Hey everybody! I’m here and so ready to be done with 2020. I just wanted to wish all of you a safe and happy new year! I hope to be back more in 2021 🙂

I’m still here. My garden has been exploding and I’ve enjoyed puttering around it. It’s a nice distraction from covid. I am so concerned about the pandemic and it’s trajectory – NY had such a hellish period that I can’t believe other states aren’t taking it seriously enough. Just wear a mask, people, please. Or a face shield. Just something as we all need to do our part.

Anyway, It’s been hard to get up the will to post stuff, but then all of the sudden it’s there again and here I am 🙂

I have a pot of pansies that has hung around despite the really hot and humid temperatures. It kind of comes and goes with the blooms, but seems willing to keep trying.

I had a good run of foxgloves. This color was one that I only saw 2 stalks of.

It’s called Candy Mountain. I have let it go to seed. After several years, my foxgloves seem to have found the place in my garden that they really like and I have tons of babies.

My campanula alba:

These get nice tall spikes on them and the foliage is neat and compact when they aren’t blooming. I might try dividing this clump and see if I can get more plants out of it. It hasn’t really spread or done too much in 5 years other than bloom a lot.

Next to the campanula is my Othello rose:

This one has been pretty happy this year. I remembered to put some rose food on my roses in the spring and turns out they like it 🙂

An early fall-like flower is the ecchibeckia:

This really bloomed early starting in late June. I had two, but only one came back.

In the back, the shade garden heuchera bloomed nicely:

Now that the plants are a lot bigger, they get dug up less by critters looking for earthworms or whatever they are digging for. Finally after a few years it’s nice to have mature plants.

Some new penstemon:

I was hoping the hummers would go for these, but I didn’t see any on the flower. But then I’ve only seen one hummingbird.

My tall asiatic lily:

This one got about 4 feet tall this year since no rabbit nibbled on it LOL.

Behind that is the shasta daisy.

These are so fun and happy! I have more pictures, since I’m obviously way behind here, but I wanted to pop in and say hi!

The blooms are back! The weather here has been pretty warm this past week, warmer than usual. That means the garden will start popping. It went from the red tulip phase to the blue/purple phase:

It’s Picasso phase, I suppose. 🙂 I divided a lot of irises last year, gifting them to my neighbors, and mind really took off like a shot after that. They have just started to open.

This one I planted two years ago, but it didn’t bloom last year and I kind of forgot what color it was until it opened.

It’s so pretty! It’s called Immortal and is a reblooming iris. Hopefully I will be posting pictures of it again this fall!

My Tour de France iris has no buds on it yet. I am not sure why. I had one stalk last year. The rhizome is still on the small side, so it may not really come into it’s own for a bit yet. Or maybe it’s just late.

Alliums, one of my favorites:

I have these sprinkled all over the front and back.

Tippy pots back in action. I moved them over to get them a little more shade. It’s kind of hard having smaller pots in the sun. They dry out too much.

Petunias and million bells:

Those look way more blue in the photo than in real life. Not sure why my phone does whonky colors sometimes. They are more purple in color.

Another weekend project done. This took all of about 1.5 hours using cedar fence pickets and some 1 x 2 boards.

I put seeds in there. Some marigolds and some shorter cosmos. My neighbor gave me the cosmos seeds, so this should be fun.

On the wildlife front, birdies are having a great time in our yard. The cat birds have returned:

And this possum went through the yard:

A little weird seeing them out in the day, but it’s not completely unusual. This one looks quite healthy, too.

I hope you all have a safe Memorial Day!

Instead of What’s Blooming, I’m posting a reno project! One of the more difficult parts of the bathroom remodel was replacing the bathtub and surround.

The old surround was fiberglass and the tub was obviously part of the whole kit. The tub stopper was broken and the surface of the tub had a bubble and crack in it, which at some point would probably cause leaking. Anyway, time to go. We removed the bits of drywall that were covering the lip of the surround and we were surprised (or maybe not really) to see a complete hole to the roof.

