I love lamp

Lamps are such a great way to add something interesting or colorful to a room. Since our living room doesn't have any overhead ceiling lights, we've been looking at cool mid-century accent lamps to join our current primary living room light: a great arc lamp that will be making the move with us to Portland. We saw a pair of these amazing wood prong lamps at Red Snapper on Hawthorne, but they weren't for sale. The shop owner said he'd eventually be selling them for $350. Nick thinks he meant $350 EACH. 

Today I found the one below in a Craigslist ad featuring dozens of mid-century lamps. And for only $95. Dylan picked it up after work and it's now ours! A beautiful and functional art piece. 

Numbers & Light

Not that these were at the top of our 'must do before we can live here' list, but they were simple projects that made a huge difference to the exterior feel and make the house look more our style. Now the front entrance features clean modern-looking numbers on an even plane and a more modern light with a slight Asian style.

Here is a photo of the original numbers and porch light:

Original numbers and light

New house numbers and porch light:

New numbers and light

Nick admiring his handiwork

My how the garden grows...

It's incredible how quickly things grow in Portland's spring thanks to all the rain. Just one month had gone by since our last trip and the yard is ridiculous. This will be great once we're living there and able to work on it every day but we've pretty much given up on having any control over it this year. We spent Saturday of Memorial Day weekend in the yard with Dylan and Elizabeth joining us for much of the day. They are pros since they also have turned their yard into a fantastic urban farm. Also they have all the best yard and garden equipment like a weedeater and chainsaw.

We did some fruit tree pruning and think we figured out what we have:
- One dwarf pink lady apple tree (the only one we're sure of since it still has the tag on it)
- One very large and established plum tree
- Three pear trees
- A few small cherry trees that came from seeds fallen from the neighbor's yard
- The biggest surprise was finding out the 3 woody vines at the trellis in the east side yard are kiwi. KIWI! The actual fuzzy kind, not the smaller yet hardy fuzz-less kind usually grown in Oregon. But the vines seem to really be growing well and are definitely several years old. We'll see how they fruit.

And of course the grapes, golden raspberries, and thorn-less blackberries. There is also a small tree of some kind of mystery fruit at the base of one of the pear trees.

Here's what we walked in to on May 25th:

April 27th

May 25th

April 27th

View from the northwest corner looking over the garden boxes.

May 25th

Nick is under the plum tree in the back corner using the weedeater on the small grass patch area. Thanks to Dylan we have a sweet new push mower, but it doesn't work on foot-plus high grass.

First Piece of Furniture: Mid-Century Hutch

Because I knew we would be visiting Portland right after closing on the house, I started looking on Craigslist during the weeks leading up to the trip just in case I found something we couldn't pass up. And I did! 

A hutch was something we agreed early on that we'd need in this house to save space in the kitchen cabinets. Since we've been slowly growing a collection of mid-century furniture, we of course wanted to stick with that style in a hutch. Unfortunately I've seen very few mid-century hutches that I really liked. Most have been made of teak, which I am not a fan of or lighter woods which would not work well with our walnut chairs and fabulous record player/stereo console, which is the highlight of our collection so far. So I was excited to find the most perfect hutch, then ecstatic that it was still available. The woman selling it was super nice and we ended up texting quite a bit. She was sentimental over hearing it was going to be the first piece of furniture in our first house because it had also been her first piece in her and her husband's first house too, so she knew I would love and care for it as she had. We weren't going to be in town for another week and a half, but she removed the ad from Craigslist and held on to it for us. People in Portland are so nice!

In addition to the upper sliding-glass display section which has three shelves, there are two lower cabinets on each side of three center drawers. So much additional space!

 

Nick 'shopped this picture with a color similar to what we're going to use in the living and dining rooms. The hutch will go between the fireplace and door to the garage.

We bought a house!

After about a year of browsing listings and visiting a few dozen houses over our regular weekend trips, we finally found a great deal on the perfect little starter home in our favorite city! Even though we currently live in Salt Lake, we wanted to take advantage of low home prices and record low mortgage interest rates and buy before they both increase again. I've been excited about moving back to Portland for years, and we have now made a big step to making that happen!

This house had everything we were looking for and more:
- Easily manageable size for simple living - just under 1000 square feet.
- Several huge windows for lots of natural light.
- Great open floor plan and flow through the house.
- Amazing floor-to-ceiling brick fireplace.
- Private backyard with covered patio, 12 existing garden boxes, established fruit trees, berries, and a very nice chicken coop. All things we thought we'd spend thousands on building and planting ourselves.
- Second house from end on dead end street, so it's very quiet and there's no traffic.
- Location! Great up-and-coming neighborhood just 2 blocks away from restaurants and shops including Lilly Market, the best Asian market in Portland. Same distance to a bus line that runs downtown, and just 10 blocks to the light rail hub that takes you anywhere from Clackamas to Gresham to Hillsboro and just 15 minutes to downtown Portland. Perfect for turning into a rental someday if we'd like to upgrade to something bigger down the line.

We're going to spend this summer taking weekend trips and doing some easy DIY improvements. Before we move anything in, we plan to refinish the wood floors throughout and paint the entire interior. The current colors are terrible and whoever painted last did a very sloppy job. Structurally the house is in excellent condition. The biggest project will be updating the kitchen, but we're very happy that we get to do that because the kitchen is the room where we really want to be able to pick everything out.

Not bad for a super-cheap Housing and Urban Development foreclosure! We almost feel guilty about getting such a good deal. Almost.