Welcome back, dear friends! While I was in California with my husband for my father-in-law’s funeral, we were blessed to visit some of the sweetest gardens I walked by on my morning walks where my mother-in-law lives and also a visit to her neighbors’ gorgeous backyard.
The Tiki Bar garden
This fun garden has been in the works for many years and is the backyard and side garden of neighbors and friends, Gordon and Liz. The family likes to entertain here and just come outside in the evenings for a cold beverage.
The Tiki Bar
I love that Gordon used all kinds of recycled materials in this build!
Their backyard is a fun place to visit and Mr. Ethereal and I enjoyed a family dinner here this evening. Thankfully the sun was going down at 6:00pm and breezes were beginning to blow in from San Francisco Bay over the mountains… It was 97 degrees this day! A perfect time to come sit out back and enjoy the evening.
I would be totally remiss if I didn’t share the family’s cutest and friendliest dog ~ a Havanese mix named Teddy!!
Teddy is the sweetest dog and is just so happy to have visitors come over. He absolutely loves our nephew Corey! Just a love!!!
My favorite part of this garden includes the pond and the plants which surround it… Set into the pond itself is this pretty hibiscus. The small gates help keep Teddy and a relative safe.
This gorgeous kniphofia, or hot poker, is stunning with its ombré flowers…
Definition of kniphofia
1capitalized: a genus of showy African herbs (family Liliaceae) having clumps of long radical leaves and tall scapes of red or yellow drooping flowers with reflexed perianths.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary online
Love the tropical vibe!
And of course some sweet geraniums… Geraniums and pelargoniums grow really, really well in California with its Mediterranean climate. Gordon and Liz keep most of their plants in containers so they can easily move them around when the sun gets too hot in an area.
My Mother-in-law’s front garden
Of all the cleaning we did, taking tons of metal scrap over to the recycler (Mr. E and our son drove it over) and power-washing the house, and sweeping up tons of sharp scrub and coastal live oak leaves…
I took NO photographs of the side yard either before or after. I was just busy getting leaves picked up for my MIL and clearing out old, broken clay pots, scraps and worn out plastic pots for her. She is seriously thinking of selling the house, which is one of the big reasons why I decided to fly home after-all. I knew I could really help her clean.
The big geranium garden out front of her home. Some of these were transplants from my garden at our Big House in Murrieta, California. Geraniums when broken off root easily!
My big gift was to repot some plants for her small hanging garden out front. 🙂 We had driven over to Lowe’s and I picked up a couple of small bags of potting soil, two 14″ core fiber basket liners, and some Espoma fertilizers for her. I’ve been learning a lot from Garden Answer on organic fertilizers in general so it was nice to introduce these to Gini. 🙂
Then I went-to-town that afternoon soaking the plants really well, recycling the current fiber basket liners to make two good ones, and potting up the four baskets. I meant to take a photograph of the front porch when it was all done, but must have got sidetracked…
Here’s how this little geranium looked beforehand. Hanging on (because geraniums are really drought tolerant) but could use a little TLC. 😉 You can see the redwood tree which Hubby’s grandfather planted when we was young. It is about 50 years old now.
Entertaining at its best!
And there we are! Just a special time out in the garden… And a big thank you to Liz and Gordon for having us all over for dinner and for their hospitality!
March roared inlike a lion for me with a whirlwind drive to California as you know to meet our movers, pack everything up, then beat feet back to Texas…
Packing the last things out of our right-hand storage unit.
California Leaving…
Six big guys came with Ron and Kari Hanson, our movers with Oakley Relocation out of San Diego and Riverside Counties. I am really impressed with all of their resourcefulness, professionalism and care with our household goods! I highly recommend Oakley Relocation as Jerilyn and Alex who run the call center were helpful in every aspect of our move.
BTW, did you know it is cheaper to move in the winter than in the summer? Peak season costs more.
Turns out my husband is a major pack-rat ~ we have more Ryobi drills and other tool things that were hidden away! And we were over budget by 4500 lbs. at 22,100 lbs. total weight. It is all getting moved and then Mr. Ethereal can figure out where he wants to place everything and what we need to sell or donate.
🙂
The beginnings of the donation pile.