You can also see where the tile was attached to the back wall from the original bathroom. Turns out that tile was peach colored, since we found some bits of it behind everything.

The surround came out easier than expected. The fiberglass broke when we pulled on it, and we could pull it out in several pieces. So, yay on that!

You can just see our original linen closet on the right there. We still have that along with our new one! Anyway, you can see how our house was built. Concrete blocks with plaster over them. The wall where the plumbing is must have been removed to put in this setup.

Next was removal of the tub, which went pretty well. It was a bit tricky maneuvering because there is a radiator right next to the tub. It wasn’t that heavy at least.

Ta-da! All empty.

Since we were replacing a tub with the same dimensions, we didn’t have to move the drainpipes or anything, which was nice. See that radiator there on the left? That plus the windowsill made getting the new tub in a real beeyotch!

The new tub is an enamel coated steel tub. I didn’t want fiberglass because they don’t last as long and you can’t ever refinish them if need be. It took us quite a few tries to maneuver the new tub in having to go *over* both the radiator and window sill. It also involved having to remove more plaster off the wall by the window to squeeze the tub in.

It really took way longer than we thought with having to keep retrying. Not to mention that the tub weighed 70 pounds, so there was much swearing and frustration. We did put a small ding in the tub, too, which I was pretty unhappy about, but it’s on the inside so you can’t see it unless you look in the tub. When we did the floor, we stopped about 6 inches from the tub so that it wouldn’t get damaged when we actually worked on the tub since we finished the other side of the bathroom first – aka phase 1.

Next up was repair, putting up the drywall and getting ready for the shower surround. We had thought a bit about doing tile, but we decided against having to deal with tile maintenance – the floor is enough, thank you. And it would have prolonged the project by quite a few days. We ended up ordering a surround from Lowe’s. It was a 3 piece surround and very heavy. It is some kind of non-fiberglass composite material that is very thick.

Of course, the largest piece created quite a problem getting it up our staircase. We kept trying different ways. The surround wasn’t very “bendy”, which is why it was so difficult, and John suggested cutting off the top 2 rows of “tiles” to get it up the stairs. I was not having that, so we just kept trying and eventually inched it up the stairs with much maneuvering and sweating…

and swearing.

This surround has the look of subway tile.

It had to be trimmed to fit. John did that cutting with a rotary tool and we were both pretty nervous about messing it up because this surround was $800.

The new hardware:

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Then there was a lot of time consuming plaster repair around the surround. I did all of that work and it felt like it took forever. But then I can be a bit of a perfectionist with that stuff, so I kept fiddling a bit more on it.

We will be getting shower doors at some point, but with coronavirus going on and not being a great time to go out browsing for them, we are going to wait and use our current shower curtain.

One more small project to show for the bathroom and then hopefully a full reveal on it!

I’m feeling a blog funk, I have to say. Actually, I think it is covid funk and wishing there was a way to resolve all of this without any more fatalities. Wishful thinking, I know. It’s just so wearing on the soul. I keep wanting to post more, but motivation to do so is lacking. I even missed Flower Friday here. But, I will make up for that now.

We have tulips in full swing out front.

I didn’t realize I bought so many red tulips last fall. They are striking, though. There are some more orange ones as well, but they kind of blend into the red.

A few different colored ones:

A pink holdover from who knows when:

You just never really know what ones will come back. This patch of red ones has been going on probably 5 years now and hasn’t slowed down:

Others only last a season. It’s always a surprise!

Lily of the valley are starting to make their appearance:

Tons more of this one to bloom. I just love the fragrance.

After 5 years, I finally did something with our big brush pile from renovating the back beds when we moved in. We cut down a lot of the brush into big piles to burn in our fire pit and the rest was moved off to the side of the house awaiting collection. Normally our city comes around and picks up brush each spring, but because of covid, they suspended it for now since multiple people have to work too close together while picking it up. Not sure if they are going to start it up in June or forget it this year. They do take the leaf bags, though, since only one person goes around in a truck.

