...

I love these branches. Sometimes it's the really simple things that bring us the most pleasure...

...like Marcello the Bunny getting very curious and feisty. He loves it when there's a commotion going on. He was rummaging through the decorations, diving and leaping...he's hilarious.

What could be cuter than this face?

Moving on: I love lanterns, and the prices vary considerably. This one from Pottery Barn retails for $90.20.

This one from Restoration Hardware costs $159.

Both of these stores are absolute rip-offs, in my opinion. Everything they sell is made in China just like everywhere else. I bought my lantern at Homesense for $24.99 and I think it's just as nice. There was such a huge assortment that it was hard to make a choice. Tonight I filled mine with Christmas balls, but you could fill it with anything - pine cones, sea shells, rocks, candy...
(or a candle, obviously)

So there you go. A cozy, decorated living room for under $100. Put on some snappy jazz, pour a glass of wine, and enjoy...

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The cottage will remain empty for awhile as we have weekend plans, but we're aiming to have all the trim painted before we leave for Mexico. I would have gone this week, but I was dealing with dental appointments. It was kind of depressing, but I was reassured by my dentist that my teeth & gums are healthy; I lost the tooth because the root canal failed. It happens, and you have to be philosophical about it, I guess. At least I'm not losing a limb or an organ, touch wood...

I came across another exceptional artist. Her name is Linda Heslop and she lives on Vancouver Island. Her art makes my stomach leap...I wish I could afford this one, but it's not in the budget right now. It's $495. for a limited print, and then you have to factor in the cost of framing.

I will scrimp on everything, except lighting and art. And sheets. Do not buy art because you need to fill a space on a wall, or because it matches the furniture. Take your time and search on-line. Wait a few months to see if it still moves you; if it still gives you a chill down your spine, buy it.

It's worth it, it will give you years of joy, and it's a good investment if you choose carefully.

                       Calm Before the Mist - Linda Heslop

On Friday night, Lorenzo brought the hardwood flooring over in a rented Budget truck. I knew the painting had been finished, but I was on edge waiting for his call. I was half expecting him to walk in and be completely disappointed. Much to my relief, he was extremely happy with the results, and he says the pictures don't do the colour justice. He says it looks fantastic. There's a few little spots here and there to touch-up but it's finally done! And it only took three painters...

You might notice that the paint colour doesn't go all the way to the top of the wall; this is because a moulding will be going across.

Here's a little trip down memory lane - I've tried to find pictures taken from a similar angle to give a sense of what's been accomplished...

Original gloomy cottage...

Demolition - bathroom ripped out, new windows installed...

New wiring, plumbing, insulation...

Pine panelling installed...

Priming...

Painted, ready for trim work and flooring! I love our new wood stove. It reminds me of Snoopy...

Here's a few other shots:

Original spooky stairwell. This is after Lorenzo replaced the bubbly amber-coloured glass with a new window and trimmed it out in the arts & crafts style that we prefer...

Prime job that took 30 hours...

All painted...


This is one area where Lorenzo didn't replace the wood; this is the original panelling. It's a bit rough here and there, but it adds character. I can't get over the difference paint can make. The stairwell before compared to now, is incredible to me. The original light fixture will be replaced. I have bought quite a few fixtures from Lighting Direct on-line, and the amount of money you can save is incredible. Here is an onion lamp by Norwell which retails for $329...

This one is made by Kenroy, and retails for $142...

Then there's this one by Transglobe which costs $112....not much difference, is there?

Or, I could go to Rona and get this one for $54.99...

If you're willing to snoop around on-line, you can find what you're looking for, or something close enough, and save a ton of money.




Here is looking toward the bathroom door from the hallway:

We borrowed the closet from the boy's room, and half of our daughter's room to put in a family bathroom...

New panelling installed...

Doorway is trimmed out...

All painted a lovely buttery cream colour. (Man on the Moon - Benjamin Moore)

This light fixture was supposed to be for the outside; Lorenzo made a mistake. This is the fixture I bought for the hallway...I found this onion lamp at Norburn Lighting in their clearance section. Forty bucks! It has seeded glass, which I really like.

In any case, he prefers the one he installed and maybe he's right. It looks pretty cute...

Here is one of my favourite spots in the cottage, before and after...

I am so pleased with the colour - it's a true butter cream without any hint of lemon. Lorenzo says the cottage feels so clean and airy now...



