Have been suspecting that the normalization of kitchen cabinets has something to do with keeping rodents out and in 2023 with a cat the remodel might just be shelves

So this is the tree behind the bathroom, those two cut trunks will be the central supports for a table and bench (there’ll be a rear deck as ground level, and they’re both a bit high so I can cut down to ideal) and I’m gonna let shoots off them grow and thicken a few years as auxiliary supports (that’s two years’ growth off the upper one and one off the lower, then I cut them down a bit so new shoots will have to stay wide of the upper ones)

Wrestled with opening what was apparently the last window in the house to go unopened for years

For a while my yard work has been my “one thing I do today to make the house better”, so it’s nice realizing that the kitchen – as the centralmost room, the last one unsorted – has been getting better as I gradually address things in the course of stuff and don’t cause new issues to arise

Just everything I’ve done with Karafuto so far, all the furniture and such, is working out so well it’s really giving me confidence re: executing the rest of my plans

Have been wondering how to arrange one room to work for an office/passage to the yard/guest room/movie room for crowds I don’t invite to my bed and have realized it might actually work best as a tatami room with a pull-out futon (and a projector to use a wall as a screen)

Starting to game out parts of the kitchen remodel here. My inspiration is honestly the kitchen in Aerith’s house in Midgar – a Japanese tint on Euro-rural cozy, keyed off unpainted wood

The main room light in the parlor is too dim to comfortably read and the lights directly addressing where I sit don’t exist yet :(

Just sitting in my chair, looking out the window at the side yard, seeing how great it looks, remembering how awful it once did, and appreciating how the difference is solely the result of literally hundreds of hours of my personal effort

Realizing that in going for a Japonisme look for Karafuto I was thinking of getting the roof tiled but as I look into it I realize that any authentic Japanese roofline or roof tile – form or color – would actually look pretty bad. So I guess the -isme bit is figuring out how to invoke what I’m going for with materials more suited and available domestically.

Okay, my mantle basically* done and it looks good.

* that wood mantlepiece doesn’t really match the fireplace, which is more obvious when empty, and will be replaced

Also, in getting the stones was able to sort the wrong colors into

pink and blue/green/purple jars of their own

The side yard (thinned those trees out a lot last year)

Strawberry Ridge

The flower patch

Blueberry Hill

Annuals coming in out front

Feel bad for getting less than I could done in a day but then I remember I have no deadlines and I’m still making progress.

Well, I need to do the earth ramming for the side ramp while there’s still moisture in the dirt, and planting some cover will be month-dependent but I honestly don’t even know what and I can do that next year at worst, I’ll be here for a while.

Doing weeding after the first rain since a lot of stuff started to sprout, used the soil pulled out to construct a ramp of solid ground back onto Blueberry Hill where I can smash up the remainder

…and fill in with debris from the power line downed branches which I’ve been smashing up against Strawberry Ridge

Seeing more and more people take that path, part of it it lines up a good shot down to a respectable park/elementary school/cut-through to a shady route to walk/bike south, but I can even overhear from their comments walking by that part of it’s just they like the side yard as I’ve made it and prefer to come that way, it makes me feel really proud, I remember moving in when it was a total mess with a worn-muddy path through a field of broadleaf weeds with a tree-of-heaven nest (that it was a right bitch to untangle and cultivator mattock the roots from) and a blackberry bramble hanging from my (then-intact!) fence

But then again I remember – less than a decade ago! – when multiple houses on the block had bars on the windows.

In planning for the future of Karafuto I’m considering the possibility that before it reaches end-life the neighborhood will densify to the extent you at least want wrought-iron fencing if not window bars, that drifter knocking on my bedroom window from the backyard today reimpressed that that there are things that scale of defense is for

Well, I picked this coffee table up off the side of the road and had been wondering how I would work myself up to replacing

The side yard where Blueberry Hill and Strawberry Ridge are is technically a city right-of-way (basically, a short street block that never got 3 of the 4 adjacent households voting to tax themselves to pave; the next block would’ve been too steep to continue anyway), not my property, I guess it feels fine to dump leaves and branches on (they fell there anyway!) but not hire people to terraform.

Beyond that I’m gonna hire people to do the house remodeling and of course I didn’t particularly do anything to acquire the resources to buy the house in the first place, so having part of the process involving mixing my labor with the products of the soil fills in there.

I had kinda thought of today as a scrub, but I did first prove the silk sheet washing/drying trivial AND triple the amount of sheepskin on my bedroom floor

for a real Lindy vibe, plus some other stuff, and hey it was raining off and on anyway

(and the sheets were much easier now that I’m actually trying to put the short side on the short side of the mattress)

kontextmaschine:

Alright great, the one part of the mimosa I wanted to have trimmed around power lines the power company just sent some guys by with a bucket truck to chop

This incidentally means that for the first time since moving in, all the trees on the property are up to date on trimming and will just need new growth pruned every year (and I guess like the occasional culling of 1 of 3 major subtrunks serving a patch of canopy once 2 develop enough to split it between them)

There’s a mimosa in my front yard that on moving in my tree inspector guy was like look out you’ll have to replace that in your lifetime and I worried, it’s always the last one in the yard to get leaves in spring but they show up, so I put the thought aside.

But now I look it up and those things have lifespans of 25 years? It’s been 6 already and it sure looked like it had had 4 times that in growth already.

I guess if/when it gives out I could put a wisteria there

It was about a year ago I got into the habit of going out to do some yard work most afternoons and then coming in to make one thing in the house better. I remember it, the period where 5-6 was the last hour of daylight like 4-5 had been weeks earlier.

Anyway basically every aspect of my home experience is significantly improved since then and still going.

space-wizards:

kontextmaschine:

91625:

kontextmaschine:

Doing a bit of decorating and wondering, to what extent am I even supposed to have ashtrays anymore? I’m not particularly expected to have spittoons or antimacassars.

They’re small and ornamental.

Yeah, and then how do I balance their ornamental value catching eyes on an otherwise empty horizontal surface vs. utility catching ash in proximity to places smoking people might want to occupy? Should I have some deployed for every obvious place to settle? In reserve, like drink coasters?

Do you want people proactively smoking cigarettes in your house? Because if I see an ashtray in someone’s house, I’m assuming they smoke, and are okay with others smoking, which is not appealing. If you really want to accommodate smokers, you could leave one on the deck. you’re better off with painted rocks or candy bowls for decoration.

…yeah, kinda, both my parents smoked and so the smell, ritual, and accoutrements all resonate as home to me, and in making provision for it I’m connecting my home to an older world that I was just old enough to experience in person