A grate update, and Mum's the word

It's been a busy few weeks here at chateau Plemmons (as you may have guessed from the lack of blogging in the last month). I'm trying to not only get the house ready for the baby - it's going to be a girl, by the way! - but also get the yard in better shape before winter.

My yard work is mostly trying to rejuvenate some dying areas, for which my method is raking the ground to loosen the dirt and remove the worst of the grass, mixing it with a bit of good topsoil (or even rich potting soil), and patching it (spreading seed/mulch/fertilizer combo and watering). I've had good luck with Pennington's in the past, so we'll see how that goes.

I also finally cleaned up the flowerbed at the front steps by planting some hardy mums. Ideally, I should have taken care of this in spring, to give the roots more time to 'dig in' before winter, but hopefully they'll still come through it okay. I still need to put in some border edging, but otherwise I'll let them settle in for a few weeks before mulching.

The easiest task I've tackled lately was probably painting the wall registers. Liz hates their design (I don't really mind them), but we haven't been able to find replacements that fit well in that 15" x 15" space, so I thought I'd at least clean them up and paint them with the same hammered copper paint I used in an older blog post, on the main floor grate. Here are some pics of the process:

Otherwise, my main accomplishment was cutting/sanding/staining the baseboards for our guest/tv room (also known as the 'yellow room') and making it otherwise habitable. I'll post some updated photos of that soon.

I still have to hang pictures, mount the tv on the wall, and design/build a special armoire/bookcase in the yellow room, but I'm strongly considering skipping that for the present. The library/office room needs to be updated and have the stinky cork - not to mention the bumpy popcorn texture - scraped off the walls, and I want to get that finished before the baby arrives so there are no clouds of dust and debris to worry about.

Of course, before I can even do that I have to move my piles of tools out of that room and into the garage, which is why I've been working on cleaning it out too...