Zone 5 Perennials for Partial Sun - Shade

On Wednesday, I revealed my intent to start building some gardens. I've done a little more research now, so I thought I would share my tentative plan.

Hydrangeas are my number one priority, and YAY the "Endless Summer" variety apparently grows well in Ontario.

Endless Summer Hydrangea via Landscape Ontario
The bed at the front of the house is shaded/partially shady most of the day, so I like the idea of two hydrangea bushes flanking the big window.



Unfortunately, the soil here does not drain well so I'll have to do some digging and other gardening like things to get an appropriate bed going on for hydrangeas.

As for what I want immediately underneath the window, I turned to Canadian Gardening's list of perennials, and googled each plant name to see what it looked like. If I liked what it looked like, I wrote down the name. Once I had my list, I researched each plant a little more thoroughly (Dave's Garden was incredibly helpful) to find out where it might thrive, it's size, colour, etc. White Flower Farm was also a great resource for finding shade happy perennials. I took notes, because I would be totally overwhelmed trying to remember everything if I didn't.

I know there are a lot of other options out there, but again, I don't want to be overwhelmed. So I'm on the lookout for the following plants for the front bed:

• Blue Monkshood (tall)
• Astilbe chinensis (medium)
• Pink Turtlehead (tall)
• Sweet Woodruff (short)
• Ghost fern (medium)
• Lenten rose (short)
• Mertensia virginica (short)
• some species of Trillium (short)
  

Tall guys in the back, medium sized guys in the middle, and short guys in the front and in between.

I wish I could say that I would get started on this this weekend, but that would be a lie. I'm wedding dress shopping on Saturday, and we're tiling the shower walls on Sunday and Monday! At least that's the plan.

Have a good weekend!

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Starting a Garden from Almost Scratch

The weather outside has been far from frightful, and my mind seems to have forgotten that the bathroom isn't finished. It just wants to think about pretty outside things. While I sit inside in my not pretty at all office 35 hours a week.

Aaaaanyway, despite some awesome flowering bushes that we inherited with the house, we don't have any real garden beds. I'd like to fix that, and I will...but in a "slow and steady wins the race" kind of way. Part of the reason for doing things slowly is that I can weed out (PUN!) what I like and what I don't like, instead of just buying cheap stuff in an effort to have a garden right now. The other reason is that it's just so flippin' expensive.

I have three areas where I'd like to focus my efforts. One spot is wee - you caught a glimpse of it in this picture.



I've decided that this is going to strictly be an annual bed. It's going to get trampled when we get someone in to do the brickwork, and many many years from now when we do an addition it will likely be removed. I don't want to mess around with digging up and relocating shrubs and bulbs, so annuals it is. Mike brought home some flowers last week, and they were planted here among some solar lights and other things that are not leafy.



The two other locations are significantly larger.



The one at the front of the house (which is actually the one on the left in the diagram), currently has some remnants of day lilies and hosta - neither of which I'm particularly fond of. But, they were free so I took them and just threw them in at the end of last summer. I would consider this area to be shady - however it would probably be partially sunny once we cut down the row of ugly cedar trees.

The one along the side of the house (the bottom in the diagram) is right in my face when I get out of my car and come into the house at the end of the day. In here I have a peony, some daffodils, a day lily, and a rose bush. The peony, daffodils, and rose bush are for sure staying, but I will probably remove the day lily. Our hose is also located right smack in the middle of this area. This spot gets sun until around 5:30 in the evening.

I don't have a plan yet, but I am starting to gather ideas and inspiration. I am totally new to the plant thing, so this is definitely a learn as I go experience.

Plants I don't like:

• day lily
• hosta
• roses (I will keep the one the came with the house, but I don't want to add any more)
• evergreen hedge-like things
• tulips
• cedar

Plants I do like:

• hydrangea
• purple leaf sand cherry
• phlox
• peony
• ranunculus
• wildflowers

And that about ends my knowledge of plant names. I'm located in Zone 5, and our soil is on the clay end of things.

Any suggestions?

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Bathroom Art, Yard Work, Flowers.

Hello friends!

Happy Monday to you; I hope you had a fantastic weekend full of fun. We had gorgeous weather which made for an awesome barbecue and bonfire get together on Saturday. Sunday was full of relaxing, visiting Mike's parents, baseball later in the evening, and a phone call with my Mom to top it all off.

