Calvin O'Briant House is for sale!

We live across the street from what is likely the oldest house in central Durham, built before 1865. Gary, of Engendered Durham wrote this nice post about it. The photo was taken from his blog. Since we moved here we've watched the O'Briant house sit empty and abandoned. Recently, it was partially restored and put up for sale! It requires further restoration, but it is livable. You can view the full listing here

Re-claim your blog

We are responding to google's urge to claim our blog. So here is a post after a long time of laziness. Last week David Glick and his crew (strongly recommended) painted our house trim purple. We were never fond of the neutral suburban colors but could not afford to repaint the entire house. Now we know that trim makes the house- surprising what a little color around the edges can do! We would've not normally picked this purple, but we wanted something that pops and it had to work with the beige. We are very pleased with how it turned out. The door needs two more coats of bright red.

The myrtles a few of us neighbors planted along Holloway last spring have doubled in size! I can't wait to see them bloom. 

Also included is a picture of an urbanite (Durhbinite) patio Michael built last summer, re-using pieces of concrete from our deck project. Since then, we planted more shrubs around it, but we lack recent pictures. For the past eleven months we've been almost exclusively taking pictures of Jana.

O'Briant's Store

The historic building in our neighborhood that we've been dreaming of turning into a coffee shop/ bakery/gallery space is now for sale! You can read about it on Preservation North Carolina

New stuff...

Sorry for the lack of posts. A lot has happened since last spring. I spent most of the summer doing research in Serbia. I came back to Durham to a few great new things, such as Fullsteam Brewery, Scratch Bakery and Bull City Connector. I've used BCC many times and find it very efficient for getting to Durham Station or Duke campus.

The garden suffered some from summer heat and incredible amount of weeds. Towards the end of summer, we covered a large section in weed cloth and mulched it over. This has reduced watering significantly and the plants have been growing faster. We also finished the rock garden.

We dug out large chunks of old broken concrete in the back and built a deck over a weekend. We will be using the concrete to build an urbanite-style patio and a garden path in the upcoming months.

Fall has been surprisingly warm and green this year. We planted strawberries and lettuce just recently. We still have green bell peppers, jalapenos, basil, sage and oregano in the raised beds. If you'd like some sage or oregano, let me know. They spread like crazy. You can come pick some or re-pot some to have inside.

Busy, busy.

I've been very busy lately with numerous freelance projects, so I thought I'd mention a new site I just created for Raleigh-based cinematography studio Ravenwood Productions. They were a pleasure to work for, so be sure to check them out.

Tree

It was very sad to wake up to this. Poor tree.

Kale!

Can you dig it?

We've been gardening obsessively within the last three weeks, making regular trips to Stone Brothers.

The new raised beds are filled with compost and soil from The Rock Shop and we've planted everything from broccoli to zucchini.

 

During the short heat wave, what we thought were just weeds in the back corner of our yard turned out to be spring onions with white flowers.

Adding insulation to injury

It is unfortunate that our home inspector didn't make us aware when we bought our house that the attic was not adequately insulated. After being hit with super high heating bills this winter (that we are STILL paying off!) we realized that our attic had virtually no insulation (other than around the upstairs bedroom walls that WAS pointed out to us prior to buying). Yeah, we were clueless about what to look for when it comes to insulation when we bought this house, but I guess we thought there was no possible way a home inspection would neglect what is such an important part of a home.

So when this past week's heat wave (which made the upstairs an oven) forced us to sleep downstairs, we decided we'd better address the insulation issue immediately.

We decided that the first area to insulate would be the ceiling of the upstairs bedroom, as it is the most difficult to access. Luckily, Dragana managed to slink her way through the beams and put down R-30 (faced) insulation in about an hour or so. The next step will be to insulate the entire attic floor with unfaced R30 (there is currently about an inch of blown-in insulation, which is worthless when it is supposed to be 9 inches thick!). Thanks to the federal home energy rebates, it shouldn't cost too much.

Tom Gauld Print

 

We finally got around to framing/hanging our Tom Gauld "Go Into Space" print from the 2008 If You Could series.  So awesome. We custom ordered the frame online, but got the glass from Clear Vue in Downtown Durham, who had it cut and ready the same day.