…and my new translation for it is: DON’T STOP WATERING EVEN IF YOUR HOSE GETS KINKED” ! ! ! I know this must sound strange, but please indulge and let me explain.
In May, I had the good fortune of getting a part time job at a local nursery that has been family-owned for decades. It carries all varieties of specialty plants as well as lovely gift items, garden art, and fountains. It has a lovely layout and I am honored to work there. I get to learn about all sorts of different plants, and my colleagues are amazing. What a collection of knowledgeable people who LOVE gardening and are teaching me so much. The bonus…I get paid to take care of plants! How amazing is that? As an avid gardener, it is a dream job.
The past couple of weeks have been difficult. The weather has been hot…I mean REALLY HOT! California has many wildfires burning and the air quality in Sacramento has been affected. One morning, there was ash all over my car and when I got to work, there was ash all over the plants. It has been tough.
In the meantime, I had made the commitment to do a bit of a cosmetic upgrade on my place. In the kitchen specifically. Remember, my cottage has 650 square feet and my goal has been to make every foot of it beautiful.
My kitchen faces north and there are a lot of trees, so it never is the proverbial bright and sunny kitchen. Even though I had painted the walls a bright off-white in March, it wasn’t floating my boat (if you get my drift), particularly when I would look at it while taking a bath in my beautiful bathroom.
As you can see from this photo, it looked drab and kind of sad.
When you have a space that doesn’t get a whole lot of natural light, sometimes it is better to make it feel rich and cozy with saturated color rather than try to make it feel bright when you just can’t. I have three lamps in the kitchen (layering lighting is important and will be discussed in a later post) as well as overhead can lights. But it still looked uninspired. So I came up with an idea that I would put a wainscoting effect on the lower part of the walls, and it would be with a black background to tie in with the other elements in my cottage. It is always good to have one space flow into adjoining rooms so your space feels more cohesive as well as expansive.
Below is my inspiration. A lovely wallpaper, a bit out of my price range since this is a rental and I’m not going to spend a lot of money on something I will have to tear off.
With my new-found love of peel-and-stick wall paper, I figured I could duplicate the pattern ( I mean, how hard could it be to cut out white and gold strips and put them on top of a plain black peel-and-stick wallpaper???)…was I ever WRONG! The black background was inexpensive and soooo easy, so I thought, this is gonna be a piece of cake! “HAH!” said the peel-and-stick wallpaper gods…not so fast!
It turned out that the white stripe peel-and-stick was IMPOSSIBLE to use. I couldn’t get the backing off of it, and I had to pivot. So, I decided to do a simple grid on the diagonal with only the gold stripes. “HAH!” said the peel-and-stick wallpaper gods…AGAIN! The black background was impossible to mark and so I just kinda winged it with a yardstick and a square.
The image above shows what THAT turned out like. No bueno. I let it be for about all of 4 or 5 hours and said, this just ain’t gonna cut it. As you can see, the top was migrating up and not level at all, and I couldn’t just let it be. I decided that I would have to come up with my own design so the slight imperfections in the angles as I applied the gold stripes weren’t so evident. Below is what I came up with.
Looking from the sink toward the window needed a new look as well. The vertical shades took up valuable inches and light, even when they were open. They encroached into the space and were not attractive…at least in the other rooms of the cottage, I could hide them behind the curtain panels I have hung.
before 
after
I replaced the vertical blinds, as I was able to purchase the woven shade that matches my sink window at a deeply discounted price. The installation of said woven shade was another lesson in patience and persistence. It took three tries to get it right. Thank goodness for spackling…there were so many holes drilled in my wall, it reminded me of a turkey on Thanksgiving that you keep putting the thermometer in to see if it is done… each bracket had four holes, and there were three of them. That was 24 extra holes that I put in my wall to no avail. But in the end, my placement was perfect!
I love my new shade. The wallpaper is not what I had originally wanted, but I made do with what I had and pivoted. It is much prettier than it was, even though it wasn’t exactly what I had planned for. Life isn’t perfect. Let’s face it. All we can do is pick ourselves up.. dust ourselves off… and try all over again. (cue the Nat and Natalie King Cole song)…
Getting back to my … You can’t stop watering even if your hose gets kinked analogy... Two days ago at work, a main water pipe into the nursery burst. We had to hook ALL of the hoses together because we only had one spigot that worked and the nursery is 2/3 of an acre. Normally, we have eight hose bibs which service the entire nursery. Needless to say, It was a lot to handle in addition to the high heat and smoke. Plants need water. Six hundred foot long hoses — hell, even short hoses — have a tendency to kink and cut off the water flow.
Moral of the story…just like I needed to stop and unkink that ungodly long hose during the pipe break, I needed to stop and regroup as I did my little kitchen project. It’s been a challenging couple of weeks on a lot of fronts, but now the nursery has its eight hoses back online. What a relief!
And now when I take my bath, I get to look at the lovely flow of my rooms. The view from my bathroom no longer looks dingy.. It is so much prettier and feels more special… “What a couple of weeks it has been”…
Till next time,
Go with the flow…