In the place of the brush pile is a compost bin. I had an open pile the last couple of years, but really wanted to hide it. I purchased a Geobin to set up. It’s only $35 with shipping. Of course, the locking keys weren’t sent with it to set it up, but the company was very fast to ship those missing pieces out to me.

Very easy to set up. This sits next to the shed. It’s probably 3 x 3 feet? Maybe 3.5 feet tall. It’s actually pretty full since I moved the active compost pile into it. My finished pile was great and I used most of that to sprinkle into our front lawn area where we are reseeding. I might get another one. The plan is to buy some fencing sections and kind of close this off from view since it is near our patio, but we are limiting trips to the hardware store as much as possible right now. It looks much better than the brush pile 😀

The birdies have been super active lately. Getting ready for making spring babies! The white-throated sparrow has been migrating through. I love their song.

That one is on the left. Chipping sparrow on the right.

Our cardinals:

I don’t know how long cardinals live, but at least one pair has been here for several years and bringing their babies to our feeders. yay!

Hope you are all staying smart and staying safe!

Spring is slowly coming in. The last part of April has been much cooler and kind of wet, so the garden slowed down a bit from early in the month.

The tulips have made an appearance. I have several types and the early ones are now open.

Those cool fritillaria are still around. They are long lasting, which I love in a flower 🙂

Lots of foliage appearing all around. A lot of that in the background is allium.

Daffodils:

These are from a clump that I found when we first moved into the house 5 years ago (can you believe it has been that long??). They were in the shade and not really blooming, so I divided and moved them. Each year I divide the bigger clump and have interspersed them around the garden and I have a lot more now. All for free! Yay!

I don’t plant tulips anymore in the back yard because the squirrels really go after them. Only in the back, though, not the front. Weird. However, there are a few holdovers:

I need to do more clean out in the back bed. Lots of oak leaves from the neighbor’s tree still in there.

I took this picture the other day:

And this is that tulip today:

This is why no more new tulips back here. Grrrr…

Pretty violets:

The violets just pop up all over and I find them in the garden beds, as well as the lawn. I have never planted any, but they sure do get around!

Pretty red tulips:

And a nice inside shot:

There should be a few more different colors next week. Yay!

I need to get pictures up of the completed bathroom. We love how it turned out, but I want to do another post of getting the new tub in.

Stay safe everyone!

Hey – it’s time for What’s Blooming again! Something nice to talk about other than coronavirus, right?

A few plants are peeping out. It’s been fun going out and seeing what survived the winter, which appears to be almost everything. I lost a couple baby plants to frost heave and there are a few that won’t wake up for a few more weeks, but looking good so far.

The birds have been going crazy as well. It’s that time of year to get working on bird babies! Some of the migrating birds are showing up. I hope to get a picture of the yellow throated sparrow before they move out. I hear them all the time, but they don’t always come to the feeder.

Papa Cardinal was having a good meal the other day:

I don’t know how long cardinals live, but a pair has been around for the last few years. Not sure if it is the same two birds, but they have brought their babies to my feeders for several summers now. I hope they do it again.

First flower of the year was some scraggly hyacinth:

Only 3 of these came back. Scent powerhouses, though!

The vinca is making a reappearance near the house.

I thought this was pretty much all gone from renovating the front garden bed, but it has appeared again. I’ll let this do some spreading to cover some bare spots on that side.

And one of my new bulbs. This is a fritillaria:

Isn’t that cool? The blooms are about 1 inch or a little bigger and maybe 4 inches tall, so not really viewable unless you are up close. Sorry pedestrians! I didn’t know they were that small, but very cute. I think the common name is snake head or something like that. My hope is that these will spread.

Our garden centers are considered essential businesses here and you can actually go in there to pick things up. The nice thing is that you can call and order things and they will bring the order to your car when you arrive and you don’t even have to get out of the car. So, I can still do planting and get started on some lawn work. Might buy a new rhododendron for the back yard. I’m not that interested in actually going in to the store at this time. Our county has advised that Covid cases in our area will peak in the next week or two, so obviously we are still on high alert. John has asthma and I grocery shop for my parents – and so we are being very careful to not get sick.