The next day I worked on donations… Here are part of the items we donated plus a lot of furniture went into this Salvation Army pile, too. SA ended up taking all the furniture and some boxes of household goods they knew they could sell. After they pulled out I went and rented a U-Haul and loaded the rest heading to Habitat for Humanity late in the day.
Thankfully even though HFH had just closed (4:30p.m.) they ladies working the donation area that day opened since I was moving out of state the next day.
One of the fun things about moving (not!) is that anything chemical related and considered as hazardous waste cannot be transported on big moving vans. I tried to drop off things I had no room for in my Sequoia but the location was closed.
Pulling out of a rest stop along the California-Arizona border somewhere. The weather was perfect all the way home!
Heading to Texas
The young man who checked in the small U-Haul truck I rented took those things, yeah! He said he needed the motor oil and could use the other things in his apartment and on his car. Two plastic jugs of 10W-30 were in my car already so I was more than happy to give him the other; it feels good to help others. 🙂
Saw this trucker bringing home this cutie for a special child. Isn’t this adorable? Love it!!!
Heading back to Texas
I stopped at some nice rest stops along the way and one in Las Cruces, New Mexico just above the city was very nice! And had the most spectacular view from the top of the mountain… I shared a video and photo or two on my Instagram of that rest area.
Photo actually taken by Mr. Ethereal. 🙂
Mr. Ethereal worked really hard while I was gone moving things out of our trailer and then cleaned out the new garage. He staged some of our things plus a shelving unit left by the previous owners here in the garage.
He also moved and put many things away in our spare bedrooms ~ such a sweetheart!
Mr. Ethereal also organized the built in cabinet ~ a new beginning for us!
Tomorrow our household goods will be delivered and then we will be able to take our time putting things away.
Until then I’ll be in and out. We are still in our Prairie Home trailer for a few more days then it will be cleaned and put up for sale.
Riverside County Parks, Lake Skinner and the Tecolota mountain range ~ four years ago when we began our trailer life adventure.
Thank you for all your prayers and well wishes with our move ~ I do appreciate it!
A look back at our last home in California and the furnishing which will be making the journey in the upcoming weeks to our new home here in Texas!
I have been talking with moving companies for a week now getting quotes and sending inventories back and forth. Whew! It’s a tough nut to navigate and I still want to drive out to bring back some of the really fragile things but now I am rethinking carrying a few of the mirrors back with me…
Maybe it is better that the movers crate them…
What do you think?…
A heavy mirror I shipped back on Virgin Atlantic from England in 2005.
I’ll be leaving later this week driving cross-country and actually my Sequoia is in for servicing yesterday and today. The brakes needed some special master cyclinder-type thing as it is failing. Glad this is getting done even though 2 bills are being spent…
Don’t want to be involved in a major crash because of brake failure!
Have you ever shipped long-distance and how did your mirrors, prints and family portraits survive the move? Did the movers crate them? How about your furniture ~ how did your case goods hold up?
Thank you for your thoughts! 🙂 I am worried and I know I can’t do anything about them, plus they are just things as people say. When I moved with my parents some jewelry was swiped on two occasions and we lost a box of Christmas things, mainly my baby stocking and velvet stockings I made for Charles and myself when we were first married.
I need to remake those… 😉
Maybe this fall…
My big birthday present from 4 years ago ~ a 4’w x 5′ tall pier mirror.
We will have a quote later today from a carrier I regard as trusted ~ hope it is a good one and something we can afford. We will probably go with this moving company as they can schedule a pick up around March 6th, just when I’d like to the packing and loading done. The estimate is for 16,000 lbs.
Here is the pier mirror as I found it in the consignment shop in Citrus Heights, California.
And another gesso mirror I found in Murrieta at another consignment-antique shop several years earlier.
Here’s a link to the story I wrote about finding the pier mirror and one very similar to this dresser mirror above.
So excited to share all these lovelies with you in their new home in the upcoming year…
Fall is a wonderful time to settle in and catch up after a long hot summer. It’s a time to get some projects done around the house now that the weather is cooler and it is also a good time for looking ahead and looking behind to what was good and memorable.
