Picardy Project

building shit & raising girls

A Whole Lotta Nothin’

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Normally on Mondays the girls go to my dad and step mom’s, and Tuesday – Thursday they go to day care. That gives me 4 days a week to do day job stuff. But a funny thing happened: my dad and Wendy AND day care are gone on vacation the exact same two weeks! My wonderful friend has been coming for a couple mornings each week to watch the girls so I can get in a couple hours of work, but trying to put in 32 hours worth of work into about half the time is, well, not really happening, lol.

Instead, there’s been a lot of, “uh, that’ll get done later,” and attempts to bring a 3 year old and 1 year old along to work with me. On one adventure Merritt inadvertently turned on the water in a  showroom’s shower

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Luckily they’re one of my favorite showrooms and are a husband a wife who own their own business and have two kids they used to bring into work with them too, so they just laughed.

Last night we went to a tile shop with both kiddos in tow

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That was an adventure. Luckily I waited till Chris got home from work so he was on kid duty while I looked at tile. Still, the tile shop employees didn’t find our children as endearing as the showroom….

Mostly it’s just been about hanging out together more though, and with the kiddos being pretty good, it hasn’t been quite as stressful as I thought it would be

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Baby + diaper wandering = adorable

I’m super thankful for my friend because otherwise I’d basically be getting none of my work done, and I can’t exactly take a 2 week vacation, so thank you Stephanie!

Next week I shall return, maybe even with some work we’ve gotten done!

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Here, There and Everywhere

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We've been a little all over the place the last week or so. I feel like this happens sometimes - there is a lot of work to be done all over the place and we both can't completely focus and we're too excited. We like getting lots of stuff done, but at the moment it's like frantic progress. I wish we could somehow take a month off from work to work on the house. Don't we all wish that? I wish we also win about a million buck so we could complete a ton of other projects. Don't we all wish THAT?! :) But alas, there is real life to contend with. In the meantime though, while dealing with real life, we have managed to get some stuff done, none worthy of a post all on it's on, so I'll just throw in a collage of mini doings today. We got the lights hung up on the porch! About a week ago we were testing to see where we wanted them to hang (clearly we need to make a dump run because this is the trash that is overflowing from not being able to fit in our trailer) If you remember … Keep Reading...

Our Address Label – My Pinterest FAIL

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About 2 months ago I shared my hunt for the perfect address label. It was hard. And expensive. Well, not actually EXPENSIVE, but I have a hard time paying $20+ for a small number that is about 5" tall. And because our address has 5 numbers, that would clock in at over $100. That just seems ridiculous to me. In all of my hunting I found this and thought it was awesome from here I was super excited about the idea and finally found time about a week ago to get started. The awesome part about this idea is that I could go with any style of lettering I wanted. Because of the style of our house's construction (Chris's mom and I were talking last weekend and we defined is as a "Mission inspired, mid-century modern-ish California ranch,") I wanted to go with something both clean and stylized. Here are the fonts I liked There were elements of each one that I liked, but all together my favorite was the second one down. What sold me was the shape of the "0" and the curve of the … Keep Reading...

Trailer Park Gang

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If you've been following us for a while, you know we accumulate a lot of trash Like, all the time. All the trash. All the time. Constantly renovating your own house and constantly working on other people's houses means that there is ALWAYS trash. And because when Chris put together his plan to organize his truck, we don't actually have a full bed to haul stuff to the dump. We've got about half a bed And a lot of times the people at the dump still charge us for a full load, even though tell and show that we've only got half a load. So we get charged for double what we actually have, and we can't actually fit very much. Which means the garbage never really actually goes away. The pile just gets smaller. But not too small. Always big enough to still make us feel like hoarders. We decided it was finally time to get a trailer. At the new house Chris and I both park our cars in the driveway. This leaves the street in front of our house wide open for space for a trailer. And … Keep Reading...

Shades for our Giant Windows

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Ummmm, it's been a while since we got these shades, so maybe I should blog about it? If you don't remember, we have a long string of windows along the back of our house I LOVE these windows. It was a huge draw when we first saw the those. It's amazing that there is so much privacy because living within the city limits of a major city and to literally have no neighbors in the back of your house that can see you is a luxury that we know we're lucky to have. And that view is awesome But the sun in the morning is blinding. It's not absolutely terrible now with the long days (the sun has risen by the time we're all hanging out in here), but come winter with later morning sunrises, that sunshine is BRIGHT. We thought a lot about what kinds of shades we wanted on the windows. We did a few Roman shades at Picardy, but we actually weren't super into them by the time we left. Chris and I are a little lazy when it comes to shades: I want them open or closed, I don't want to … Keep Reading...

Garage Progress!

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It's been a while since I posted about the garage. So let's get to it. Right before we moved in we got the concrete poured for a new slab because the old one was hurting pretty bad   Since then we've been really slowly working on it. Which sucks because we're always going in there to look for tools for working on our own house as well as working on other people's houses. Not to mention we have a few clients who want us to build things for them, and well, we've got absolutely no room for that. When our house was getting primed our painter so generously offered to prime the ceiling of the garage which was pretty awesome because it was light sucking dark brown drywall. It took two coats and there was still yellow bleeding through, but it was a great improvement. Once we get lights up the white ceiling will be a much better reflector of light than the terrible brown it once was. Two weeks ago while family was here for our work party i made sure to make … Keep Reading...