Attention Portland-area bungalow lovers! The second annual Portland Bungalow Show is just around the corner and is sure to be chock full o’ bungalow goodness, complete with fabulous vendor booths, informative lectures and hands-on window restoration workshops.

A separately-ticketed wine-tasting and lecture event is scheduled for the evening of Saturday, May 17 from 7 - 10 p. m. and will feature presentations by the astoundingly talented CJ Hurley and renowned bungalow photographer Alexander Vertikoff.

If that isn’t quite enough to pique your interest, we have one more little tidbit of information to share with you. The “Painting Your Bungalow” lecture scheduled for 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 17 will be delivered by none other than Stephanie Brown of Local Color - otherwise known as Mrs. Bungalow Insanity.

Hope to see you there!

Just posting a few pics to show what’s changed lately. I was supposed to be going back to work today, but I asked for another day off to try to wrap up some of the loose ends. Pic 1 is Chloe posing in Ginger’s room.  Pic 2 is an example of the pain of some of the compound cuts required for trim in this sloped upstairs. If everything were perfectly square, it’d be easy, but there seems to always be just enough variation to make it tricky.  Although, they are definitely easier than the cuts in Chloe’s room, because those had to be notched out to accommodate other sections of the ceiling that sloped into them.  Sometimes it feels more like sculpting than sawing. Pic 3 is of the new shelves I finally constructed to fill the built-in bookcase in the playroom.

This could have been much worse. Much worse.

I wish I could say that I had been drinking, cause it’d be nice to have an excuse, but the reality is that I just did something stupid. I have probably made tens of thousands of saw cuts without incident…and then I did this… Continue Reading »

Ginger’s room is coming along nicely. The most difficult part, not surprisingly, was the closet doors. We always find that any of the “adapted” house parts that we get from salvage yards (in this case, the Rebuilding Center) end up taking the lion’s share of the labor time. The story here was that we needed doors just a bit shorter than 5′ for the closets, and new fir doors were quoted out in the neighborhood of $800…each! We got these, which are actually some sort of old cabinet doors for $30 or $40. Total cost after having the lead paint stripped off was maybe $150. The downside is that I had to fabricate jambs for them, since they had none. This is the type of project for which I have little patience, skill or interest. But the cost difference is pretty compelling, and of course, we always like to be able to reuse something old in our house whenever possible. Today also saw the new windows go in, so by tomorrow all the trim in the room and closets should be finished as well. Also, I got another coat of mud on the stairwell, but it doesn’t look different enough to warrant a new picture.

OK, so this has nothing to do with crops, but they do seem like they must have come from aliens. On sunny mornings, this is the sight that greets us. The reflections from the playroom windows upstairs create these three Xs on our neighbor’s house. Chloe likes to run upstairs to open and close the windows, which makes the patterns move around. The only thing that stumps is is why do the windows create these Xs? The windows are just plain squares of glass, so there must be some kind of complex polarizing effect going on here. Can anyone explain this to us?