Recently I opened up my iPad which hasn’t been looked at much since I moved to my computer about three years ago and there are some photos from our Big House that I thought you might like to see. Some are candid family photos but they also show off our last house well so today I thought I’d bring them out for you…
🙂
An early summer photo after the rock was put in the pathways… Realized quickly that we should have gone with smaller stone but I wanted white. Live and learn! 😉 Roses were exceptionally beautiful this year, 2015, just before we moved.
Hubby was home this day and the year was 2012. Our son was on top of his pole vaulting game and won most of the events he was in and was talking with his future university coach, Olympian Derek Miles and University of South Dakota grad himself, about going to South Dakota. He wanted to major in Broadcasting and Journalism as he loved being behind a movie camera. Work was going well for Mr. Ethereal and myself and for once life was going pretty smoothly. Peter would go on to win the CIF State track meet that year and graduate solidly after taking 10 classes that previous fall earning almost all A’s his senior year.
Our daughter Amy, who is two years older, was enjoying her classes in Art and Design at the local community college and was now working and driving and the three of us shared my car to get places. This was a happy time for all of us enjoying life and friends coming over for sleepovers and pool parties, and an occasional
tea luncheon party for me.
It’s nice to look back and remember this time and see this home and garden at its best again… I can look at it and think what can I do differently this next time? What worked and what didn’t? Funny as I wanted French partierres out in the garden but didn’t really know what they looked like or how to create them ~ they are a central garden bed often surrounding a fountain in the middle with four identically created corner garden beds with pathways in between. We created what worked for us and made that partierre garden as best we could.
I was determined to put in a rose garden when we first moved in even though the kids were early teens then, so we created pathways with pressure treated wood staked into the dirt for moving people and the lawn mower around {and the occasional son who loved to ride his BMX bike around creating small jumps for those years before rocks went in}. When the pool was put in a couple of years later we had the builder lift and move that Norfolk pine to its new permanent spot. Then we moved the shed to the back left hand corner of the garden behind the Norfolk pine. The whole family made a weekend of it creating a 12 x 12′ framed pad and filling it with cement, Peter and Dad doing the heavy lifting. The yard came together beautifully!
The Norfolk pine can just barely be seen in the top photo on this page.
There’s our little garden angel holding treats for the big flocks of sparrows and mourning doves who came to our birdfeeders.
One of California’s rare rainy days ~ this summer photo shows the pool at its best when the rocks were clean and the spa was full and ready to step into… ahhh! We are talking about having a small pool or even just a spa again for this next home.
🙂
It took a year and a whole lot of liquid B1 for the pine tree to recover from when it was laid down, then rolled, breaking off many of its branches while the pool guy dug it’s new hole. The Norfolk was a beautiful tree and full of branches and life when we left. A large scrub bluejay had just decided to make it its home in that tree and the doves and sparrows loved to hide in its shady leaflets.
Kids Projects
Now moving on… Here’s Hubby out in the garage looking in a box at papers the kids had done when they were little. I had written when and who created each ~ and I was so thankful that this had been done! It made going through them and packing them all into one small box that much easier.
This house had a three car garage which was perfect for setting up a workshop! We made Scout pinewood derby cars in there with our Cub Scout troop and little wood crafts for our daughter and the girls in our Brownie and Girl Scout troop. Later, Peter worked with his Eagle scout friends from BSA Troop and Venture Crew 604 on cutting, creating and putting together parts of his Eagle Scout project when it was time to create a new pole vault rack for the new shed Murrieta Valley’s track and cross-country teams had at the high school. We had a surprisingly large number of Eagle Scouts come out of our Tahquitz Council! Way more than the national average. 🙂
Lovely little sewing corner in my 8′ x 10′ craft room. This back table was where I would scrapbook sometimes but often it was used just for storage. One of our sweet little chandeliers hangs above.
Crafts2Make ~ Message Board from an Old Frame
Here’s a craft I ought to share and I’m pretty sure I never have. This one is easy to make using an old picture frame and it was already painted white when I bought it used from an antique mall.
* All I did was add in a pre-made magnetic white board to the bottom back, which fit almost perfectly.
* Then I added part of an old broken cork board to the middle section nailing it also to the back of the frame.
* Lastly, I added in some hardware cloth to clip cute cards and doodads to which I picked up for only 70 cents/yard from a good, old-fashioned hardware store which carries everything. This screening was stapled to the back, too, of course. These stores are hard to find anymore but when you do… Keep their address and phone number handy.
