Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Today was a good cloud day

I hope you've recovered from that one summer when I was obsessed with clouds and posted a ton of pictures of them here at Hugs...


because today was a REALLY good cloud day and I am so in love with these images, I had to share them.


I don't often get to see a sky that looks this big!  Especially not downtown, where there are so many tall buildings. 


If this next one was a piece of art it would get poor marks for balance, with so much happening on the top half and the road and fence and building at the bottom all being so plain and colourless.  Repetitive, even. 


On the other hand I would be pretty impressed with myself if I could reproduce these clouds and the vivid blue sky peeping out from behind them, with paint.  I am thrilled enough to have captured them with a smartphone.

Overall: fantastic day for looking at clouds and also, getting rained on, but apparently for choosing porch materials too.  It sounds like Ray will be able to start rebuilding our porch next week some time!!  We need to pick flooring, and the ceiling, and columns (I am back to thinking we should just buy wood for those.)  Sadly, I can't have the same materials I had before without doing a lot of maintenance, and being tired of renovations I really want to keep things simple, so this is what we are looking at:


Plain poplar floor, painted grey, but without the little dips and grooves we had last time.  The old grooves had a ton of character and I loved walking over them and taking pictures of things laid down in between them, but they were also excellent for trapping leaf bits and pooling water, which ate away at the wood over time.  Ray is proposing a flat plank that connects together the same way the old one did, but as a plain seam, for a longer lasting floor.  And he's also recommending narrower planks than we had before because the wider the plank, the greater the risk the wood will curl. 

(admittedly, our old floor NEVER curled - even as it was rotting away - but if we're not going with the same texture of floor it won't kill us to branch out from the old plank width, too.)

Instead of a white painted tongue and groove ceiling, we are putting in unfinished cedar tongue and groove.  This is a gamble, because the darker material will reflect less light into the front of the house, but we have SO many windows now we think it should be okay.  Also, as Ray pointed out, it will be pretty nice to look out from the front room at a gorgeous cedar ceiling.  We will never have to paint it, which is pretty appealing to me, and apparently bugs don't love cedar so hopefully we will stop getting those bees that burrow into wood to make their hives.

The only question was, what width to choose for the ceiling?


Ugh, which is better?  In the end I went with the narrower one in the middle.  It's closest to the floor plank width, and that will give the porch a more consistent feeling. 

What do you think of Soapstone As Background?  We still haven't polished it up, but I'll get to it as soon as the place is sufficiently dust-free for us to move back in. We're on track to start doing that around the middle of July, which is lucky because lately I've been looking around the condo and actively wanting to pack.  And that is a huge step up from the dread I was feeling about that job, back in May.

Are you excited for the new porch too, and the many knitting photo ops it will showcase?



2 comments:

Laurinda said...

Moving day is coming up fast! & I love the soapstone 😍

Mary Keenan said...

I can hardly believe it Laurinda! both the idea of moving home, and the fact that I get to touch soapstone every day :^)