Tuesday, May 25, 2010

White Open Spaces... (sing it)

We live in a very modest sized home. Don't get me wrong we love it and it's perfect for us now, but once in awhile, I daydream of the day when we have a little more room. I'm a sucker for the beach house/cottage spaces... talk about laid back. I'd be wearing flip flops for the rest of my life if I lived in this place. I love the paneling on the ceiling. That will have to be a definite project in the future for our place, as well as the transom windows above the doors.

I've been keeping an eye out for some free wood, especially old and worn kind of like this table. I'd like to build a dining table someday. I think it'd be a great project with the end result getting years of everyday use. I can see it now, after every dinner... "kids, your dad built this table with his own two hands."...kids reply with, "I know dad, sheesh!"images via Country Home Ideas

Ahhhh, the good life!

Monday, May 24, 2010

Cozy inspiration

.
These great cozy scenes, via Home & Cottage magazine.
Great inspiration for this upcoming spring/summer season, don'tcha think?
Enjoy!


I hope you are having a wonderful start to your week!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Deluxe Treehouses!

Maybe when you build a tree house for your child someday,
you can make sure it's a place where you want to stay too!

This one was designed and built by Pete Nelson
through his Seattle-based TreeHouse Workshop, Inc.

"Inside the Temple of the Blue Moon on a
primordial patch of forest in Fall City, Wash.

Also a Pete Nelson creation."

"Perched high in the forest of Okinawa is a unique
creation by
master Japanese treehouse builder Kobayashi Takashi."

"The Free Spirit Spheres in British Columbia, Canada are
designed to be treehouses for adults. Handmade
from local wood, they are envisioned for meditation,
photography, canopy research or wildlife watching."

Finca Bellavista treehouse

"A pair of expats in Costa Rica, Matt and Erica Hogan, are developing a 30-lot eco-village in paradise. Finca Bellavista, as the small community is called, will have a microhydro plant on a gurgling stream, solar panels, a recycling center and a common garden. Transportation is by foot or ziplines, and visitors and residents will bunk in the trees."


If you want to find out more about these tree houses and check out some other ones, click here!

Monday, May 17, 2010

Beefing up Porch Columns!


I apologize for the long stint of time with no new postings, it's been such a busy past few weeks. In short it was family visiting us in Tacoma, then we visited family in Portland, then different family visited us in Tacoma, then catching up with friends. But now we're back and this past weekend we had some time to do a little house project. A project that had to be pushed to the top of the list.




Operation "curb appeal", which wasn't supposed to start until summer, had to officially start this past weekend. I noticed that the wisteria we planted was growing very quickly and attaching itself to the column, which was the plan so it would go across the top of the porch, BUT as I said, we had plans to beef up of the porch columns first to further add to the craftsman style of the house. So we decided we would at least get that column done, and then let the wisteria do it's thing.

The columns that are up now are just 5"x5" and looked kind of scrawny to me, just very basic and no character.










I wanted a tapering effect
on the columns so I built a
surrounding base of 2"x2"s
at the top and a base
of 2"x4"s at the bottom.
















I went to Loews and had a 4'x8'x1" piece of plywood cut into 3 sections of 13.25" x 75". I wanted each piece to be wide enough for the base of the columns and 13.25" was perfect. Unfortunately, we couldn't get 4 sections out of the 4x8, so we'll have to go back later to finish the backside of the column.

I held each piece up to the actual column for proper measuring for the tapered sides, because I didn't want to take any chances on my math.

It was time consuming and a little difficult working around the wisteria which had already surrounded the column...




...my lovely wife Cassie gave each section two coats of sealer on all sides to help keep the wood weather resistant for many years to come. (See that chain linked fence? Our next big project is to replace that with a more charming wooden fence.)


And Voila!

It's not completely done, I still want to add more trim to it and extend the base of it down to the ground but it'll do for now. Oh, and remember, the column is only finished on 3 sides! We'll probably finish it up next weekend, if not sooner. The wisteria can be on it's climbing way!