Country Escape
Or renovation nightmare? To Be Continued...
Hello friends! We have an exciting update which may result in more than 1 post a year (but no guarantees). While I love our little house in the middle of the city, I have always longed for some rural land to escape to near the Shenandoah. I’d often peruse listings out there just for fun and thought that maybe one day closer to retirement, this dream might become a reality. Well, once the pandemic hit and Mike and I were stuck at home for so many months, the walls felt like they were really closing in and at the time we weren’t getting the benefits of living in the city either as everything was pretty much shutdown.
That motivated us to accelerate our time frame. So after a couple of years of hemming, hawing, debating, and searching, we finally bought a house in rural Virginia! This is the pic in the listing that really intrigued us to check this house out:
This all feels a little bit crazy, impulsive, and a bit of a splurge as well. The view is perfect (it’s also better in person, the mountains are very zoomed out in this picture); the house… needs work. A lot of work. And it’s a big house. Much bigger than our house in DC. So have we bit off more than we can chew? Maybe. Only one way to find out!
More after the jumpRadiator Covers
FINALLY
Time sure passes slowly during a pandemic. With all the extra time, we finally started a project that we vowed to do many moons ago. We would hide the ugly, old (but very efficient and effective) radiators with radiator covers that we built ourselves. We finally tackled one of them back in April!
We started with the radiator cover by the dining table. I wrote about it in a post from 2015, but here is what it looks like up close. This one isn’t too bad but painting this to look great would have been pretty difficult, plus we want to be able to put plants on top of it:
Cornices!
Pandemic Edition
Hello friends! In this post, we continue on our journey to make the windows more pretty. A few months ago, we added trim to the windows in the living room. You can see that post below:
I decided I wanted to add a cornice to pull the room together a bit more and to hide some of the window treatment hardware. So what’s a cornice, you ask? It’s a type of valance - a window treatment that covers the top of the window - but has more of a box-like construction. We used this post that I found on Pinterest for inspiration: DIY Cornice!
Here’s a picture of what the window looked like before.
Fixing the lawn. Again.
Pandemic Edition
The front yard has proven to be an unexpected adversary. You may remember that we initially tackled it in this post from 2015, when we hired someone to remove the rocks in our yard and lay down sod:
Then, Thambi sort of destroyed the lawn and Mike planted grass, which was covered in this post:
Well, the grass never really looked that good again. It was just fine. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. Mike felt that the grass wasn’t properly tilled and that might be part of the reason that the grass wasn’t doing so hot. We decided to try the This Old House Way!
First, Mike destroyed what little grass remained so we could start with a blank canvas. It’s definitely bleak:
Back patio living
Pandemic Edition
Happy Fall, folks! When the weather finally warmed up this year, I used it as an opportunity to make our back patio a more comfortable place to lounge, particularly since we are pretty much home all the time. I also wanted to incorporate more plants since the brick and concrete make it feel a bit institutional. I didn’t take a before picture but this pic from 2018 is roughly close to what it used to look like. Look how small Thambi looks!
