The House with the Blue Door

Attention...the below photo is NOT PHOTOSHOPPED. (well, it is, but just to make it prettier, not to change the door color) Do not adjust your monitor. Our front and back doors are now painted Violet Beauregarde Blueberry blue. I love this color. It looks vaguely purpleish in some lights.

A non-photoshopped shot of the front porch area:

Eee!! So exciting.

My coworker also let me have some more starts of forget-me-nots, and I bought an Endless Summer Hydrangea. So now the plants near the front porch look like this:


Lobelia, lavender, lamium, forget-me-not, violet, hydrangea, rhododendron, and hosta. Can't wait to see it all grow grow grow over the years as we live here!

We couldn't leave the back door red, of course, so here's the back door, also painted blue:

Lamium Buds!

It has been a busy holiday weekend around Catty-Corner Cottage. Yesterday I had to work till 3. Today we woke up bright and early and power-washed the outside of the house and an especially grody section of the fence. We also cleaned all the main floor windows inside and out, and did several other house projects.

I was giddy and literally squealed out loud when, while cleaning the front of the house, I saw a handful of flower buds starting to appear on our mysterious lamium plants.

Isn't it lovely?

Pretty Jar Candles

Last weekend we hosted a birthday party for a friend. Another of our friends who came to the party brought us a housewarming gift of a handful of Bath and Body Works jar candles and Scent Bugs.

Well, for fun today I decided to try this awesome and super simple tutorial over at EPBOT blog, showing how to make old-fashioned Art Nouveau and French labels for your jar candles. It worked great!

In about five seconds, using a glue stick, my jar candles went from this (stock picture):


To this:

A No Rain Saturday

Yesterday at CCC we finally had beautiful late spring weather all day long, with nary a drop of the wet stuff falling from the sky. Ahh, how wonderful!

You can see the Rhododendrons planted last Sunday are all blooming now. Yay! (Yes, I photoshopped the door...it's not painted yet ;)

A bit of silliness...I planned to make a sign for our "Waterhouse Water Closet" on the main floor. J.W. Waterhouse is my favorite artist, for those of you who didn't know already. :)



It's silly, I know, but it makes me smile.

Now for a few more plant pictures. I know. I know. I'll stop. Really.

I finally planted the sweet potato vine I bought weeks ago in the planter box with the ivy. We'll see if the ivy doesn't choke it out.


The Siberian Delphinium is doing wonderfully.


Rhododendrons in bloom!


Aaand my favorite....our first lavender blossom!

Friday Pictures

Of course you know I have to start my post with a new picture of the eponymous cat of Catty-Corner Cottage, Corvin.

Yesterday, mom and I went garage saleing in the morning, and then I enjoyed some yard work at home. I shot a few pictures.

The ferns on the far side of the garage have really taken off. And now the wild strawberries are starting to flower.


..and peek their little red berry heads out of the greenery.


I thought this curled fiddlehead on the fern was lovely.

The thornless blackberry start I bought at a garden society sale last weekend seems to be doing decently.

As is the purple passion plant I bought for inside a few weeks ago.


My neighbor let me see her back yard garden yesterday, and she quipped that gardening is easy to get addicted to. Well, I do believe I'm smitten.

Yesterday at the garage sales, my favorite find/purchase was this gorgeous stained glass butterfly light...perfect for the Dreaming Room.

Hawthorn Tree

Thanks to Lindsey for identifying the tree in the back yard. I can't say with 100% certainty, but I'm quite sure that we have one of the hundreds of species of a Hawthorn tree. Which is ridiculously awesome because a) they are traditionally associated with faeries, b) they frequently appear in Celtic myth and Arthurian myth.

In fact, the tree in which Merlin was trapped was a Hawthorn, and if you click the above Edward Burne-Jones (one of my favorite artists) image of The Beguiling of Merlin you can see that Merlin is entangled in a tree with exceedingly familiar blossoms....

ID the Tree?

?

Well, you all were so absolutely amazing at immediately identifying the lamium in my front yard, I thought I'd give you another challenge.

We have no idea what kind of tree we have in our back yard. Here are a few helping images. Click any to see larger:

We just got blossoms on the tree about a week ago. And the birds and bees LOVE IT. Seriously, it's like chirp and buzz buzz city back there right now.