The craft room set up for sewing… Looking forward to having another craft room/office so we can have a permanent ironing board set up again, of all things! Lol!
I had seen something similar somewhere and decided I’d like a message board of sorts to hold all of my bits of craft ideas. Frankly, I could use something like that here if we had more wall space. Still thinking I might create some kind of cork or chalk board just for fun… 😉
Watering for Free
One of the last lost photos for now is this trashcan set-up we had for catching rainwater sheeting off the back roof over our living room and our master bedroom above when we did have big rainstorms. No need for gutters ~ we just set out all the old trashcans and the galvanized metal washtub and collected all we needed for the next week or two. This was handy during the winter saving us money on watering the yard. In desert areas like much of Southern California is, it’s a good idea to collect rain water all year or dig up the ground and put in an underground water collection system of tanks which would be attached to a large gutter system along the roofline.
With our little watering system I’d go around with leftover chlorine buckets from our pool hand-watering all our boxwoods, the rose bushes and the small palms and African orchids and the other plants to the right of the pool. Recycling the rain water, repurposing those buckets which would have been tossed otherwise and reusing them this way was something my recycling heart loved to do!
Fall pumpkins waiting to come out and play again. 😀
Well, that’s it for today. I’ve been backing up my computer and moving off photographs again so I can hopefully get back to posting more often. That’s why I haven’t been on much lately.
Coming up next I should be back on track to finishing the second post about our visit to San Antonio, the Alamo and the Riverwalk around the San Antonio river for you later this week. I have just a few more photos from the St. Anthony Hotel to share with you, too. 😉 Such a lovely place!
Spring gardening is just beginning and I wanted to
share a beautiful garden centers my friend Kathy took me to
while I was out visiting in California in late January ~
Miner’s Ace Hardware and Garden Center
186 Station Way Arroyo Grande,CA93420 Ph: (805) 489-9100
Miner’s Ace Hardware is a one-stop shop where you can pick up tools, nails, paint and plants all at the same location!
After grabbing your paint supplies you can pass through their
indoor gardening area and head outside and find lovely
plants to beautify your garden and home.
I’m a nut for plants anyway so it was a garden fix for me
for sure!
In Southern California especially one can garden really
365 days a year ~ it’s one of the things I really miss.
😉
Lovely pink azaleas surround this water fountain.
Like many gardening centers this one sells the usual pots
and also sells seasonal annuals and perennials.
What is different about it is that it is attached to a hardware
store which I found intriguing!
A table chock full of coleus plants ~ beautiful in bloom and with their variegated leaves! Loved their striped look! Perfect for shady areas in your yard.
I’m really ready for a big garden again so I was on a picture
binge trip snapping photos of plants that might also do well
in Texas.
🙂
These coleus are grown pretty much as annuals in the U.S.
unless you live in zone 11 {think: Hawaii} according to what
I read online as they are tropicals.
Here’s a good view looking out into the vast outdoor garden
area from just under the shade structure.
I loved all the geraniums, azaleas, camellias and pansies
that were in bloom then.
If you are expectantly waiting for springtime to come to
your part of the country
I hope this will give you some ideas for plants
to put into your gardens this year.
These perfectly pink camellia bushes do well in my
mother-in-love’s garden and tolerate some lower
temperatures with a frost blanket thrown over top
as needed.
Come to think about it I don’t think my mother-in-law
does do much
to protect the big camellia on the north side
of her Sacramento area garden.
It has been in that same spot for over 50 years now
and other than trimming to bring camellias inside
it I think it is pretty happy there.
Jumping to geraniums
I took this photograph as I had forgotten how much
I love geraniums and this light pink beauty was
calling my name!
I also like these shepherd’s hook plant hangers ~ several
of the extended stay residents here at our campground
have them for with hanging baskets.
Really sturdy and great for adding height to the garden!
Another beautiful hanging basket filled with fiery orange
calibrachoa and an unknown *yellow flowering plant.
These lovely hanging baskets make me
miss the baskets I had
hanging off my old back patio cover
at our last home.
*If you know what it is, would you let me know
and I’ll correct this.