Sunday was also Mike's 27th birthday. I find him pretty hard to buy for, but this year I had a plan. I am going to buy him two tickets to a NY Islanders vs Ottawa Sens game, but I still wanted him to have sometime to unwrap.

So remember this big empty space above the turtle tank?



I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I grabbed one of Mike's favourite quotes, played around with some fonts, and had the words printed out on a poster at Staples.



If anyone reading is a fan of baseball movies, you might recognize the quote...

In other news, our guests were very successful in ridding the yard of everything flammable. Including the old rotten clothes line pole and stairs.



And I've gotten into the habit of buying flowers every so often - I love me some Gerbera daisies.



Now, who can tell me what movie this quote comes from?



Psssssst! I'm linking this post up to...



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Our Victorian Farmhouse - The Layout

Home renovation and design blogs are my favourite go-to for when I need to get myself out of my own head. And although these blogs are full of inspiration, I often feel like I'm looking at an amorphous blob of pretty rooms. I can't picture where rooms are in relation to each other, and I'm left feeling a little lost.

With that in mind, I threw together a layout of our small, modest old farmhouse.


On the first floor we have the kitchen, living room, and bathroom, as well as the smallest entry hall in the history of entry halls. The stairs from the entry hall lead upstairs, and the stairs near the bathroom go down into the basement. We typically use the door on the left side of the kitchen to go in and out of the house, although we'll probably start using the back door more often now that there are stairs there. The door in the entry hall is the original wood door and in desperate need of restoring (you can see it here). Unfortunately, the entry hall is so small and cramped I doubt we'll ever actually use it as an entrance.


On the second floor, we have four bedrooms, the smallest of which has been designated as Mike's office (and the only room where I really don't care what it looks like). The only closets we have in the house are up here. Mike's is the one off the hallway, and mine will be the one in the master bedroom as soon as we get around to finishing that room. My clothes currently live in "bedroom 1", while we sleep in "bedroom 2". Unfortunately, only the master bedroom and bedroom 1 have heat registers...so we'll probably have to put in electric baseboards or something in the office and bedroom 2. Trying to run ducts from the furnace would be a huge headache.

As you can see, our house is essentially the opposite of open concept. We're cool with that; it's cozy.

Our house feels small a lot of the time, and at around 1200ish square feet, I suppose it is. But, we're really only effectively using 4 rooms right now. The master bedroom is half torn apart, the office isn't organized and functional, and bedroom 1 has become a dumping ground for stuff.

I don't mind not having a dining room. I don't mind that our laundry is in our bathroom. But what I really, really, really wish we had? A garage, or at least a mudroom. We will do an addition one day, and you can bet your buns that something along those lines will be included in the plans.

Oh! If you're looking to do a layout of your own house or even just a room, try Urban Barn's The Make Room. It's fantastic, free, and really easy to work with.

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Stenciled Flour Sack Cafe Curtains

White cafe curtains are incredibly hard to photograph when you don't really know how to use your camera on the manual setting. I took dozens of pictures and they're all terrible.

I had told you guys that I wasn't going to show you my cafe curtains until the bathroom was done, but since that's taking for-freaking-ever, here they are.



I think there are too many rings?

Other than that, I really like them. They give just enough privacy without blocking light from the room. I especially love that I can see the sky, and this window has the perfect view for watching the sun go down. Sort of sucks that you would have to hang out in the bathroom to watch it, but whatever.

They were really cheap to make. I grabbed a package of flour sack towels from Wal-mart, as they were the largest, plainest thing I could find ($7 I think).



I then dove into the world of Martha Stewart crafts, and bought some of her stencils, craft paint, and stencil brushes. This stuff was not exactly cheap, but since everything can be used again and again, I figured shelling out a couple extra bucks was worth it.



And really, I'm not going to explain any further than that because I'm pretty sure you can figure out how to stencil something. I just picked a couple designs and went to town. There was very little planning involved.

Hopefully by the time the new window is in and the trim is back in place I'll be able to figure out how to take a decent picture. Until then....what do you think? Take out some rings?

PSSSSSSSSST! I'm linking this post up to...