The flowers/tree smells like...well...it's kind of hard to explain what it smells like. It doesn't smell bad, per se, but it's a very musky raw smell, kind of earthy and slightly sour sweet.

Finally a last "pretty picture" of the tree and the back yard from today.

So help me, oh internets...what sort of tree do we have here?

Sleigh Beds Ring?

So I've started to notice that the two rooms upstairs at Catty-Corner Cottage are taking on accidental additional themes. The Dreaming Room is representing Spring and Summer, and the bedroom is totally Autumn and Winter.

So I saw this picture on a favorite blog today and I was smitten. Do I want a round bed? No. Do I want a canopy? No. But something about this image really feels like the "look" I want in the bedroom.

So I've been searching beds on Craigslist and this one came across my screen. I really like it. I've been fond of sleigh beds for a while, and I definitely think this one would add to the "Autumn and Winter" feel of the bedroom and has the potential to work really well.

Or would it be too heavy/overkill in a room that already has a lot of dark tones?

Of course I could always just throw the sleigh bed outside and the whole "outdoor forest" look could be reality....

Or make myself a bed of moss and call it a night...

Shut the Front Door

Or leave it open. I hate that expression. Anyway....

Did you know that we've only had 40-some days of entirely precipitation-less weather so far this ENTIRE YEAR?! It's quite frustrating for a new home owner trying to get things done on the outside of her house. One of the projects that has been delayed is painting our front door. The bright red front door is quite cheery, yes, but it just doesn't quite match our personalities or the personality we want the house to express.

We had decided on painting the front door purple. Kind of like this:


Buuuuuuuut....now that the plantings are going in and we've lived there a little while, I'm reconsidering the color (who, me??) and wondering if it wouldn't be prettier and a more flattering shade to go with all four seasons if we painted it a dark periwinkle blue, like this:

Or, more aptly, like this photoshopped image:


Thoughts? I thought a periwinkle blue (dark shade so it's not Easter Eggy) would both bring in the purples I love, and also look striking with the oranges and reds of autumn (blue looks amazing with autumn leaf colors, as my friend Sheri's wedding proved to me) and could work with Christmas colors too.

And the above image also has a photoshopped window box. We're considering purchasing these from ebay:

A Few More...

Last night after I did my post about all the yard and garden work we did yesterday, I went to mom and dad's and filled the planter box from our front porch with ivy. I got a trellis for it at Walmart, and brought it home. Today I snapped a few more pictures:



Also, mom mentioned while I was at their house that they had a chair at church that might work for the Dreaming Room. You all may remember the desk I found for the room. It didn't come with a chair, so I've been scouring the antique shops and garage sales for one that I could use in the room with it. After all, what good is a desk without a chair? Anyway, dad had taken a picture of the chair with his cell phone, and as soon as I saw the picture I said "um, YES??"




I think it adds the perfect touch of fairy tale charm to the room. :)

Pretty Maids All in a Row

Today was the trip to a local garden center I had heard a lot about. Aaand without further ado, here are the results!

Okay, so it may be hard to make out the changes in the larger picture. Here's a detailed shot of the entry and right side. Here, we have two new planters to either side of the stairs with lavender in them. On the far right is a new Minnetonka Rhododendron. Next to that is a transplanted hosta from the other side of the front, and in front of that is a new Siberian Delphinium. In front of the Delphinium are the forget-me-nots from yesterday.
Over here, we have two other new Minnetonka Rhododendrons at the outside corners. Next to those are hostas we shifted to make room for the new rhodies. At the center under the window is a Grape Galaxy Hellebore.
My cart at the garden center :)
Rhododendrons!!!
A closer shot of the plantings on the right side. Again, I hope these will take off something fierce.

As the rhododendrons grow, they should hopefully start to look like this:


Well, okay, maybe not quite that big. But still. They should grow rather large!

The Grape Galaxy Hellebore was a spur-of-the-moment find. It's evergreen, blooms in late winter to early spring, and is a shade plant. And the blooms...oh my!

It's too late to see the blooms this year, but I can't wait to see them next spring!