It's my flag, too

In honor of the recent Fourth of July barbecue frenzy weekend, I am doing something drastic. Today I am reclaiming the flag. Granted, it's a Pinterest-inspired project made from an oh-so-trendy pallet and cast-off spray paint, but I'm doing it. And for me, it's a big deal.

Over the last few years I have come to associate the American flag -- be it on a porch, a bumper sticker or a t-shirt -- with the following ideologies:

• Republicanism
• Christianity
• The far right
• Pro-gun activists
• Anti-choice activists
• Conservatives
• Fox News
• Bullies
• The Tea Party
• Climate change deniers 
• Creationists
• Southern traditionalists
• Haters in general

Because of this, I have given up the flag as something that doesn't represent me. My ideals. My beliefs. My way of life. And I did this willingly, blindly, and stupidly. Because the flag, and what it stands for, is bigger than just me.

The American flag does, in fact, encompass a set of ideals I would never claim as my own. But as this is still the land of the free and the home of the (not-always-but-we-try-to-be) brave, then it also stands for:

• Democracy
• The Green Party
• Hinduism
• Judaism 
• No religion-ism
• Pro-choice activists
• Gay rights activists
• Community activists
• Pacifists
• Slow Food movements
• Ecologists
• Scientists
• Dreamers
• Bronies

The flag represents the freedom to believe - or not believe - in whatever we choose. By its very definition, it stands for all of us. And that's the point.

No party or group owns it. Rush Limbaugh does not have more of a connection to the American flag than Jon Stewart does. Republicans can't exclusively claim it; Progressives don't automatically forsake it. Our country, as these fifty united states, houses thousands of ideals and nationalities and belief systems. Together. As one nation (that until 1954 wasn't required to be "under God"), indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And that utopian message, an ideal to aim for and struggle to achieve, I can get behind.

There is room here for all of us; for all of our beliefs. Beliefs that we are legally allowed to voice without fear of pain or imprisonment. (Really, how freaking lucky are we?!) Beliefs that make us stronger even when they don't bring us together. I can have Obama - or Hillary! - and you can still have Romney. Or Palin. And while that last option makes me want to throw up in my mouth and pass out condoms at churches, she has her place in America too.

So yes I am taking back the flag, and in doing so realize that I should never have let it go. As much as it is yours, and hers and his, so too it is mine.

Homemade Chalk Paint Renovation

I write a guest blog, Hey Neighbor, for Dwell Denver Real Estate once a month. This was August's post.

*****

Hey Neighbor,

My newest DIY infatuation is with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. It's easy to use, the colors are beautiful, and a complete furniture transformation takes place in a day or two. The only drawback is the price - the supplies last a long time, but the cost of entry isn't cheap! Enter my sister-in-law Li. She's so frugal she'd make a penniless monk look like he lives his life with frivolous abandon. 

Li and my brother recently moved from a 700 sq foot New York apartment to a 3000+ sq ft, 4 bed / 4 bath home just south of Denver. Movin' on up! The trouble of course lies in the fact that they do not have enough furniture to fill their new suburban palace. It's a familiar story, but fortunately for us, we get to learn from a thrifty lady, her auction find, and a Pinterest recipe for success.

Li bought a $10 end table at auction to go with her new couches and super fab $100 estate sale rug. The table had good bones, but an ugly finish. It also did nothing for their decor.

With her sleuthing skills, Li then did a Pinterest search for chalk paint and found the following recipe on LiveLoveDIY's blog:

Homemade Chalk Paint: 2 cups paint, 5 TB Plaster of Paris, 2 TB water.

The bonus of the self-made paint is that you can pick any color you want - Li went with Benjamin Moore in a punchy Japanese Kimono color - and all of the supplies cost her less than $50. (Full disclosure, on my first trip to an Annie Sloan dealer I left the store with $230 worth of similar merchandise in my bag.)

We spent a Saturday together transforming the little end table that could.

First, a quick sanding to take off any peeling varnish. Then, Li made her chalk paint. 

Two tips: 1) mix the water and plaster of paris first to make a slurry before adding to the Benjamin Moore paint and 2) if it's too thick, add a little water until it's the consistency of normal paint.

Three painstaking coats were added to the table. If Li had been going for a distressed look she could have gotten away with two, but the goal here was a modern pop of color.

After letting the table dry between coats, and then overnight after layer #3, Li applied Minwax Paste Finishing Wax with cheesecloth and buffed the table to a shine.

Voila!

As the recipient of half a bag of Plaster of Paris, I can't wait to try this new painting technique in my dining room on a sideboard begging for a facelift. I'll let you know how it goes! And Li and I would love any tips you have on furniture restoration. We are officially addicted. Thanks, neighbor.

