Covered Greenhouse Update: End of Summer

Earlier this season I designed and built this covered greenhouse to help my plants out during the foggy summer. Some of you have been asking how my garden has fared. See for yourself!

Not too shabby, especially because summer in our area is apparently all fog all the time (booooo). If you'll recall, here's what I planted:

And what it looked like mid-August.

Aloha!

I've been suffering from lack-of-blog-post guilt (I have made zero progress on the home office makeover). Things have been crazy busy lately, both at work and at home. I've been taking on a lot more projects at work which includes getting my first real estate staging gig! Exciting!

Boyfriend and I had also planned to go to San Diego for our annual vacation, but then he switched it up on me the morning of our departure and put me on a plane to Hawaii instead. WHAT??

This was the view from our hotel room:

I KNOW, RIGHT?? Well done, Boyfriend.

Thinking he had used all of his planning mojo on coordinating a secret trip to Hawaii and keeping it from me for a month (not an easy task...I'm obnoxiously nosy), I did not think he could pull off the next part.

SHABAM!

Home Office Part 2: Bye Bye Beige

This is what the office looked like as of last week. Adios, soul-sucking beige!

This weekend was supposed to be a deep-clean-and-collect-paint-chips weekend in Apartment Therapy's Style Cure schedule, but Sherwin Williams had a 30% off sale last week and what's a girl gonna do, right?

I knew I wanted to do a medium-tone gray so I gave the two I already had a try. The first color we used in the living room/hallway (I think it's called "Simply Greige" from SW) and the other was "Pavestone" from SW. One was too light, the other was too dark, and both were too warm. I was actually really bummed out about this because it was the last day of the Sherwin Williams sale and I had come down with a cold, which left me greasy-haired, mucus-filled and in no mood to go running errands. You're welcome for that mental image.

Long story short, my deal-loving Asian side won out against my weak and sickly Caucasian side, and I returned from the store with two gallons of "Requisite Gray".

Home Office Part 1: The Before

Say HELLO to the most neglected room in the house (aside from every room in the basement...shhh).

We call this the home office, but it's more like my makeup room/occasional guest overflow room. It still suffers from the original paint color, which is a green-toned beige (vom), and a half-hearted attempt at decorating (yours truly).

Megha's Planter Bench

One of my very good friends came to visit the Bay Area a few weeks ago. I probably owe a large portion of my blog's popularity to her, because she forwards my posts to just about everyone she knows (and she's a very well-connected lady). 

Megha had talked about wanting to learn to use power tools, and I mentioned a while ago that during her next visit she should stay over at our house and let me help her build something. We had talked about building something small like a simple box planter, but when she ended up driving her own car up to visit, we got a little more ambitious. 

Like myself, Megha has been getting into gardening (as much as she can on her LA balcony). Unfortunately she doesn't have a lot of areas that take advantage of the sun due to the shade of her solid balcony wall. She had been talking about building a raised planter bench to put her vegetables on, and finally she did!

We only had an evening and a bit of morning to complete this project, so I kept the design pretty simple. The frame was to be constructed of redwood 2x4s and the shelves out of 1x3s and 1x4s.

We came back from a shopping trip at Lowe's around 8:30pm, so I tasked Boyfriend with making us some dinner while we retreated to my garage workshop. Role reversal, I love it.