Here’s hoping more plants show their faces this week!

It feels like we are in suspended animation here in NY. We have pretty strict measures in place and hopefully that will help, but it seems like it wasn’t quite enough. Here upstate there are cases in our hospital and one nurse has tested positive. When I had my hysterectomy last year, my nurses were so great and I worry for them. Testing in our area is only available now for health care workers or those admitted to the hospital. They only did about 600 tests in our area before they stopped (a week ago) and it has taken more than a week for results to come in with 200 results still pending. Ugh! So, we are all just kind of waiting to see what happens as everything kind of rolls upstate. There are people from the city who have second summer homes here and they are now coming up here to get out of the city. Hopefully they will self quarantine as they are supposed to, but who knows.

Anyway, back to our alternate reality…

All the wainscot wallpaper went up,and then baseboard and chair rail.

We had plenty of wallpaper with two rolls, so we extended that into the new linen closet.

That is the “new” mirror for the room. It was actually a mirror that was in the hallway. In our first house in Illinois, this mirror was over our fireplace. In Casa Radiance, it was on the wall as we had no fireplace. In Radiance manor, we have a fireplace, but our ceilings are too low for the mirror to fit over the mantel, so we just put it in the hallway. I realized it was a great fit over the vanity, so I painted the frame and voila!

Our new faucet.

As I mentioned before, we are going with an oil-rubbed bronze finish on everything, which also meant having to paint the new toilet handle since it was silver LOL

This was the vanity test fit. No backsplash on it yet and no chair rail on the wall. The backsplash top comes to the exact height of the wallpaper

I painted the vanity drawer pulls because they were nickel. We would like to change them out at some point, but for budget reasons right now, paint it is.

I *love* this vanity! It’s so pretty and it even has soft close doors! It is 48 inches wide. We ordered it from Lowe’s and it was 50% off. It’s still on sale through April 8th, FYI. We would have liked to build a custom one, but time issues and finding a piece to work with just wasn’t really happening. With this vanity being 50% off, that made an easy decision with it having a marble top.

Next I’ll show the finished walls and the linen closet (yay!!).

So, in an effort to bring some kind of normalcy, here is more progress on the bathroom. Again, we are farther along than this, but I’ll just play catch up to post more.

We had the floor finished, which I’m really happy with now that we got the pattern right LOL!

We got the new toilet installed for a little while – yay!

Then came finishing up the walls. We had to install drywall on the one open wall, which I then did a skim coat on and started painting. We changed the color a little bit. It’s still blue, but more powder blue than aqua blue. Paint color is Air Kiss by Valspar

The trim is going from a beige color to white.

Our original plan was to put wainscot panels on the lower half of the wall. We had the panels and were dry fitting them to put up and realized it was going to be really difficult.

With a floor that isn’t really level, panels don’t work very well because the top chair rail needs to be level and if the lower part isn’t, it’s really hard to make the panel level without trying to cut and fit the panels or the baseboard, which really just makes them shorter and would mess up where we wanted the chair rail to be. Queue yet another frustrated round of curses.

I was bummed because I really wanted the wainscot look and thought about doing it with a painting technique, but I hadn’t finished the bottom part of the wall because it was supposed to be covered!

Now people, I know this will be a shock since I have long professed my hatred of wallpaper after removing many rooms of it, but I found some paintable wallpaper that looks like beadboard wainscot. I couldn’t believe it was coming out of my mouth to suggest it, but with major side eye, we decided to proceed. With the size of our bathroom, we needed just two rolls, so that ended up saving us money over what the panels cost. I purchased this on Amazon (my affiliate link)

It actually was pretty easy to put up. You just soaked it in water, let it sit for 5 minutes and put in on the wall, squeegee-ing (new word!) the excess glue out. That part was pretty messy, I have to say. The paper is very easy to cut sharply when dry, not so much when wet. I was pleased after it started to go on:

The chair rail goes over the top of it. You can see the lines more when it is wet. Once it was dry, it was all white again. We did have an issue with the outlet on the left as that was the original outlet in the wall, which didn’t get moved. Of course, it butts into the chair rail. We didn’t want to move that outlet (or John didn’t want to move it), so we ended up cutting out the chair rail around it, which looks fine. We needed the chair rail to come to the exact level of the backsplash of the vanity so the room would look aligned. The ceiling in the room is about 7 feet, so we kept the wainscot a little lower for balance.