$6 Pallet Compost Bin

I write a guest blog, Hey Neighbor, for Dwell Denver Real Estate once a month. This was June's post.

*****

Hey Neighbor,

What has two thumbs, 12 chickens, and more poop than she knows what to do with? This girl!

 

Urban farming has been an adenture so far. Harder than I anticipated when reading about it, but more gratifying than I could have imagined when I see our hand-raised chickens scratching for bugs, or the bees coming and going at the hives by the dozen. Lately we've turned our attention to waste, both the noun and the verb. 

The chickens are great garbage disposals and save a lot of food scraps from the trash. But once they process said scraps, there is a different kind of waste to deal with. Since I'd love to divorce myself from buying big box garden soil, a compost bin was the logical conclusion. And then I priced them. Yeah...After building a 200-square-foot chicken palace out of cedar, we were a little short on farm funds.

So, I hightailed it to my local feed store. I purchased used wooden pallets for $2 each. I saved myself $94 and saved the wood from the trash heap.

The fastest way to compost, besides having a huge pile of grossness rotting somewhere in the yard, is a three-sided bin with no top, no bottom, and plenty of air and moisture. Our perfect pallet composter was assempled and in use in under 10 minutes. 

Think you need 5 acres in the country to be able to compost? Think again. We are lucky and can hide the compost bin in the trees, but we've seen bins stashed at the side of the house, in a corner of the yard, hidden by bushes, painted to match the lawn furniture, and right smack next to the garden in all its rotten glory. 

Composting is easy, and virtually smell-free, if a few basic rules are followed:

1. Try to keep a 3:1 browns to greens ratio. 

• Browns (carbon rich): dead leaves, small animal bedding, cardboard, newspaper, dead flowers and plants, sawdust, straw.
• Greens (nitrogen rich): manure, grass clippings, fruits and vegetables, coffee grounds.
• Do not compost meat, bones, cooked foods, cat litter - when in doubt use common sense. Or Google. 

2. Shred large materials for faster breakdown. For example, run the lawn mower over a pile of raked leaves before adding to the bin.

3. Add moisture. The best description I've heard is that the compost should be as saturated as a sponge that has been wrung out.

4. Turn compost weekly. 

5. When the compost is dark brown and smells like soil it's ready for the garden!

Good luck on this next project, neighbor! If I can do it, you can do it. Go forth and biodegrade! 

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I hate to be one to espouse procrastination, but sometimes it's the only way to go. Like with gardening. A late garden seems to be de rigueur at my house. In years one and two, this stressed me out. Here in year three, where the final planting didn't happen until this morning, I see it as a bonus.

Stick with me on this, oh you Almanac gardening calendar purists.

The first year that I planted late I avoided the hard frost that crept in the week after Mother's Day. Last year, my late garden missed out on an early-June blizzard. This year? Many timely gardens were wrecked by a freak hail storm and then two straight weeks of 100 degree weather. But my early July garden is beautiful. And, let's be real. I didn't plant from seed, so a plant growing in a pot at Home Depot vs braving the early elements in my garden probably has a better shot anyway.

Gabe prepped the soil this year with organic compost and one round of grass clippings. I am fertilizing every 3 weeks with an organic fish-based fertilizer. Unlike the fish juice of year one, this time I chose one that had been "naturally deodorized with mint." I'm also relying on my trusty old friend the marigold to help fight off bugs. They are much prettier than spiders, and instantly brighten the garden.

For the sake of ease, I decided to skip the crops that didn't work out so well in years past, namely strawberries (dead before they even started), peppers (all leaf, no fruit),  and pumpkins. "How can one mess up pumpkins?" you may ask. Apparently you need flowers of both sexes to get fruit, and my plant was strictly same-on-same. Yes, much like my boyfriends of yore, this plant was gay to the gay. The blooms were quite lovely though, and I would definitely vote in favor of allowing this plant to marry if it so desired.

But I digress...

This year I planted 5 containers of tomatoes: Early Girl (hybrid), Cherokee Purple (heirloom!), Cherry (hybrid) and two Patio (never heard of them, but what the hell, as I am in fact growing tomatoes on a patio). Yeah...I prefer more heirloom varieties, but late season beggars can't be choosers; I had to settle for what was there.

In the beds, I planted 4 zucchini this year. I know, it's a lot. But the year I did 5 it was too many, and 2 proved too few. Keep an eye out as summer progresses and I'll share my favorite recipes as well as freezing tips. This is the easiest vegetable to sneak into foods that kids eat.

