October arrives tomorrow. The tomatoes took their sweet time this year but have finally decided they’re ready for their closeup. ‘bout time! Don’t worry. Those Green Zebra and Green Sausage heirlooms are meant to be green…
Yum.
Archive for September, 2010
the harvest is ON, ish
Thursday, September 30th, 2010ooh, we’re “significant”!
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010A little something to make you chuckle… Just after we moved in at the beginning of 2008, we got a letter from the Providence College Department of Art and History asking if we’d consider adding our house to their “online exhibition” as a “significant example of modern architecture.” Really? Our place?
Sure, why not. I guess we do own the only modern in the ’hood after all. So we were visited by a shiny young thing from the architecture class who then did her research, we gave her photos and told her what we knew, and she put together this entry for the PC architecture website. Keep in mind that this was a student project and makes our house sound a little, how you say, highfalutin?
Page 1 (click to biggify)…
Page 2 …
Page 3 …
I’ve told you what we know about Irving Haynes in previous posts. I wonder what he’d think about being compared to Le Corbusier and Schindler? Flattered? Embarrassed? Which brings me to an unexpected syncronicity…
David’s grandmother, Maria Fenyo McVitty, was an architect who worked in Paris with Le Corbusier right after World War II. No, really! I’m pretty sure she’d laugh off the comparison to Le Corbusier. However, she did give this house her stamp of approval on an all-too-rare visit to Providence the year we moved in — unfortunately also the same year she passed on. Hers is a fascinating story I intend to share with you someday.
Miss you, Ria!
back on track
Friday, September 24th, 2010
With the outside projects soon drawing to a close (fingers crossed), it’s time to bring the momentum indoors. This morning we met with Markus Berger, our architect, to get things rolling again. There was coffee. And tea. And baked goods… and pencil gnawing.
Hopefully construction begins in October.
going off the rails…
Monday, September 20th, 2010… on a crazy train. Thanks, Ozzy. So after weeks of waiting, the galvanized stainless steel cable railing finally went in on the back retaining wall today. Rhode Island Welding pulled up at 7:20 ready to rail. Here’s how it went down.
They drilled the holes for the railing posts…
The railing arrived completely fabricated. They set the posts in place…
They added concrete to the holes…
Threaded the cable through the pre-drilled holes…
They attached machine swaged fittings to the ends of the cables and tensioned the entire assembly to prevent sagging…
TA-DAAAAA!
Am mostly pleased. Wishing I had dictated squared posts so that we hadn’t ended up with round. Also wishing there were right angles and no curves…
Bah. Me being a cable railing snob I guess. What’s done is done. Moving on. The next project: patios!
brimfield past
Thursday, September 16th, 2010Over the years, Brimfield has had plenty to offer — much more than my last post might suggest. I’ve always come away with something I love, for a steal. Like these…
A vintage cast aluminum lounger. 40s? 50s? 60s? Dunno. We had it beadblasted to remove the peeling paint and left it bare, then found a company on Cape Cod who specializes in rewebbing…
It came with the cutest loveseat…
Since I brought up beadblasting and rewebbing, I should mention the Brown and Jordan patio set we inherited from David’s grandmother. Was it white or yellow in its past life? I forget. We had the set beadblasted and rewebbed at the same time the lounger and loveseat were done so they would “go” together…
One year we scored three vintage medical cabinets for our storage-less loft. We decided to have them stripped and sprayed before we brought them to the new house. The metal is thin and couldn’t take beadblasting. Also, it wasn’t uniform enough to warrant leaving the cabs bare as we’d hoped we could. (I apologize for having absolutely NO natural light to help this shot out)…
I decided to dress up the interior walls with Waldots wallpaper by Ferm Living…
Still not sure I’m loving that paper. Hard to tell here because the light is awful, but the paper is a little more purple and much less grey than I’d imagined…
Have also picked up a slew of vintage Vornado fans at Brimfield. Very streamline, industrial, Raymond Loewy…
Could use a good dusting because they get used every summer. The company is still around and recently released a new “Retro” style based on the original…
The one above was featured on Remodelista but I keep seeing it on various design blogs. Less of an energy hog than the originals, that’s for sure.
The point is, if you haven’t been to Brimfield, go next year. You just never know what you’ll find when you have 20 fields’ worth of flea market to stumble through.
my latest brimfield score
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010Finally made it back to the Brimfield Antique Show this past weekend. Hadn’t been in years and suddenly got the flea market bug. Must be the fall weather. So what did I find?
Mostly a crapload of junk I’m not interested in. Is the poor quality of the offerings related to the crappy economy? Or am I suddenly pickier than I used to be now that we don’t have the advantage of loft space? Who knows. I drove away with just one thing…
A lantern for the garden, to drive up my Asian quotient.
Antique? Not per se. Unless stone formed over thousands of years counts as antique. According to Michael Carboni, the dealer at The Traveling Buddha’s Brimfield booth, the lantern was carved from Chinese bluestone by artisans in Northern China. He travels there for handcrafted goodies and antiques for a few months out of every year. Nice guy.
Comes in five pieces…
… and weighs about a gazillion pounds.
The bottom pieces are drilled in case you want to run electricity to it to light it up rather than use a candle. I’m unlikely to do that.
For the one gardening geek out there trying to identify plants around the lantern (click for biggification)…
Leaves of datura in the foreground, Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’ switch grass just starting to turn burgundy to the right, plumes of Miscanthus sinensus ‘Rotsilber’ (Japanese Silver Grass) waving in the background, the red-leafed tropical-looking thing is Ricinus communis (Castor Bean), yellow and green-banded Pinus densiflora ‘Oculis Draconis’ (Dragon’s Eye Red Pine) immediately behind, Matteuccia struthiopteris (Ostrich Fern) behind and to the right, Cotinus coggyria ‘Royal Purple’ (Smokebush) just to the left. Hoping this will fill in nicely in the next few years.
the time is ripe…
Monday, September 13th, 2010So why aren’t my friggin’ tomatoes?! This is September, right? I normally start harvesting bumper crops of heirlooms the first week of August. Yeesh.
This heirloom, whose plant tag appears to have escaped me… big. fat. green.
My brandywines… green.
Black cherries… green.
Garden peach… just starting to turn yellow.
Green zebras… yes, supposed to be green but still rock hard!
Green sausage tomatoes… also supposed to be green but again, not ready.
Even the tomatillos… not quite there yet!
I don’t understand. I trimmed out the overzealous branches. They get plenty of harvested rainwater. No bugs. No mildew. No blight. Just leafy and healthy. And green.
The feta is ready. So why aren’t you guys? Is it something I said?