Thank you!
🙂
Love love love…
Pansy heaven!!!
Arroyo Grande is part of the central coastal climate of
California so it does get pretty hot there in the summer
{around 100 degrees Fahrneheit}
but it also enjoys major sea breezes every afternoon
which helps keep plants from frying.
For hanging baskets sometimes they need to be watered
in the morning and in the afternoon in California
if it is really hot.
How about in your area? Do you have to double water
because of your summertime heat?
Well I hope you have enjoyed this garden tour of
Miner’s Ace Hardware and Garden Center.
When you get out to the central coast sometime
stop by Arroyo Grande and tour the antique district
storage units I wrote about the dust and icky spiders
I was pretty sure I was going to have to battle…
Sorry these photographs are a little blurry. They were taken with my iPhone 6 and iPhone7. My daughter Amy calls the carved wooden ormolu on the bonnet of this armoire a “mermaid.” And it does look a bit like a mermaid from the front! Hence the opening photograph.
But today I am happy to report that the spider issue wasn’t as bad as we originally thought they would be ~ the cobwebs were mostly around the rollup doorways.
So I took the duster you can see in the photograph above and swooshed and swept up as many webs as I could find and then
set off bug bombs to kill any other critters still alive and quickly
pulled down those doors while still holding my breath and
locked those doors and left.
🙂
That was on Thursday afternoon the day I arrived in California.
I posted a few photos on Instagram just after setting off the bombs as I still had time to go by HomeGoods in Temecula before traffic was going to get bad and I loved seeing the palm trees and smelling and feeling ocean breezes.
I remember the store owner sharing with me if I knew
that this piece was French.
This is when and where I first fell in love with
French country furniture.
When I said no, he in turn told me all about it.
I’ve always loved the grain staining technique that
S-curves down the sides of this piece that
the furniture finisher used on it.
I have forgotten the technique’s name but will add
it if I remember it later.
😉 *Update: I was just out on a blogging friend Cindy’s site, Edith and Evelyn Vintage, where she’s talking about creating her French Provincial buffet and realized that mine was the same style. Now I am able update and share this with you for when you are looking for similar pieces! 🙂
Gardens are such special places and getting to see how
my friends Julie and Jim’s gardens were coming along was a
real treat on my recent visit to California…
Jim added the shade cover to their vegetable garden to protect the plants there from the harsh
and intense California summer sunshine. Great idea to incorporate in our gardens!
Jim purchased the beautiful red barn {top lead photograph above}
and then builtit towards the left-back part of their property
in the Wildomar/Lake Elsinore area of Southern California.
*Update: Julie just FB me and said Jim built this lovely barn from scratch. I am not surprised as he is a terrific carpenter.
🙂
Being that their property is quite wide and is deep ~ nearing a half-acre with a covered porch set up against the eastern-facing back-yard, a large swimming pool to the immediate right and traveling back down along the fence line, bougainvillea along the chainlink fence separating their yard from their neighbors and many lovely rose bushes planted in-front of the bougainvillea,
Jim and Julie were able to do a lot with their yard.
Their next big plans are to add a retaining wall running down the left side of the yard and to plant it with oleander bushes, which grow really big in California and will create a nice privacy screen
with their left-side neighbors.
Don’t ask why I didn’t take any photographs of the rest of the yard for you ~ I have no idea why except I was there just to visit initially and then Julie suggested we go on a tour.
That’s how we ended up upstairs seeing her home’s
gorgeous bathroom!
I’ve been to their home many times over the past decade for
teas that Julie has hosted and often just to visit or to pick her up
on our way as a group to go antique browsing or out to lunch.
So, at some point I can share more of their beautiful home
and gardens through other photographs I’ve taken back when we were all getting our photographs printed.
🙂
Two sweet chickens who are friendly and enjoy being picked up and cuddled ~ Rhoda (L), a Rhode Island red and Mr. Clara (R), in the apron, and who was originally thought to be a female. Lol! The Barred Rock chicken below is Maddie.
Today it’s all about the chickens
These girls are gorgeous in their black and white feathers
and their shiny red combs.
I just looked them up and I think the black and white
chickens are of the Barred Rock breed which are good
egg layers and produce large white eggs.