The vanity also arrived and I am so in love with it! Marble!!

It’s 48 inches. It looks a lot longer in this shot. The marble top was just anchored to the vanity, not glued, so it could be taken off. Thank goodness because that top was farking heavy! We did get it upstairs and the vanity installed without breaking the top, so heavy sigh of relief there. I cannot tell you how nervous we were about damaging that top.

Also during this time was painting of fixtures and such. Our old things like the TP holder, towel ring, vanity handles and light fixture were a mix of brass and nickle. Since we wanted to go with oil rubbed bronze sink and shower fixtures, I got a can of Rustoleum ORB paint to see how those would look. I really hated our old light fixture, but trying to keep costs down with the economic uncertainty right now, painting was an option here.

We had 2 fixtures, but consolidated to one. We bought 3 new shades, so it cost about $30 to redo this, versus a couple hundred for a new fixture.

I am quite pleased with how it turned out. In the future we might change to a setting that is more to our liking, but this works fine for now.

With a mirror just behind and below this, it gives the room a lot of light. i was a little worried going down to one fixture from two, but with the overhead light/fan combo, it seems as bright as before or maybe more so with all the white in the room.

This weekend we plan to move on to part B, which is the tub and shower. All the materials are in, so we are ready to go. The object is to get it all out and replaced this weekend. haha 😀

These are certainly strange times. As of today, NY shot up to the most Covid cases in the country with over 900 statewide, and of course that number is going to grow with more testing coming on board. Governor Cuomo gave a stark warning today that he did not think we were going to flatten the curve enough to not overwhelm our medical system. Schools are closed. All restaurants and bars must either close or go to take out/pick up only and nonessential businesses are encouraged to close or let employees work from home.

John and I are very fortunate in that we already work from home, so there is no change for us in that respect. Our businesses will suffer some, I’m sure, but there isn’t much else we can do but wait it out. We are trying to support our favorite restaurants by getting take out, wishing that there was more that we can do. It’s hard feeling helpless.

I stopped giving blood a few years ago after a couple of dry sticks (owie) as my veins were scarred from years of donating, but I think I am going to give it a try again as I know blood banks are either in trouble or are going to be. There is a drive next week, but I’m not sure how they are handling it right now as far as distancing. We will figure it out and hopefully be able to do that.

People have freaked out with the stockpiling, which just needs to stop!

This was a strange sight with only cream of corn available in this aisle. People, grocery stores aren’t going to close and there is supply for normal shopping. Hoarding is really selfish.

First priority now is keeping my parents safe and isolated as they are in their 70s and have underlying conditions. I have been bringing them groceries. No hugs and kisses 🙁

On a more “normal” note, our bathroom is progressing along. This was the flooring going in:

We had a snafu with the floor. After laying the center line of tiles down and working outwards, we had finished about half the floor before realizing that some of our tiles got out of pattern alignment. Argh! We had to pull up that half and reset those. Just to show we make a lot of mistakes along the way.

We actually are pretty far along, pretty much done with phase 1, which was everything but the tub and shower. It’s nice to have a functional bathroom and I’m loving how it came out with just some detail work to do for phase 1 like caulking trim and paint touchups.

For phase 2, we have the tub and our surround is being delivered supposedly some time this week, but with all the closures going on, we are going to wait to put it in since we assume we will need to go to the hardware store during that install and who knows what will be open. I’ll show pictures of more of the process in another post, but it felt kind of weird to post about that with the seriousness of everything going on with Covid.

Stay safe, wash your hands, keep your distance and keep a level head.