White is all right

It took two weeks, but we’ve finally pretty much settled into our new rental house. It’s still a bit upside down, but we’ve found spots for most of our stuff, and I’ve even managed to do a bit of Christmas decorating. Well, OK, I put up a tree ad hung a wreath :-) I highly recommend NOT moving two weeks before Christmas!

Our new rental house is completely different from our former rental house. It was also built in the ‘70s, but it looks like it could have been built 100 years ago. And it has FOUR levels – that’s a LOT of steps to go from the basement to the top floor! The cool thing is that the interior of this house is designed a lot like what I envision for our house. It has wide plank floors (although I like these ones better than ours because they’re real hardwood, not engineered), white walls (many are tongue & groove), simple white trim that’s also painted white, blue accents, wood beams & posts, and black door hardware.

Here’s the living room. The big windows are great, but the sun really beams in through them in the morning!

The two exterior doors on the main floor are painted blue. I suspect that all the doors were built specifically for this house.

Heading up to the second floor…

The pointed tops on the doors are cool, but I see potential for heads whacking on the door frame if you don’t go through the middle of the opening!

I heard that the previous owner did a lot of painting in this house, so I’m guessing that all the tongue & groove that’s now white started out stained pine. If that’s the case, there was a LOT of pine in this house! But it was definitely a good call, because the white walls really brighten and open up the house. Now I’m feeling really good about my decision to go with a lot of white in our house :-)

Beam me up Scotty

A few days ago, I was walking Sassy on the beach and came across a big wood beam sitting in the sand. I’m always picking up pieces of wood from the beach for as-yet-undefined craft projects, but this baby was way too big for me to handle by myself. Plus it was in the center of the beach, so a long walk back to either end with it. Luckily, the beam washed up right in front of a rental cottage. So after asking for and getting permission to use the cottage driveway and beach access, I convinced Brian to help me round up the beam. Which, as it turns out, weighs about 1,639 pounds. But we managed to get it off the beach and into the car and up to the lot.

So now I have an 11 foot long wood beam to use somewhere in our house. Where, I have no idea. But I’ll figure something out :-) Maybe we’ll use it for something like this around the front entry…

Source

What would you do with a big old beam from the beach?