Crossing the Bridge

Roughly six weeks ago our family moved from a lovely 2000 square foot home in the trees of Castro Valley, California, to a tiny 1940's cottage in the small water-side town of Benicia, California. It was a daring move.  While both towns are technically within the "Bay Area", or greater San Francisco metropolis, Benicia requires the crossing of a toll-bridge, which, to many Bay Areans, means it doesn't exist.  This explains how I managed to overlook this quaint town for the first 6 years of my Bay Area residence.

It's not the bridge-crossing alone that makes this move a daring one, however.  The house we signed up for is a cottage that was built in the 1940's; giving it ample time for a speckled history of being loved and nurtured, as well as abused and neglected, as evidenced by uniquely executed additions, mismatched fencing, questionable plumbing and wiring, a variety of flooring types, and a well-earned, 70-year-old-house scent.

In general, I welcome this type of "character" in a home.  I prefer it to the modern comforts found in many tract homes, actually.  But, it can be a challenge to take on as a renter. Particularly if the contractor in charge of renovating the well-aged home fails to complete the renovations prior to the move-in date.  When we arrived on moving day, with two truck-loads of way too much stuff, our new little cottage was missing a few necessities (any appliances, useable closets, finished floors, functioning gas, electricity, plumbing, sinks and showers).

Why?

Well, for the first month of living with strange hammer-weilding men traipsing through our personal space, drilling holes in our walls, holding cock-fights on our roof (or so we suspect), and shoveling shit (yes literally) in our backyard, we weren't sure we had a good answer to that question.  But, there was an answer.  We came here on purpose.  We were following our soul-fire.  That unquenchable inner light that haunts you with visions of the life you're meant to be living.  I have always felt it - since I was a child drawing pictures of my dream home.

We saw the potential for that life in this old home, in this small town.  And, while the initial weeks were flooded with the dread that maybe we had made a horrible mistake, Benicia gently whispered to us that we were home.  She whispered in the distant lullaby of the train whistle and passing boat horns.  She presented us with gifts of sea glass and beach wood.  And she embraced us with the warm smiles and genuine "hello's" of her community.

Slowly, this cottage is accepting our many treasures (and helping us to identify the less keep-worthy items).  Goodwill and Craigslist have been well supplied by our loosening grip of 'stuff'.  It feels good to trim back again.  I have always felt at home in a cottage.  It makes sense in my entropic mind to live in a smaller space with less to manage.

Not everything is smaller though.  We have a lot of dirt to play with here, and I'm giddy about it.  This weekend, Klee and I tore down the old picket fence surrounding our large front yard.  We have been carefully pulling out old rusted screws and sifting out the rotted lumbar (not a small task) in order to reclaim the old wood to build a new fence.  We are building a "hog-fence" (also called a welded wire, or no-climbe fence).  We have already re-set all of the posts in cement and are almost ready to start assembling.  I can't wait!  Once we have it up we can start our garden.  We are planning to plant a large vegetable garden in our front yard and another in our backyard.

This is it!  The beginning of the answer.  A small piece of the WHY that moved us here.  We are living in a 1940's cottage (at substantially less rent than before) surrounded by the promise of vegetables and flowers (and chickens?), on a quiet street with friendly, and perfectly quirky neighbors. We are just a short bike-ride away from the beach and a fabulous downtown community that embraces art and music.  This is the vision.  We are here and my heart feels at home.

I Hit the Motherlode!

Elli and I set out for an Ikea outing yesterday when we happened upon a local estate sale.  I have almost no ability to resist garage/yard/estate sale signs, so we detoured.  Fortunately, my Mr. shares in my sickness, so the only reprimand I receive from these detours is for going without him.

Anyway, I found FABULOUS! I can not wait to post these treasures in our shop! Hats! Scarves!  Bohemian Beads! Polka dots! Ruby depression glass! Linen!

I'm beyond giddy. 

The Shop!

We did it! We've finally launched Entropy: The Shop. And just in time for the holidays! We even shipped our first order this week!

We're small right now, but are growing daily. Please stop by and check out the goods...

We're selling some of our fabulous vintage finds:

My funky bohemian designs:

And Klee's delectibles!

And, if you ever see something you want from one of my blog posts, please message me, I'll do my best to accommodate!

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What To Do With Old Branches and Tin Cans?

Make a towel hook/vase for the half bath!

A bulky towel rod in a bathroom that has neither a tub nor a shower just makes no sense at all.

Peace out!

Painter's Tape and A Little Bit of Psychosis

I promise there is a deep and provocative blog entry brewing within me, and I will write it soon, but not today.  I simply don't have the mental organization to pull it off.

So, I'll share another of my recent OCD projects...
The staircase!


Our staircase was beaten up and painted white (at some point long, long ago).  Now, I like white railing very much in the right setting, but these stairs are in a vaulted stark-white entryway, leaving the railing virtually invisible.