Here is a picture of the west wall...

Front door, before and after...

All in all, we are very relieved that our painting migraine is over. Lorenzo organized a little painting area for me on the kitchen table. I have to paint all the trim pieces, but I can't go over this week because I have a bunch of stuff to do, and we have a Christmas party to attend on Saturday. So this week is off. Anyway, once the trim is in, the floors will be ready to be installed. And then we move in - I can't wait. The new goal is spring break....

I can't believe how much work Lorenzo has done. Everything you see, he has done with his two hands. All of it! I'm so proud of him.

Until next time!

I can relate to Charlie Brown....

I get him: The existential angst, the wondering "what it's all about," looking forward to things that end up turning into crap...

Just when the fireplace fiasco is behind us, we find ourselves mired in yet another swirl of frustration. The painter we fired is still beaking off. She mailed Lorenzo a long letter that only served to prove how ridiculous her final invoice was. There it was on paper, how each day was spent. Thirty hours in total  painting a seven-foot hallway & one short stairwell and...it's still not finished. Hour after expensive hour...day after slow-as-molasses day....one hundred and fifteen hours...and not a single room finished. The main floor has only been primed. This is headache number one.

Shortly after Lorenzo terminated her, and after he was sufficiently healed from the insult of being called a strange little man, he was told about another painter on the island. I was ready to pass out. Did you ever watch the series "Northern Exposure?" This is what passed through my mind: some guy in a plaid jacket with leaves and twigs stuck in his hair, lumbering up the driveway with a paint bucket. And a bong...

 But Lorenzo, the eternal optimist sunny-bunny that he is, took a chance on another islander. He came highly recommended, and he said he could finish the job in a few days and his quote was excellent. So he began working...

This weekend, Lorenzo stayed in town and we were almost giddy about it. Friday night, we went shopping downtown and then went out to our favourite Italian restaurant which is just down the street from our house. Red wine, flickering candle, all is right with the world. This was our anniversary dinner, six days late.

Saturday rolls around. Lorenzo's cell phone rings...I hear, "Oh no....you're kidding?"

When Lorenzo ran out of paint doing the ceiling, he went to Home Hardware and they colour-matched our Benjamin Moore paint to their Beauti-Tone paint. Their website guarantees a perfect match. The painter said there was a marked difference. Then I hear my husband suggesting that he come over with some Benjamin Moore paint. I felt this was ridiculous, to blow $150 on ferry trips just to deliver paint. So he called Home Hardware to explain the crisis that was unfolding.

The person in charge of colour-matching wasn't there. So, Lorenzo told the painter to continue with the walls. Problem is, he's running out of wall paint as well.

The next day, a brilliant solution appears: a Mayne Island courier will pick up the paint for us for a nominal fee. Great. We email him the colours, and everything is a go. But then...
Hurricane Dunderhead blows in and all the power goes off in our cottage. The winds rip through the island with such force that trees are down. A branch gets snapped off our maple tree and makes a bee-line for the painter's truck. It misses his bumper by an inch. My uncle's boat canopy gets launched into the air like a frisbee and ends up trapped upside down against his house.

Paintus interruptus.

At this point, all professionalism is gone. My poor Guido whines to the painter, "Are we cursed? Is the entire universe aligned against us? Will my cottage ever get painted?" Calmly, the painter explains that power outages happen all the time. Don't worry dude, your cottage will get painted.

In the meantime, a molar that I've had root canalled twice was starting to act up. An excursion into dental hell unfolds and I'm applying every home remedy in my arsenal: tea tree oil, peppermint oil, seal-salt compresses....  The lovely cozy weekend we envisioned turns into a black swirl of pain. The rain is pounding down, the kids are making noise, my son is hammering on his drums, the dog wants to go for a walk. And then everyone wants dinner...

Today, I saw my dentist and the tooth has to be extracted. Here is my prediction: in the not-so-distant future, we will regard root canals with same disbelief that we imagine blood-letting, or arsenic cures from the 18th century. Root canals fail at least 50-percent of the time because anaerobic bacteria is almost always present in the root. Left trapped, without oxygen, it mutates. Years go by, and then BOOM. I will never have another root canal. They are being linked to many auto-immune diseases.

If you grew up in the 1970's, there's a good chance your mouth was drilled to smithereens. My brother, sister, and myself must have had the most sadistic dentist who ever lived. All of us have been told that our molars were drilled beyond anything that was reasonable or even ethical. Did our parents notice? They were too busy watching Carol Burnett...