Finally, I planted a lot of herbs. Rosemary, parsley, oregano, cilantro, 2 thyme (my new love), and 5 basil. Sweet sweet basil, giver of all things pesto. I still have one final batch in my freezer from last year and can only now bear to use it with my new basil crop being in the ground. As a general rule I only plant sweet basil, but I did branch out this year (once again, making do with what was available) and buy 2 boxwood basil plants. Look at the size of these leaves - now with 100% less chopping!

(Dirty nail courtesy of the soil, with its chewed-down length being the direct result of an anxiety-based oral fixation.) 

My favorite garden find this year came a few months ago in the dollar aisle at Target - little chalkboard garden signs that I wrote on with a white paint pen. I've been saving these since April. (Who plants in April?! Other than retirees and Texans I mean.)

Not only are these Martha Stewart-adorable, they are especially useful when I send Gabe out to clip herbs while I'm cooking. Helps us avoid the "looks like a Christmas tree but smaller" conversations.

And really, I do love to label so these are perfect for me. With that final touch the garden was planted. Bring it, July!

Restoring Cast Iron, or History Repeats Itself In My Kitchen

Reduce, reuse, recycle. I choose not to question whether my zeal for second-hand goods is a result of wanting to cut down on consumer waste or a direct result of what my Grandma called her "cheap Scotch blood." (Scotch as in Scottish - she'd haunt me if she thought I portrayed her as a boozer.)

Either way, I love a good deal. The majority of the baby goods in my home - from bassinet to swing set, high chair to clothing - have both a previous and future owner. But this is not a blog about Craig's List baby goods. Consider this one giant segue leading you to my newest kitchen obsession.

Cast iron.

I have fallen in love with a #10 Wagner cast iron pan from the early 1900s that my mom found for $10 at a yard sale. (Huge benefit to me that the "granny" of ebay's Granny's Trinkets and Trash is my mom.)  It weighs more than a bowling ball and I have definitely built some arm muscle since I've started cooking with it. There is comfort in the heft though - the feel of a thing that is well made. I like to imagine the three generations of mothers before me using this same pan to feed their families. It has good mojo.

When I first got it though, there was work to be done. Most old cast iron requires some reviving. It was covered in rust and layers of cooked-on grease that the cast iron world technically refers to as "gunk."

Like all innovative DIY newbies, I went online for information on how to restore this beauty. I found that people are CRAZY when it comes to cast iron. I'd find a blog with what I thought to be good information only to be dissuaded by reader comments hundreds deep on why a particular process does or does not result in a perfectly seasoned non-stick pan. For cast iron junkies, the "perfectly seasoned pan" is the elusive holy grail of cookware. So, I read a lot and then decided to wing it.

My salvaging supplies consisted of oven cleaner, protective gear for me and the patio, a few garbage bags, 2 wire brushes originally for stripping paint, vinegar, borax, and those blue soap SOS pads that you can probably find right now corroding in a corner of the cabinet beneath your kitchen sink.

My process consisted of spraying down the pan with oven cleaner, double-bagging it, and letting it sit in the sun for 48 hours before rinsing it off and going to town with the wire brushes in an effort to get the gunk off. It took 4 rounds of this, and a final bit of elbow grease courtesy of my husband, before I got the pan down to its raw iron core. It still looked rusty but it was smooth.

Then I gave it a final scrub with the SOS pad before I soaked it in a 50/50 white vinegar and water bath for about 12 hours. After that I thoroughly cleaned the pan with borax (borrowed from my laundry room - 12 Mule Borax is great for your whites) to neutralize the vinegar.

Time to wipe it off and then pop it into a 200 degree oven for 20 minutes to get it bone dry. Let the seasoning begin! I coated it with a thin layer of organic flax seed oil and put it in a 500 degree oven for an hour, then let it cool in the oven for 2 additional hours, before taking it out and repeating this process. Based on a blog I found, I did this a whopping SIX TIMES. I was about 2 weeks in to this pan at this point, but things were looking pretty good.

I still didn't have that deep dark black that I coveted though, and my first trial with cooking salmon was semi-disastrous. I wanted my friend Julie's pan from The Crankin' Kitchen - she makes amazing food with a jet black pan that was her Grandma's.

Back to the internet, and I stumbled upon the best piece of cast iron advice yet. In essence, a very down-to-earth man, whom I picture to have a slightly shaggy haircut and a handlebar mustache ala Sam Elliott, advised the cast iron world to calm down and take a breath. He told us all to clean our pans with soap (since we'd be re-seasoning), dry them with heat, wipe them down with a good layer of shortening or lard, and throw them into a 300 degree oven for 2-3 hours. Wipe them down once more and then start cooking. He said to break in the pans in with fatty meats (hello bacon friend) and deep fried dishes until they reached a glossy black finish over time. Yep, just like our grandmas did. I would have to slow down, curb my notions of instant gratification, and give my pan some time.