After a lot of playing with colors, I changed all that.

In general, when I paint I like to free-hand all of my trim.  I learned years ago that using painter's tape just takes a lot of extra time and the edge never looks as clean.  However, when I'm painting in tough corners, or in patterns which require meticulous lines (like stripes on a wall), I reluctantly pull out the blue rolls of sin. It's a love/hate thing.  It seems no matter how careful I am, when I go to pull the tape off, I find drips and bleeds.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

This is an OCD nightmare.  Especially if I've mixed my own colors, as I did here, and have limited quantity of paint for touch-ups.  I hover over these lines for hours with my magnifying glass and that familiar lump of anxiety in my chest.  But, eventually, I remember that sometimes you just have to step away from the project and take your little blue pills.


In the end, I make my peace with the madness,
and it all works out...

And, just in time for fall!

I Own Very Few Articles of Clothing That Don't Have Paint Spatter Somewhere

Paint is always close at hand in my world.  The other day Klee asked if I wanted to toss out the hideous pink curtains that came with the house.  I had been using them as drop cloths for painting the cabinets.  He figured, since the cabinets were done, I was done painting, so the curtains could go.

Oh, Klee.  The painting is never done...

Klee's old nightstand (which spent a year outside)

I found the paint at the rejected paint
stand at Lowes ($2.00!)
The knobs were on sale at Anthropologie

The Office (Devil Birds Included)

View from my bed

Before I get started, I have to comment on the duck.  I'm sitting here, on my bed, and I hear a quack from the creek below.  How completely cool is that!? (I never know what punctuation to use when I'm both questioning and excited. There needs to be a third option.)  And the duck is not alone!  I have been spied on by both deer and wild turkey.  And, somewhere in those trees is a horrid screeching devil bird and some form of bear-dog.

I also believe it is skunk season, as I have passed far too many aromatic road-kills these past few weeks.  I always liked the scent of a distant skunk.  Kinda feels like home (weird?).  But, up close, it loses that homey charm.

I really want to share my latest project with you.  Please excuse my tangent-riddled brain.  She's tired.  Also, the lyme symptoms are back and doing a number on her clarity.

Well, we've been working on our backyard this month.  I can't even describe how calming it is to finally have life out there.  (I will show you before and after pics in a future blog.)  One of the major improvements, of course, is the grass!  It arrived on our driveway in one big square pile of dirt burritos. I wanted to surprise Klee when he came home from work, so I managed to muster my superhuman strength, which seems to kick in when I'm in project mode, and lugged each of those muddy rolls to the backyard.

I was delighted to find a large wooden pallet at the bottom of the heap.  I couldn't wait to play.  As the ideas developed, I knew that one pallet would not suffice.  So, Klee and I set out to scavenge for more.  They're everywhere!  But they aren't all for the taking.  Some businesses reuse their pallets, so we had to make sure via lookout man and getaway van that they were free to take.  We collected all different sizes and color shades. Treasure hunting is kind of our thing.


So that's a whole lot of typing to tell you that I made some cool stuff out of wood pallets... and other materials like a big cardboard piece, tin cans, rebar twisties, etc..

Since Klee and I are both creative types, we decided to designate a wall in our bedroom to be our "ideas" wall.  We weren't sure just how we would go about this until our magic pallet appeared.

The great thing about pallets is that they are pretty much pre-assembled (take that Ikea!).  However, you will most likely want to embellish yours.  In this case, I cleaned and lightly sanded some of the really rough spots.  Then I applied just one coat of paint, as I wanted the character of the wood to show through.  I backed it with a large piece of cardboard, covered in fabric, which I had laying around (I have crap like that stashed all over the place).  The purpose of the fabric and cardboard was to serve as a pinboard, possibly sparing the wall from unsightly pricks.  This turned out to be mute, however, as I then proceeded to use eight screws to install the piece.  Mama likes her power tools.

Once the pallet was mounted, I played...

My tin can project (in process)

Card Klee gave me, telling me I was
courageous; and some shells
 from our beach trips

Sentimental frame, postcard, jars of rocks, and vintage
hat which I bought at a thrift store in Santa Cruz
when I was about 17 years old 

And, what idea wall is complete without a desk?

I plan to add glass to the top.  It turns out,
a desk with large gaps, has some drawbacks 

And, cool antique kitchen cart, which Klee and I found on an unrelated treasure hunt a while back.









The wall has two square windows which I've only slightly covered.  I will most likely add to them eventually.

I used wire, curtain rings and
fabric-like paper

It's still a work in progress, but, I guess that's the whole point of an "idea" wall, right?  It will change with each new piece of inspiration, or project.

Repurposing With Flower Power

One of the casualties of our recent move was a loft bed which I had been using in the kids' room.  When we attempted to reassemble it in the new house, we quickly realized that it was too bent up to go back together properly.  So, the skeleton of said bed has been perched outside, by the garbage cans, theoretically waiting for one of us to make a trip to the recycling center.

