It’s been a busy month between beginning the process of wedding planning, taking on new work assignments not related to either of our blogs, and then trying to squeeze in all of the home improvement projects we actually had lined up to complete this summer. Just another tale of busy people with loaded calendars. Want a hint of my latest most time consuming DIY adventure? Think: Mr. Awesome Bear Rug. I’ll tell you more next week.

Somehow, in between all of this, we’ve squeezed in a trip to Boston, a visit to IKEA over the border in Burlington, Ontario, spent time with family, and did just enough around our home to keep it from becoming an overwhelming mountain of plates and forks.

What have you been up to this month?

1. Framed and still fab.

Jaime Derringer’s mountain-inspired fab.com print sat perched on our dining room shelf for at least a month before I picked up a suitable frame for it. I’m still under the impression that I can’t go wrong with a RIBBA, and it’s fitting here too. I am concerned that the signage at IKEA led me to believe that they were about to be discontinued (“buy before it’s gone!”), but let’s not go there yet.

2. That roof. Those needles. I’ve made a decision.

Should there ever be maple or pine trees overhanging my next house, I will bring them down. Probably with my bare hands. Between jam-packed gutters, weeding exactly 1 Billion maple tree shoots from the gardens, and the constant mess of a flat garage roof, I’ve had my fill.

Every month or so, or after any good windstorm, the garage roof looks like this (photo taken from perspective of the toilet upstairs). Pine needles, branches, cones, maple helicopters, everything drops and manages to flood the edges of the garage roof. It wouldn’t be such an issue if the brush could just fall over the edges, but there are tile edges capping the drop off, and the roof itself isn’t steep enough to encourage it to wash down to the ground during a good rainstorm. Instead, it sits still, weakening both the tar paper and the patchwork we’ve done to prevent water leakage that could potentially rot the ceiling joists. And leaks most definitely contribute to wet scooter helmets.

Sweeping it clean is easy enough, except during the summer months when standing on a tarred roof makes you break out into the kind of sweat that makes you look like you wet yourself completely, so I picked the afternoon of the coolest day possible (78-degrees) and waited until the sun was behind the trees to climb on up and clean things up.

A good 15-minute sweeper got the job done, so we’re in the clear of collapsing our garage roof or encouraging water damage and rot to take over. It’s enough that we’ll have to replace a few boards on the back of the garage this summer after the wind and rain damaged the tar paper over the winter.

3. I inherited some vintage lit.

I know I’ve said it before, but I usually get loaded up with some good treasures every time I visit Grandma. Last visit, it was this wicker basket that I refinished to hold our sandy sandals on the deck, and this time I picked up a handful of new vintage books, ranging in topic from home decor and gardening, to horoscopes and mystic fortunes.

The books, lovely. It’s hard to find such pretty printed canvas book covers any more, and I love the way that the colorful images wrap all around it. Shown on the left, Good Housekeeping Illustrated Encyclodedia Of Gardening, Volume 1 of 16, 1972. In the center, New Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Gardening, 1964. And on the right, Home Owners’ Catalogue, 1950.

The insides of these books is pretty too. Last fall, I chopped up some cool but insignificant book covers for the sake of home decor, but I think these ones will stay whole as-is. Or framed as a whole, if ever that were to happen.

Why Grandma also had two sets of horoscope books is beyond me, but they’re in excellent condition and kind of cool to flip through if you’re into that sort of thing. I still don’t know what a Beauty Scope actually means, but it sounds fascinatingly 1960’s and has chapters within referencing one’s Healthscope and How To Appeal To The Men In Your Life. There are a total of 21 in my new collection, not all shown here:

The traditional astrological set by Sydney O’Marr has beautiful designs on the covers, each very unique, bright, and geometric. Maybe I’ll find something artful to do with them someday.

I’ve found shelf space for most of them, thinking that maybe I’ll want to have them as a set down the road, but I left out Libra and Leo, because those are the categories that Pete, Julia, and I fall into. Can anything wonderful be cited for when a Leo marries a Libra?

4. We got out of the house.

As much as we’ve been traveling (and will be traveling) this summer, it’s hard to get away during the week with so much work to do at home.

In the grand scheme of being a DIY Shelter Blogger, it’s probably a sin that I had never stepped foot in HomeGoods. We do up Marshall’s. TJMaxx. We run in the JoAnn Fabric circuit, but I didn’t actually know there was a HomeGoods within a half hour from my own home until last weekend.

Verdict? Nice. It’s the kind of place you have to be careful in, because it’d be really easy to buy a little of everything and then realize that your home looks a little bit harried and overwhelming, you know, like a HomeGoods does, so I played it safe and only came home with a clearance-priced $7 wooden box. Pete bought the Sarsaparilla. I suppose it’ll be a good place to shop when we’re looking for something really specific like lighting or area rugs.

The box top itself is really pretty, although I can’t tell what it’s made of. Feels not like ceramic, but more like a Corian countertop material.

Maybe we’ll go back again soon.

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