In the Garden of Eatin'

We planted our vegetables a couple of weeks ago in the hedge garden. The slugs have found a couple of lettuces and some caterpillars found a collard plant, but everything else seems to be happy. Here are some pictures.

As you may remember, we've got heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, read leaf lettuce, butter crunch lettuce, beets, carrots, spinach, collards, and rainbow chard. Besides our newly planted veggies, we've got lots of strawberries going in the hedge, oregano, chives, three kinds of mint (plus Corsican mint), and a few other things. We used the mint to make mojitos on Father's Day. The spearmint was better than the orange mint for the mojitos. Yum.

We've been mudding our seams in the living/dining room. More posts about that later.

Magic Box of Samples

We spent the weekend slathering more joint compound on our walls. We would have put on more, but my poor spouse was sick all weekend with a bad fever. He's a little better now, but still not great. So, I did what I could on my own. Progress was made. Pretty much the whole room has the first coats except for the ceiling. Because of my old back injury, doing stuff over my head is really hard for me. My nerves get pinched and my arms end up going numb. Not very conducive to doing ceiling drywall taping. Still, I managed to do some.

We've also been doing other sorts of research, such as on washing machines/dryers. The ones we got when we moved in are okay, but they like to eat clothes sometimes. We'll also be moving the location of our laundry room, and machines capable of different configurations might be beneficial, such as a front-loading washer (that way we can put more storage on top).

We also found out that Teragren, who makes that bamboo flooring we liked, is a local company. So, we ordered up a box of samples.

Here are the ones that we liked, the Synergy line. It's oriented strands of bamboo. The strands are more carefully oriented than in OSB. The color we like is the Java, in the center.

Apparently the Synergy line is generally used in commercial applications. It's 100% harder than red oak (2200 on the hardness scale, as I mentioned before). It has a 25-year finish warranty, and its production adheres to LEED standards. So far, we think it's pretty good stuff. Even though it's an engineered floor, it's the same material all the way through, instead of a veneer over a different wooden core. So, if we ever needed to refinish, we can.

And, just for the heck of it, here are some other products of theirs. There were even more samples in the box, like bamboo plywood and butcher block, but these were the most interesting.

I liked my magic box of samples. It'll come in handy once we have the clay up on our walls and want to test for color, and it's also nice to see how the different colors look during different times of day.

Mud Honey

We have officially entered the final phases of the living/dining room work. Hooray!

This weekend we popped down to the Environmental Home Center (now Ecohaus) to look for some non-toxic stain for our cherry bookshelf wood and check out the colors of American Clay, the clay we're going to use to "paint" our walls (it's more like plaster). It was fun. I've probably said this before, but I've never really liked to shop much - but I LOVE shopping for the rat hole. We looked at all the colors, and we picked Tucson Gold, which is a light yellow. Not pastel, but not too bright, either. It will go well with our pendant lights and really create a nice atmosphere in the room, we think. Anyway, we ended up picking up non-voc primer and flat paint for the ceiling, semi-gloss for the trim, and then the supplies we'll need for putting on the clay. While we were there, we checked out flooring just for the heck of it. We've been waffling over what we want to use for our floor. We need something with a slightly beveled edge, like most engineered flooring has, because our floor isn't exactly level, and we think that might be easier and more forgiving for our project. We like bamboo, so long as it rates well on the hardness scale (we pay very particular attention to hardness), but a lot of bamboo flooring uses toxic adhesives. Bamboo is good if we're trying to be environmentally friendly from the standpoint that it's a quickly-renewable resource, but then you have to factor in all the resources needed to truck that stuff across the Pacific, which is decidedly not environmentally friendly. It would be nice to get something harvested in the US, so long as it's harvested sustainably, to cut down on emissions and all that. And, of course, underlying all this is how much we can afford. *sigh*

But I digress. While we were at the store, we saw some beautiful flooring. One of the problems with bamboo, aside from all the environmental/hardness arguments, is that it very well could look a bit dated 40 years from now (although who knows). So we'd been looking into regular hardwoods, too. The flooring we saw, though, was bamboo (2200 on the hardness scale), but it was oriented strands put together with a relatively non-toxic glue. This particular sample was Teragren Synergy (the Wheat color). We're still on the lookout for flooring and haven't made any decisions, but we were both really surprised at how well we liked it.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing drywall taping. Mudding. Not exciting, not really fun. And because of some of our walls not really being straight or plumb, we're going through a lot of mud in some places. Neither of us have very much experience doing this sort of thing, either. All in all, not the best combination. Luckily, we have some gracious friends who let us borrow all of their taping tools (hooray, corner trowel!), and we have some extra joint compound and tools from other good friends. We also have another friend who actually doesn't mind taping and is going to come over and help. So, hopefully we can get through this stage relatively quickly, but we're also going to take our time and try to get it right. After all, we have to look at these walls for the coming years. Luckily the clay we'll ultimately be putting up on the walls will help hide our mistakes a little.

So here's what we've got done so far. Not much, really, and just the first layers of mud.

We'll probably sand next weekend and put on the final layers.

We started mudding, and THEN we looked through our books and online for tips and tricks. So I had gone around doing all the screwheads, then read online about a great technique for doing them all at once (which is how the pros do it). Oh well. I think it'll be okay.

Our friends who lent us all the equipment also told us about this contraption that allows a shopvac to suck up all the dust when you sand, so we found one at the hardware store and picked it up. That will hopefully make cleanup easier.

So, we'll just keep mudding, slowly and surely. I know what I'm doing every single night this week...and probably next week...but it will be worth it. Or at least that's what I'm going to tell myself.