Neighborhood Building

While working on our own house is very important to us and brings us a tremendous amount of joy and satisfaction, we believe it's even more important to be involved with our neighborhood as well. Over the past few years we've worked to bring neighbors together to discuss neighborhood issues, set goals and improve the area, and we recently got a big help from the city.

Over the summer we applied for a Neighborhood MiniGrant from Kansas City, and were awarded just over $1,600 to purchase and install neighborhood signs! Using a logo Chris created for a neighborhood welcome packet a while back, he pulled together specs for two-sided metal signs and brackets. Over the next few months we'll have 8 signs produced and installed throughout our little 4-block neighborhood.

Here are the details on the signs from our proposal, and we'll show you more once they are made.

To me, the best part about this whole process is the great friend we have made along the way. We have very cool neighbors - people of various ages and from different background - and we love to get together not just to talk about the neighborhood, but to spend time together and support one another. We've now had two block parties, with between 70 and 100 attendees at each, four neighborhood clean-up days where we have helped some of our elderly neighbors with yard work, and lots of great social times. Here are some highlights of our times together.

Neighborhood Clean-up/Dumpster Days:

(isn't that tall guy in the middle handsome?)

 
Block Parties:

 
(with some pretty sweet activities)

Neighborhood Garage Sales

Impromptu barbeques

Sometimes we have some pretty cute guests stop by for a hot dog - our nieces maintain an "honorary" resident status.

Second Chances

During our time in our house, there are certain areas that have gotten a lot of attention (ahem, kitchen), and others that have been a bit neglected. Ok, a lot neglected. As in, we walk through them with hardly a second glance.

I'm talking about our dining room. When we moved in we brought a table we had purchased at our old rental house, my old upright piano and a floor length mirror from Ikea. We purchased a new chandelier, small china cabinet and a cheap jute rug and called it good enough.

Dining room before.

And it was fine. But not great. And over the past few months, I've been working on how to improve it. My main issues are:

• The table is not the right size/shape for the room. We bought it in our rental home in a much more square dining room. It's fine when it's small (like above) but it expands widthwise, not lengthwise, and quickly becomes too wide for our room. 

• The general color palette is a bit blah. I love all the woodwork, and I love the soothing wall color (baguette from Sherwin Williams), but that all together with the brown rug was too much. 

And that is my first culprit - the brown rug. So I've been browsing lots of different patterned rugs - various dhurrie and kilim style pieces. And as I was doing that, my sister decided that she did not like the rug she had recently purchased from Ikea for her fireplace area.

Fate, right?

 
Dining room with new rug.

She offered me the rug, and I took it, never thinking it would work. The rugs I had been browsing had larger patterns, arranged in concentric rectangles rather than lines like this one. But as soon as I laid it out in the dining room, I was in love.

First, the shape. I thought I was doing a good thing when I purchased a round rug in this room, but the rectangle opens up the sides and ends of the room, and frames the table area perfectly.

But more importantly, the colors! Oh the colors. They bring so much more excitement to the room, and tie in really well with the rest of the main floor. 

By the way, did you notice the beautiful orchid on my table? A gift from my mother-in-law this Thanksgiving. Isn't it beautiful? I consider orchids a challenge - they are reluctant rebloomers but I won't give up. Fortunately this one came already covered with beautiful flowers.

 But that's enough about that. This rug, which cost me exactly $0 (plus a $15 rug pad that I just ordered on Amazon) has made me like our dining room again. Not to say that there won't be future changes - in fact, I may have been browsing a few items recently . . . .

I'm holding out though. I'd love for our "forever" dining furniture to be at least some antiques, so I'm enjoying watching Craigslist and browsing local flea markets and antique malls.

But that doesn't mean I can't have some fun in the meantime, right? In fact, I have another small upgrade coming in the next few weeks, but you'll have to wait to hear about it.

Kitchn Feature

What a fun week for our little blog - the cutting board Chris made to fit my farmhouse sink was featured on Kitchn, a great national blog that I very much enjoy! We have been a bit quiet this season, but have some big fun things coming up so stay tuned.

Wrigley's Ancestors

I was going through some blogs I like the other day, and came across this story of midcentury furniture designer Florence Knoll. While her story is very interesting, and she is a very accomplished woman, the thing I'm most interested in is her buddy in this photo. It's Wrigley!

