A busy weekend

without many opportunities to stop and look at the birds!

Last weekend, I saw this American Crow playing in the fog outside the hardware store.  The hardware store is the location of all my big outings lately — remodeling is all consuming.  (Check on our progress {click})

I am also going to a quilt show tomorrow — despite my husband’s deep irritation at my playing hookey from the home improvement efforts.  That will be wonderful.  Off by myself with a bunch of quilts to look at and feel inspired by.  Hurrah!

So, that’s the news here.  Nothing earth shattering.  And that’s not a bad thing.  I can’t wait to see how much we get done today but I’m not looking forward to all the work that will undoubtedly be involved!  🙂

Advertisement

Solving problems by waiting for inspiration

Greg and I have an ugly problem in our kitchen. Well, let’s face it, we’ve had loads of ugly problems and we are solving them one by one. The one that’s been bugging me lately was the hole in the front of our cabinet under the range. The problem was caused by the original (and horrible) electric range that lasted about a year before we ripped it out and put in my gas range.

The trouble was that the controls were push button controls on the front of the cabinet. An absolutely idiotic design in so-so-so many ways — particularly when we moved in to this house with an 18 month old boy who loved to push buttons. Thankfully, no fires resulted from those buttons. Still, we were glad to see them go.

But the hole remained. It got to where we didn’t see it anymore and that, my friends, is a dangerous thing.

And, here we are painting the cabinets and we still haven’t filled in the hole. We didn’t know what to do. Just covering it with a piece of wood would look like we’d covered up a hole. Filling it and patching it would never really hide it. What to do? What to do?

Inspiration struck me tonight, however. I got the idea of looking for a carved wooden panel that would look like we put it there on purpose. I couldn’t find anything good, however, but did find some neat wood onlays that I thought we could put on top of a plain old piece of wood and it would look like we’d done it one purpose.

At this point, I brought in my architect. Genius that he is, he immediately thought that my idea could be improved — perhaps by using decorative clay tiles. I didn’t like the idea but he persisted and found a great site with amazing tiles. He is using them for another job that he’s doing and so they came to mind. We looked at almost all the stuff before I saw something I liked.

And, when I liked it, I loved it. It’s beyond perfect. I didn’t need to look any further. It is the perfect tile to cover the hole in my cabinet. It will look not only like we put it there on purpose but like we flew to Italy to find the perfect tile to accent in our kitchen. It is beyond lovely. It suits us to a tee. It will be a gorgeous accent without competing with the gorgeous glass tile we are using as our backsplash. It is utterly perfect!

And that is why I married my architect. He is so damn handy to have around.