So, I have been frying bacon, chicken cutlets, and these delicious Asian fish cakes to my heart's content.

After dinner I wipe the pan down with a paper towel and leave a light coating of oil from that night's meal. And lo and behold! Little by little, meal by meal, my lovely history-filled pan is turning in to the skillet of my culinary dreams.

My Big Fat Basement Reveal!

Unlike the actual renovation, let's make this quick and to the point. We came, we saw, we painted. It's glorious.

If you recall, we started here:

And after some intense cleaning, purging, scraping, priming and painting, now we're here:

I'd pan out, but the rest of the room is filthy. Much like my paint speckled hair, which looks like dandruff and old age had a baby. 

But the built-in is beautiful! 

Thank you Martha Stewart "Plumage" in eggshell. Thank you off-the-shelf toxic oil-based paint in bright white. (My children may have damage to their nervous systems but at least my doors don't stick.) And thank you Gabe - I know you hate to paint but this makes me so happy. Hewey too - he looks right at home.

What should we do next?!

Oh yeah, we got this. Totally. For sure.

Crap. Hewey is here and slumming it in his current digs.

I was super motivated at the beginning and started to clear junk and pick paint colors (we're going with the far right sample for the back of the bookcase).

But it's easy to lose motivation when the bookcase is still so junky and the spare room starts to look like this:

But I went at it again this morning. So the bookcase now looks like this:

But sadly the spare room now looks like this:

 ...and this:

I am having horrible flashbacks of when we tried to re-landscape in sporadic 2-hour chunks while Baby Jude napped. We ended up dropping almost $13K to have that catastrophe professionally remedied. Now that Jude is wildly three and we have Baby Aidan, I am sure we'll be much more successful with this project...

Basement Dweller DIY

I miss the sunshine.

One of the main reasons we bought our darling little house was the basement, and since it is the most comfortable place for the kids (carpet, baby swing, TV, giant "spill whatever you want on it because it's temporary" Craigslist couch), it is where I spend most of my time. It's a lifesaver, but the windows are small and I always have the TV on for additional wattage and companionship. That sounds sadder than it is, but is in no way ideal.

Before Aidan was born we started to update it, but then life got all out of hand. Even if Gabe hadn't been laid up by his surgery, DIY projects with a toddler in the house are a joke.

So now I sit in the little dungeon every day and dream of renovation projects. And watch other people fulfill renovation projects on HGTV. And read about one couple's fabulous ongoing renovation project at the popular YoungHouseLove blog. And pin renovation ideas to my Virtual Decorator board. And pine for a more visually inspiring underground life.

But yesterday we ordered a new computer. Our 6-year-old desktop served us well, but he's ready to retire. The new computer is beautiful. I shall call him Hewey in honor of his creators, and Hewey deserves a beautiful place to live. He arrives in a week.

Project!

Gabe despises anything that requires a paintbrush, but due to the gourmet dinners I have been creating on a regular basis it is easier to talk him into things. (Thank you, food.) Bring on the To Do list!

Here is where we stand:
1. The basement walls are a mushroom color that I like. It looks spectacular next to a bright white trim...but we haven't finished the trim. We also haven't yet edged around the door frames or windows. And maybe I want to switch from mushroom to my favorite wall color ever, True Value's "Boulder," but don't tell my husband (who hates to paint) or my dad (who so wonderfully painted the basement its current color while Gabe and I were in LA on vacation).

2. We really need baseboards. Or maybe beadboard. I don't want to call attention to our low ceilings with crown moulding, but we need something. More art would also help.

3. Once the kids are older, this space begs for a darker carpet (note the stains). And a couch that doesn't produce the super blah brown-on-brown effect that makes professional decorators want to kill themselves. But that's at least a year out.

4. I really want to refinish the Green Monster. It's a great old sideboard that we found, but it desperately needs to be brought into the current decade. I think this will be a great place to try out Annie Sloan's chalk paint. Unfamiliar with chalk paint? You can check out a spectacular chair project here and a mirror update here. Love.

5. De-clutter. Organize. Create a before-and-after worthy of a magazine article.

We'll begin with the built-in desk/bookcase/office section of the dungeon that is currently a super-cluttered playroom. I am going to reclaim it. Well, not fully. We still need a place to put boardgames and toys and piles of miscellaneous grown-up paperwork that need to be filed. But this will be Hewey's home and I want it to be worthy.

That's enough to get us started again, right? I feel pumped. And prematurely exhausted.

Aidan and I are going to pop over for paint samples this afternoon while Jude's at preschool (we need an accent color), and then I need to make Gabe his favorite old-school Sloppy Joes for dinner. He's going to have an aneurism when he reads this post...