My kids have never had a cavity. But we were always being told that we had cavities, and now I think it was all a pile of BS. So there's a good chance that I'm going to have serious problems with my overly-drilled molars. So I went to the library and started reading these books... I've learned a lot.

 

*     *     *     *


So that's the scoop.
The good news is, Lorenzo and I are always able to come up with " what if " scenarios that leave us doubled over in hysterics: a massive pine tree is going to squash our cottage. The painter will get attacked by a bat. He'll slip on a frog. It's a glorious sunny day on Mayne Island but there's a gloomy rain-cloud suspended over our cottage. The neighbours are having a pleasant barbecue while Lorenzo does battle with a plague of blood-thirsty locusts.

Our cottage starts to decay before our very eyes, like something out of a horror movie...

It felt good to laugh, even though it hurt my infected tooth.


*     *     *     *

Here is one really exciting thing to report: I was determined to learn Oscar Peterson's "Hymn to Freedom." So I went to Long & McQuade and dealt with a really dumb guy who thought it was spelled "Him." Then he typed in "Peaterson" and "Oskar" until I nearly wept. Finally, I got the book ordered.

When it arrived and I began to play it, I quickly realized that it was a cheesed-down version and it lacked all of the snappy piano licks that I was desperate to learn. After doing some snooping around on the internet, I found out that many years ago, Oscar Peterson put out a book called "Note for Note" which featured exact transcriptions of his pieces. Yay! All I have to do is get this book and I'll turn into a wicked piano player. But the book is out of print and is being sold on Amazon and Ebay for upwards of $900. I was deflated. On a whim, I checked the Vancouver Library data base and....oh my god, they have a copy. This is the best thing to happen to me in so long - I can't wait until my request comes in.

What else? When I felt like I wanted to drop a canon-ball on our cottage, I escaped into house fantasy and downloaded pictures that cheered me up. And gave me inspiration...

What a beautiful house. Our cottage has the same Dutch colonial design...with a few tweaks, it has potential and maybe it could end up not looking so much like the Amityville Horror House...

What I hate most about the exterior are the blue deck railings. They are such an eye-sore and they're an obstacle to enjoying the nature that surrounds us...

We're thinking of replacing them with cable-wire. I love this - your eye passes right through the railing because the cable-wire is almost visually transparent. With all of our surrounding trees, it would feel as though we're suspended in a tree house...

Stainless steel cable wire is very expensive, but there are much cheaper options. Lorenzo says this will be very time-consuming and tricky. I have faith that he can do it! 

I also find myself pondering our small deck on the south-side of the cottage. I want this to be a very special spot, because I love the sun and I think it could be made very pretty. Here is how it looks now...

And here is how it could be!

Our plan is do board & batten siding...

add some decorative accents...

and voila! Our little engine-that-could, our sad Charlie Brown tree of a cottage, could end up like this. Seriously, it could...

And here's what else I'm excited about. Our cottage is on a corner, and sits atop a hill...

This presents many landscape challenges. We have a third of an acre to play with - right now your eye just travels downward. A giant slope is only good if you`re planning to buy a toboggan...

and currently, it's not very pretty...

But it is going to be a glorious, magical piece of island property. We're going to terrace the land, add plantings, have sneaky little areas to sit and read a book, and when it's done...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It will be a lot of hard work, but I'm looking forward to it. I already know what I want to plant, and once the inside is finished, we'll be itching to get going on another project. We are incapable of sitting around doing nothing. So I did some reading on grass, because in the summer grass typically looks burnt and ugly. Here is the typical west-coast lawn in summer...

 We keep planting the wrong grass. You need grass with deeper roots.

Lorenzo wonders what I do on the computer. I research stuff. Check this out:

A guy spent eight years developing a grass seed that has won awards and was featured in This Old House magazine. It's called Pearl's Premium...

Requires no chemicals, guaranteed to be lush and green with only one watering and one mowing per month. Think of the carbon footprint of the typical stupid lawn: gas mowers pumping pollution into the air, noise, fertilizers, thousands of gallons of water...it's insane. I'm going to plant Pearl's Premium seed in between flower beds. The pictures are terrific...

And it's guaranteed to thrive and flourish in the toughest of conditions...

Well, that's my blog for tonight. I need to take my penicillin now...