While we see dogs like Wrigley pretty frequently now, he's definitely not what you would consider a classic breed and I've never seen an old photo of a doodly dog like this one. I'm not 100% certain her dog was a doodle, but the resemblance is amazing. Here Wrigley is snuggling with our friend Alex.

Coming Soon

Happy Friday!

I just pulled the trigger on something I've been wanting to purchase for our house, literally for years. This beauty should be arriving on our porch sometime next week!

This simple metal arch will go over the front walkway into our house, with some simple landscaping clinbing it and reaching down the hill. Here's a very bad photoshop rendering of my plans:

The arch will go at the top of the steps, and the browned out lawn is where I will pull out the grass (sorry CJ) and landscape. The area goes over a slight hill (maybe about 3' from top to bottom) so it will make all the new plants very visible from the sidewalk and street. Here are some of the plants I have in mind.

Morning glory vine growing up the sides of the arch through the summer. It's an annual so it will die out in the winter, leaving only the pretty arch for you to see. The large blue flowers will look great with our house that will (hopefully) be all blue soon.

At the bottom of the hill, at the widest spot in the new landscaping area, I want to do a large prairie grass on each side of the walkway,

surrounded by white salvia and orange lantana (butterfly bush). I love the textures of these three together, and they'll make a good dramatic entry into our yard from the street. 

And finally, I'll plant a variety of low-growing perennials (about one foot tall) along the rest of the steps and walkway to fill the sides in.

 
This will add a lot of new color and interest to the yard, and I can't wait to get started. Come on UPS guy!!!

Ahoy Matey

Happy National Talk Like a Pirate Day!

I love flags. As a graphic designer, some of the most beautiful designs I come across are flags. The bold colors and the geometry are easy to geek out on. Our house is very symmetrical, with two brick pillars that hold up the porch. The face of them is wide enough for a flag to perfectly sit, almost as though they were made for a flag on either side.

We decided to get bold with our front porch and now proudly have two flags. Our first set are naval themed thanks to my good friend, Ryan, who made me aware of their rich history. Apparently ships used the flags to communicate to one another. We like the bold design of the flag that means the letter a, or alpha.

The alpha flag matches our future color scheme for our house (more on that soon), and also has a nice angular end, for a little medieval times touch.

Believe it or not, I actually bought a special drill for this project. Drilling holes into brick is neither easy nor fast so I purchased a hammer drill to get the job done so I could attach the flag bracket to the bricks. Each hole took about ten minutes to drill, so I don't plan on drilling any more holes anytime soon.

Cashew's Visit

Meet Cashew, a baby squirrel who stayed with us last week. We first noticed him on Monday, and while we were surprised to see such a little guy on his own didn't think much of it. But when we saw him again Tuesday, we became concerned that he may have been left behind when his parents left the nest that had recently fallen out of our elm tree.

 After playing with him a bit, we decided we should intervene, mostly because of some neighborhood cats who were seriously eying his hangout spot. So I began extensive googling of caring for abandoned baby squirrels, and learned the following.

1. Don't feed them. While it seems the obvious first step, it's likely they're dehydrated, and feeding them causes their cells to further dry out while their little bodies try to digest.

2. They need fluids. Pedialyte is best, but as we didn't have it I read that the next best thing is a cup of warm water mixed with one teaspoon of salt and three teaspoons of sugar.

3. Keep them warm. This little guy was shivering furiously when we found him, and I read that at this young age they can't regulate body temperature, so a blanket and a heating source are crucial.

Once we got this little guy watered and wrapped up, he promptly fell asleep. We put him in our cat carrier overnight (in our guest room with the door closed, as Nino paced curiously outside it all night). We set him up with some towels and a heating pad, and he was out like a light. We woke him up a few times to get more water in him - here's a video with some pretty serious baby animal cuteness:

The next morning I took him to Lakeside Nature Center, a local wildlife resource that rescues abandoned and injured animals. They looked him over and were surprised to see a little guy left alone so young. They will stabilize him there - make sure he's healthy and taking formula - and then when he's ready they'll send him to one of their many volunteers trained to raise him and eventually release him back into the wild.

 
They gave me the option of receiving a good news/bad news post card, which I opted for, so hopefully I'll receive news in a few months that our little guys is out in the trees being rambunctious, like he was born to be. We miss our little Cashew a bit - he was fun to watch and hold - but we know he's in good hands.