Five Things on a Friday – 7/5/24

Happy Friday, friends! Summer has settled in here and we’re looking forward to a mix of busy summer plans and hopefully a long, lazy, drawn-out stretch of time without much to do. Life has been pretty fast-paced and I think we deserve a little quiet time. 🙂 Let’s get caught up on everything that’s been happening around here over the last couple of weeks.

Jack is starting to become a real expert at chess, and it’s a little bit terrifying. I used to think I was pretty good. When we played in school every day during lunches and breaks back in sixth grade, I was unbeatable. But now, there’s this thing called YouTube. Jack has been learning so many different moves for every possible situation by watching videos and then practicing by playing online against increasingly more skilled fake opponents. He now says things to me like, “Your pawn structure is terrible.” and “You could have done an en passant.” and I just basically have no idea what he’s talking about. I guess I’d better start learning a few new things, or he’s going to get bored of playing me soon. 🙂 This is the chess set I got for him. It looks beautiful sitting out on the table, but it’s magnetic, and it folds in half as a case for all the pieces, so it’s perfect for travel.

We finally found an apartment for Kennedy and her friends in Toronto! They had all previously been in student housing but decided they’d like to get an apartment together for this school year. It seemed like a great idea because it would give them more space, a chance to settle into life in the city a bit more, and it would reduce costs by a bit, too. As it turns out, finding an apartment in Toronto right now is not quite as easy as it seems, even with a decent budget and clear goals. In Toronto, renting is done through real estate agents a lot of the time, and strangely, the thing we were having trouble with was getting the agents representing the different properties to even respond to us or bother presenting our offer to their clients after we’d viewed the apartments. It was a twilight zone kind of situation. We would look at a place, like it, submit an offer, sometimes offering to pay more per month than what was requested and hear nothing back. Anyway, it was a crazy few weeks, but we eventually found a beautiful place for them. It’s owned by people who seem very nice, and about a 15-minute walk from their school, so we’re all very excited. We’ll be getting the keys in a few weeks, and if you follow along with me on Instagram, I’ll share a little tour in my stories when we do!

The exposed brick wall in the bedroom is done! There was not much left to do when I last reported on this project. All I really had to do was paint all the new trim we added and the back of the door, but it just feels so good to see a project through to the end and get it checked off the list. It took us almost thirteen years, but we now have four fully-finished walls in our bedroom! Ha! This might not seem like much of an accomplishment, but it’s been a long time in the making, so I’m celebrating. You can see what the rest of the bedroom looked like after we finished the other three walls a couple of years ago in this post here. I’ll share more of the fully finished room in a dedicated post soon!

The basement has been getting a proper clean-out over the last few weeks, and it’s so satisfying. We have one of those typical old farmhouse basements where the ceiling is low, and everything’s a bit crumbly. We’re lucky that the original builders placed the house exactly where it is near the creek because our basement always stays dry, and we never have to deal with any kind of flooding down there, but it’s still not an area suitable for anything other than mechanicals and storage. We have big industrial plastic shelving units lining the whole space, and they hold all our camping gear, holiday decorations, and all kinds of other things that wind up down there over time. I always find that life functions much better when you treat your utility and storage spaces like they’re the most important spaces in the house, but our basement had become a bit dusty and neglected. We got a burst of motivation when the new water system was put in (because someone would have to actually go down there), and I’ve been slowly picking away at clearing things out, dusting things off, and reorganizing a bit more so I know exactly what we have down there. The basement is not somewhere that I spend a lot of time during the day, but having everything clean and organized just makes me feel so much better.

I have a new gardening schedule. And by “new schedule,” I mean I now have a gardening schedule, whereas before, I just went out whenever I had time and haphazardly tried to pick away at whatever was bothering me the most at that moment. That is not a great system when you have a larger property like we do. So what I did was break down the property into seven different sections, one for each day of the week, focussing on the areas that need the most upkeep right now. The goal is just to do something, anything, in that section of the garden on that day, even if I only have five minutes. It might be pruning, mulching, pulling weeds, or maybe even adding a new plant sometimes. Over the course of a few weeks, it really has seemed to make a difference, and that has been very exciting. Here’s how I broke the gardens up into sections:

• Monday: Side garden (next to the side porch where we enter the most)
• Tuesday: Backyard gardens
• Wednesday: Front garden to the left of the porch
• Thursday: Front garden to the right of the porch
• Friday: Sun perennials, herbs, veggies
• Saturday: Shade garden (under the tree in the main garden)
• Sunday: Porches and walkways (including stone walkways around the house and the turf grass garden path)

NEWS AND FINDS

-I had a magazine editor reach out to me recently about potentially including my home in a magazine, but it just wasn’t the right time. I would love to have reasons to make big, exciting announcements about big features and fancy career developments, but right now, daily life has definitely been enough to keep me busy and very well-occupied. You never know, though! Life has a way of changing very quickly sometimes, doesn’t it?

-Currently reading: I just finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is about a young girl, Francie, coming of age in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. My understanding is that this is a book that is sometimes read in schools, but it’s a classic that I had completely missed out on. It’s bleak but beautiful and hopeful at the same time, and it’s definitely one worth picking up if you love the idea of reading classic literature but sometimes feel intimidated by the speech patterns and vocabulary in a lot of typical English classic literature. Next up is Jane Austen’s Persuasion, because every summer needs a little Jane Austen.

-Currently listening to: I stumbled on this fun Spotify playlist the other day, and it just sets the best laid-back summer mood. It’s all kinds of popular songs from Abba to Britney Spears to Tracy Chapman, all done in a summery bossa nova style. You don’t realize it at first, and then you kind of go, “Wait a minute…” as you start to realize you recognize the songs. Remember my fictional bakery cafe from last spring where I said I would serve my lavender chocolate chip cookies and have the patio with French cafe tables and ivy-covered brick walls? This would be the playlist I would play in that cafe during the summer. 🙂

-I’ve been on the lookout for a really beautiful traditional full-length mirror for Kennedy’s room to replace the very basic one that we have in there right now. So far, nothing has really caught my eye, but then I came across this very budget-friendly, old-fashioned free-standing style of mirror. It wasn’t what I was originally thinking, but now I’m wondering if that might be the perfect finishing touch to the “elevated peasant” room? What do you think? Is it perfectly peasant-y or does it just feel outdated? My vision is to one day find a vintage Fortnum & Mason hamper basket to go under the mirror and fill it with extra blankets for picnics and chilly nights. The old F&M baskets seem to be impossible to come across in Canada, but I can dream! Or maybe I’ll just have to treat us to a new one full of treats for some special occasion. 🙂

-Amazon home finds: I’ll take the opportunity to use a cake stand any chance I get, and I just found the most beautiful set of three black metal cake stands on Amazon that are absolutely perfect for our old house. I love to use cake stands to set out desserts, of course, but also to add height to a table with snacks and appetizers, to style open shelves in a kitchen, or to hold sink-side necessities in the kitchen. I just reorganized my baking cabinet and found I have a bit of space on the top shelf that would be perfect for these cake stands when they aren’t in use, so of course, I took the opportunity to order them. Really love this wood and ceramic stand as well! I have my eye on this coffee table book called Walk With Me: Hamptons by Susan Kaufman. We have the New York version and love it. The Hamptons edition looks just as mesmerizingly beautiful.

-Pin with me on Pinterest! Alysondra on Pinterest recently tried my recipe for Cardamom Fig Thumbprint Cookies and here’s what she had to say: “Absolutely amazing. And I used white chocolate chips in the middle for a kid friendly version and they were a smash hit both ways!”

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