Here’s a link I found talking about types of chickens that I
found useful in trying to identify these fluffy girls.
Another friend in Northern California who also raises chickens
and whom I went on a long hike back several years ago
says that the way to sex a chicken is by their tails ~
roosters have curved tail feathers as compared to the
straighter female’s feathers.
Julie was telling me a while back that she makes little
“aprons” for her chickens to keep them from getting
picked on by the other birds.
Unfortunately I guess chickens do this a lot as several of
her birds are in separate chicken pens due to having
been picked on.
🙁
Guess that’s where being hen-pecked comes from…
😉
*Here’s a link to pick up some chicken aprons of your own
if you need some:
I am an Amazon affiliate and if you purchase something from me I will earn a small commission on it ~ please see my full disclosure HERE. Thank you!
\Aren’t they the cutest??!
I kept trying to get this one chicken to turn so I could get a good picture of her sweet pink apron but she wasn’t budging.
Oh, well!
I loved the big red chicken barn with it’s places to roost ~
now Julie just needs a sweet chandelier to make her chicken’s
home a little “chicken chateau!”
😉
Seriously, though, their farmyard garden is a working garden and the chickens are providing eggs for friends and family.
The vegetable side of the garden has pole runner beans, a variety
of lettuces and even tomatoes currently growing in the
Southern California warm winter sunshine!
I have been hankering for a fresh homegrown tomato and if
they had been ripe I would have asked to eat one.
🙂
Just a quick post today as that’s all the photos I have for you
from their garden.
Hope you’ve enjoyed the tour!
Sharing with
Snickerdoodle Create Bake Make ~ My Husband Has Too Many Hobbies
It’s definitely a dream trip to be able to accompany my husband
out here for the better part of two weeks here in January.
While it is still snowy and cold across much of the United States
and still getting down into the 20 degree temps where we live in
North Texas, this is a welcome vacation…
This is just a quick post today as I’ll write more over the weekend
sharing some photos from my travels back down the California
coast from Nipomo through Ventura.
These two photographs are just as you’d come into Santa Barbara
area and it was about 4:00 or 4:30pm PST or so and it was
66 degrees outside with a light wind blowing so that it was brisk but not cold on your skin.
I love this time of year in Southern California before late spring
and summer’s heat really start kicking in!
It was my favorite time to garden as you could stay outside and
play in the yard all day then take a nap in a favorite patio chair.
{with your feet propped up on a chair opposite for extra comfort}
There’s a photo I took while I was outside reading at our big house
at just about this same time of year and it is a favorite.
And speaking of gardens… I posted a few photos on Instagram
as I travelled about this week and one of those places I visited
was my friend Kathy’s home up in Nipomo about a half-hour
north of Solvang and an hour or so above Santa Barbara.
She is my garden mentor! Kathy can grow anything and together
with her husband Ken they create the most beautiful gardens!!!
This house they moved into about a year and a half ago now and
this garden is still in its infancy ~ but look at how far it has come!
Here is a photograph Kathy took of our tea group a number of years ago at their former home in Escondido, California.
You can see how drop dead gorgeous their garden was there!
L-R: Friends Carolyn, Sandy, Julie {foreground ~ she’s the sweet friend whose bathroom I shared the other day!}, Sandy,
me {looking much thinner then… working on it! Lol!}, and Gloria {in the white blouse}.
Here is a photograph of Kathy and Julie at my snowman tea
however the post that went with this no longer exists ~ probably
a casualty of moving from Weebly to Blogger back when…
But here is another tea with the gang of girls at my home if
you’d like to check it out.
😉
I’ll be sharing more next time I post… until then enjoy
this last photo from Kathy’s lovely garden.
Sunrise in Nipomo, California… Wouldn’t you like to wake up to this view everyday?
Now put cobwebs, cleaning and this photograph together
and you’ll get a little picture of what I’ll be doing over
this next week…
😉
Sawhorses, bookcases, the 1940’s Danish maple table I refinished and had made into a sofa table, and my favorite easy chair that is worn and shabby ~ sitting next to our 1880’s reproduction French armoire bought around the year 2000 from a woman closing her gift shop at a mall in Oceanside, California.
So, first orderof business was to call our storage landlord
and ask if it would be alright to set off some of those “bug bombs”
in our storage units and my message was returned with a yes!