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Starter of Plenty, Finisher of None

As the title of this post implies, I started on a whole whack of projects this weekend and managed to finish a whopping zero of them. That's not totally true - I did get a sunburn. I don't think you can do those half way.

The point is, the bathroom is not getting finished before we have people over for Mike's birthday. My chairs are also not getting recovered (but my fabric did arrive and I looooooove it!). And I've decided that I don't care. Our friends know we bought a junky house with the intention of fixing it up. I think they expect chaos. At least I'm going to keep telling myself that.

Although we have a few projects to go, I'm making one a priority. I think our guests would appreciate having a door to close when they have to visit the washroom. Well, I imagine the guys won't care so much (and to be quite honest they'll probably use nature as their restroom), but the girls probably will.

If the weather cooperates this week, we should have a bathroom door again. The dog isn't going to be pleased considering she's gotten into the habit of following people in there.

 The bathroom door is called a 4 panel door, and is typical of what's found in plain Victorian homes. Unfortunately, over the years it has been covered in layers and layers and layers of paint (sort of like the layers and layers and layers of flooring that we uncovered when we started the bathroom reno).



Rachel from A Home in College Hill did a great tutorial on refinishing doors so I'm not going to write one here, but I will let you know that I used a combination of my heat gun and chemical stripper, as well as various scrapers and picking tools.



Because of the weather, I've been working on this door off and on since February. Thankfully I'm finally finished with paint removal and now it's on to sanding. Which, weather permitting, I'll do in the first half of the week. 



The door was originally stained a deep red-brown. I don't think I'll go that red for the new stain, but it's pretty up in the air. Either way, I can't wait to see this thing all finished up with the original hardware re-installed.

Speaking of original hardware, I've decided to keep the original hinges - at least for now. I had bought some new Stanley hinges, but the spacing of the screw holes and the size of the "wing" didn't match the original and it was just going to be a bigger pain in the behind than I needed it to be. The hinges are cooking in a crock pot with some other hardware while I write this!



How was everyone else's weekend? Hopefully more successful than mine!

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Farmhouse Yard Mini Tour

We got a wicked storm yesterday evening, with the biggest pieces of hail that I've ever seen. It didn't last too long, which I was kind of bummed about, though.

Before the storm rolled in, I got a chance to meander around outside the house and take some pictures of the current state of affairs.

Last year around this time, we tore down the shack at the back of the house that had collapsed due to really heavy snow fall in the preceding winter. We still have a lot of work to do back here, but things have already improved dramatically.







We have some major brick work to do back here, so we made sure that the stairs we put in could be easily removed and then put back into place. We might try and strip that white paint off, too, but I'm hoping that being exposed to the elements for a few years will cause a lot of it to fade. We'll also one day replace the door with a nicer wood one with a window.

As for the yard, well, it needs work too.



These cedars at the side of the yard are beyond over grown, and are actually engulfing the power line that runs from the street to the house. They also make our yard look way smaller - the next 20 feet or so on the other side of them is also ours.

I think someone attempted to keep them in check a long time ago; it's the only explanation that I can come up with for them having grown like this.



We've decided that they're coming down. They're messy, not that nice to look at, and are choking out some way better looking trees...like maples, crab apple, and a huge old oak that I'd like to be able to see from the living room window.



Coming home is the absolute best part of my day. As soon as my tires hit dirt road, I press down on the accelerator just a little bit, and feel like I can breathe again. And then turning into my driveway? Hello, house. I'm so happy to see you.



This old maple is my favourite tree (it's the one I wouldn't let Mike tap this year for syrup because I'm convinced it's going to drop dead on me).



I'd like to replace the log between the two trees - the one up there looks a little rotten - and find something a little more attractive than the swings currently hanging. My thoughts were met with instant revolt when I suggested it awhile ago, but I'm not giving up. It'd be such a quick, easy, and cheap project to really improve the curb appeal of our home.

On a more personal note, I have a totally irrational fear of moths and butterflies. Moths are definitely freakier, but the bodies on butterflies are just as gross. The bigger they are the worse my reaction to them is. I went to the butterfly exhibit thing in Niagara Falls with some co-workers back in November and they thought my twitching and freezing was hilarious.

The yard was teeming with little Red Admirals yesterday...they're not so bad.



Enjoy your weekend!

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