I have always been into my house, our home. I have worked out of my house for the past eight years. Originally, when we moved to Denver, I thought I would be working a full time job, but things have changed. See earlier posts, for an explanation, I am talked out about the situation & the Antonio subject still makes me sad. I am back to running my own freelance graphic design company from home & business is great!
I have always been inspired by my living space, it has to feel like home!
So, since I am around the house all day, we have started a few more projects around here. I have always had a pioneering spirit. I have always been able to make a lot out of what ever I have laying around. It started as a kid. I would build entire towns for my matchbox cars out of spare car parts, wood scraps (one of my grandfathers was a mechanic, the other a carpenter, so go figure, their scraps made for great stuff to make things out of), trash, moss, sticks, rocks and whatever else I could find. I used a piece of asbostos sliding as a scraper to build roads for my matchbox towns. I am sure that was super safe and really great for my long term health. It was was super for my creative health anyway, and that is what is important to this blog post.
I built many things at our old house on Broad Street out of free, found stuff. Our fence was made out of hotel doors. Literally, hotel doors from the Princess Anne Hotel around the corner. I built a wall out of a bunch of wild cherry tree logs that were the result of said wild cherry tree having to be cut down. I used bricks I found in an abandoned lot across the street to make a flower bed border. Our broad street house looked pretty sweet after 8 years of hard work and love!
So, of course when we bought our new house in Denver, I was taking stock of anything laying around that I might use for potential projects. We looked at many different houses, on two different housing buying trips to Denver. Each time we pulled up, I was wondering, is there anything laying around I could use to sweeten up the new pad? The Pearl Street house won on many different levels as the one, but a lot of it for me was the potential. She is basically a blank slate, other than the two amazing pine trees, a fenced in huge back yard, a sweet front porch, and a killer deck, that we hang out on all the time. The Pearl Street house has many left-overs from previous renters/owners. There are piles of rocks, tons of wood (shoved in the open rafters of the garage), loads of flagstone patches around the deck. I had been eyeing the rocks since day one for a project. The front yard was almost completely weeds. I should have done a before photo, but I never can bring myself to look at the ugly version of projects! Our sweet handy man Justin (see photos for G. I. Joe look alike) laid down landscaping fabric and dug around the edges of said weed patch, then carried all the many miscellaneous rocks into the front yard, and proceeded to help me arrange them for another 2 hours, after he had been working on the yard for the past 6 hours. He is pretty awesome. We mention quite often, we don't know what we did to deserve such a handy fellow around all the time, but we are incredibly grateful daily for him.
We had mulch delivered a few days later and wow, what a difference a little mulch & lots of GI Joe man power can make around a place! I know, finally, photos of the house, on the blog. Miracles really do happen!
Snow days inspire me, possible more than anything else. I have loved snow since forever. Snow makes even the ugliest of things beautiful. What else can you think of that has that sort of power?