“Whew!!!”
I just need to make sure my neighbors will not be there when I set them off ~ hopefully I can do that this coming Thursday evening and let the spray sit inside over the weekend.
I’ll leave my neighbors small notes next to their locks to let
them know that I sprayed so they don’t wonder about
the smell.
🙂
Happy Memories
I am thinking of selling some things while I am out there
and I’ve considered selling this antique oak dining table…
except for my birthday one year my father-in-love made
me two leaves for it.
Those leaves go with the original ones that came with the table when I found it in Auburn, California in 1993.
There it stayed at that shop as I worked to pay it off
at $100/month.
Then this old Victorian stayed with my longest known best friends whom I’ve known since our freshman year of high school
at their home in Northern California
for another year.
Finally when our son was 5 months old in January of 1995
we drove up to see our inlaws, our son and daughter’s
great-grandmother {who passed shortly thereafter}
and to visit our friends ~ that table of memories made the
trip home to Southern California to live with us
in our first and then our second homes.
Can I really part with it?
This chair basically came with our second house.
The previous owners were selling all of their furniture with
their move up the hill to an area called Greer Ranch.
This chair in all its floral beauty was so comfortable and
practically new so I made an offer and it stayed with its home.
I made a slipcover out of a matelassé bedspread that I found at AmVets Thrift Store in Escondido, California
probably eight years ago now.
The chair is beginning to lose its seat and the stuffing has
fallen apart in the back piece but I remade a new cover
for the back piece out of heavy muslin and
{shown above}
then lovingly made the welted slipcover taking care
using the original cover as my pattern.
There are the the most beautiful roses in a twining vine
along parts of the matelassé and I designed the cover
lining up the scalloped edges of the three edges of the quilt
to create the skirt bottom around the chair’s lower edge.
Can I sell this chair?
Maybe…
Now I have been looking for a large Welsh cupboard for probably 20 years or more and the ones I found in antique stores
I just could not afford.
One day however I found this sweet new Shabby Chic cupboard
and buffet at a now-defunct gift and tea shop for $300.
Once again it was another of my layaways.
It took only a month or two to pay it off.
Made around the angel picture frame, the man from Riverside
who made a number of these cupboards and sold them to the
owner of this shop
{or consigned them, I don’t remember}
probably doesn’t make them anymore.
These custom-made cupboards were hot items then
and were beloved because of the items incorporated
into their designs.
No, this cupboard really doesn’t hold much on its upper shelves and I used our table saw and cut and installed a second interior bottom shelf inside the lower doors matching the paint from one of the original doorknobs.
It was made more functional with that shelf addition and it has held hundreds of pounds of stacked china on the bottom shelf and
17 teapots and various creamers and sugars
along the upper shelf hidden behind those doors.
I have planned to sell it as it has had a good life with us
and I’m ready to find something bigger and different
but really
I am pretty attached to my furniture and as a curated group
they all go together and a part of me.
The $5.00 goose which was part of the goods sold at the model homes of which our first home was a part of ~ Vista Homes, Beezer Homes, Murrieta, California.
Chalk it up to moving over 40 times in my life with
all of my parents’ military moves then college and
our young married lives.
Well, you get the picture…
😉
Some people are more than able to sell everything they own
and move on.
Perhaps they lived in one house all of their lives and their homes
were very stable with extended family and cousins surrounding them all of their young lives and they aren’t affected
with this crazy deep need for
“home.”
Just thinking about having these pieces of furniture
near me ~ even if they are still in storage ~
I’m already excited!
And I have sold many pieces of furniture over the years
but for now most of the big pieces will stay.
I always said I’d keep and pass on the large red sectional
that is Hickory Chair and eight-way hand-tied.
It’s a down-filled sofa and is sooo comfortable to lie on
and take a nap on a lazy afternoon.
I think it has to go…
It won’t fit in whatever house we find here in
North Texas.
The mirrors will definitely be staying
A piece is already broken off the big one as I remember
my daughter was overtired and was being rough with it when she was moving it in and out of its spot between the bookcases…
Another 1920’s or 1930’s mirror was broken as it was being taken off the wall in our living room and readying it to be packed.