It's hard for me to explain how my projects come to me.  Inspiration usually hits me when I'm attempting to do something completely unrelated.  I might see something, that makes me think of that other thing, that reminds me of something in the back of my garage that would be great for...  it's like that.  So, it was something like that, that lead me to my most recent headboard project, using, of course, the abandoned loft bed frame.

It started when I realized that the mattress supports for the loft bed were the exact length of a king headboard.  I liked the lines of the metal supports but didn't like the cheap Ikea metal finish, so I decided to paint.




Paint falls into one of my hoarding categories.  I like to have paint on hand, since nothing changes a look faster than a coat of paint!  Paint can get expensive, so I've made a habit of checking the rejected paints at Lowe's, Home Depot, Ace hardware, etc..  There's always a table of paint cans that were denied, generally because the color or finish wasn't what the buyers wanted.  These cans are usually $1 to $5, as opposed to $30.  Not bad.

In this case, I had a blue color that I liked, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I pulled out my stash and started mixing.  I came up with a perfect gun-metal grey.

Some of you may recall the headboard project in which I layered old fabric samples.  When we moved, I collected and stored those samples, uncertain of how I was going to use them in the new house.  It occurred to me that the cold look of the frame might benefit from some fabric softening, so I started to play.

My idea was to make fabric flowers.  Then I remembered that I have a tin filled with old buttons from my mother's and grandmother's sewing days.  I was so excited to infuse some history into this project.  I also decided to use some of the yarn (which I got from freecycle a while back) for accents.

Once I started applying the flowers to the frame (I sewed them on), I realized I was going to need to make a bundle of them in order to get the effect I was looking for.  I was going for the look of scattered flowers, but I think it would also look really cool to use one to three large flowers instead.

After a lot of placing, removing, repositioning, and staring, it was time to install the headboard.  This was easy to do since the frame had perfectly placed holes which I was able to use for mounting it to the wall.  I used deck screws because I liked the rusted look of them.

I had a few flowers left over which I've had a little fun with.  There are so many fun applications for them.  One of my favorites is lampshade embellishment.  In this case I used magnets to apply the flowers to prevent damaging the shades.

Klee and I are planning to open a little on-line shop to sell some of our creations and finds.  I think I might sell some of my flowers there. What do you think?

Anyway, stay tuned my friends.  I have an obscene amount of projects to catch you up on.

Peace out!

So, As I Was Saying...

I miss you guys!!!  Well, I guess, I miss writing to you guys.  I moved in May and have had a bit too much entropy to keep up with life.  I've concluded that I won't be able to completely catch you up on my experiences, epiphanies, blunders... but, I will come back to you as I can.  I have done some fun projects which I would love to share sometime soon; so please, stay with me.

For now, I will leave you with this:

Tin tiles backing open cabinets to make a fun
dish display/design element to  the kitchen.

And there's so much more to share if you'll just hang in there with me!!

Jar Pennies

*Clink**Clink*

Adding pennies to our jar

On the quest for

our new home...

The flowers mark our savings.  They have to climb all the way to the top right-hand corner.  Can't wait to see where this leads!

The Latest Dish

So, one of the things I love about Klee is his creative spark.  It's fun to be with someone who appreciates a good project like I do.  He embraces my eclectic flair, and contributes a great deal of his own.

As a chef, Klee has completely altered my relationship with food.  The man is an artist.  I mean, he needs his own spot on the Food Network, complete with cult following.  And, frankly, I deserve a cajones medal for even attempting to cook for him.  Fortunately, he still appreciates a good "kick ass" cottage cheese loaf, tater tot casserole, or stone soup.  (I mean, really, who doesn't?)

The kitchen here at Belmont Cottage is not chef-worthy by any means, and is lacking in certain basics for meal prep... like dishes.  When Klee came to join us, this dish deficit became more apparent.  Being financially challenged, buying a new dish set was not an option.  Hence, we decided to start our dish project, and it has been fabulous!

We have been piecing our collection together slowly.  Every piece, unique.  It has added a great deal of sentiment to, otherwise completely ordinary, objects.  In fact, we love our growing menagerie so much that we've chosen to display it on our kitchen bookshelf.

Of course, I have my favorites...

Like, I really love this little turquoise bowl because it says biscuit on the bottom

And, this little coffee mug has become my little cup of comfort in the mornings.

These tumblers and bobble glasses are so very much better than the foggy plastic Walmart cups we've been using for the past 12 months.

They remind me of the green vintage glasses I used to have in college.  Don't know what happened to those...

And, I sort of have a thing for birds.  We even found a fun Elliott's Owl plate.  Hopefully it lasts long enough for him to use it when he's older.

Our dish collection has become so special to us.  A bonding endeavor.  Pieces will break over time, which will be sad, but the collection won't be lost.  We'll just have to set out to find new additions to keep the project alive.