This is the longest I've been away from the cabin since last July. This time last year I was getting ready to drive back from visiting my brother in Tacoma. During this current hiatus I've actually made some major strides toward making the apartment in Boulder livable. The big game changers were a couple of small pieces of furniture I got half price last Saturday at a Goodwill in Lafayette, Colorado. It's hard to convey how this little settee...
...and matching chair...
...have actually changed my life at the apartment. Because I have no seating in the rest of the apartment except for the one straight-backed chair I blogged about in my last post, I have used these two pieces of furniture to transform my tiny balcony into a really pleasant place to sit, have my morning coffee or an afternoon cold drink, read and just people watch.
The latter activity I learned to enjoy from my maternal grandmother who could, and did, weave wonderful stories about all of the people we would see on Saturday afternoons in the closest town to our farms where people still said they were going into town to "do their trading," a leftover phrase from earlier years in which they actually did take their eggs and cream and trade them for groceries.
We didn't link up with my grandparents every Saturday afternoon, but when we did, my sister and I would pile into their car and listen with fascination as my grandmother pointed out one citizen or another as they went about their business or met up with and talked to other area residents and concocted interesting, usually funny and often irreverent stories about what they were saying and doing.
But back to the "furniture that changed my life." First off, I almost didn't get the settee moved from the store. I had to make two trips back to Lafayette, one on Sunday during which I did get the chair in the back seat, but determined the settee simply would not fit inside the car. On the second trip, which I made on Monday morning, the attendant in pick-up and receiving, managed to get just the back of the settee into the car trunk and with the help of two bungee cords, which he provided, made it quite secure for the trip back to Boulder. I wrestled both pieces into the apartment building, onto the elevator and down the long hall to my apartment. The chair was not a problem, but the settee almost got the better of me. My arm is still not healed, but as long as I keep it below my waist, my strength seems pretty good.
I'm not finished "decorating" the balcony, but have confirmed I can put in a work order and have maintenance come and hang things on the balcony walls. Right now, I've created a couple of vignettes that have made this small space seem a little more like a room...
I put this artificial topiary, which is in a white pot, inside this rusty bucket and teamed it up with these similarly colored candlesticks, raising one by placing it on another up-turned candle holder of the same color and fronting it with a green metal fern-like votive holder that picks up the green in the topiary. This is on top of the air conditioning unit and I hope I'm not told I can't place anything on the a/c unit. I may just move this when maintenance comes to hang the things I want hung on the walls.
This metal owl, which I built up by placing it on a metal can..
...and what I guess must be a metal wine carrier complement each other and are on the floor next to the chair, along with a couple of brown bottles in which I put small strands of white holiday lights right after I moved into the cabin. They are very romantic at night.
All of this goes with the fabric that's on the chair and settee now which I'm not finding that objectionable. I will eventually sand and repaint the wood and am thinking of recovering the seats with this fabric...
All of this stuff was in my Boulder storage unit and had been piled in the living room, so it was fun to find a use for it and not have to give it away.
In addition to the lights in the brown bottles, I found these grapevine lights...
...that I had tucked away in storage. They look cute draped over the back of the settee, but aren't practical here since you can't lean back on them. I've determined we can have lights on the balcony railing so will probably affix them there even though there aren't enough of them to cover the entire railing.
I also made this artificial succulent arrangement...
...in a container I found in storage and put it in this plant stand that I bought from another cabin owner the first summer I was in Eldora at a moving sale. I put this bamboo wine holder up behind it to provide some height in this corner behind the settee. I had purchased these succulents at a wonderful store in Phoenix called Crown Imports before I moved from Arizona. They specialize in very high-end (and high-priced!) artificial florals and these were fun to work with. It had been years since I'd made a floral arrangement and I had no floral wire or picks and no wire cutters, but managed to produce something I like.
I also created this little side table out of a folding base I had and a bamboo tray. I had intended to bring the tray up here to the mountains and spray paint it black but forgot. Perhaps the green picks up those touches of green in the candle vignette and the floral arrangement? And I also want to work in this quixotic life preserver. I don't know if this is a real life preserver or a prop of some sort, perhaps made for a prom or something, but it caught my eye. Right now I have it hanging on the balcony railing, but I originally had it hanging on the back of the chair and think that's where it will end up.
Among the things I had in storage, I also found these metal leaf cut-outs and this beautiful piece of sari fabric...
I think I'm going to have maintenance hang the two metal art pieces along the west side of the sliding glass door, one above the other, and, because there is a metal girder that runs all along the patio roof right in front of the door, I think I'm going to get two or three expandable curtain rods and have them wedge those in between the wall and the girder and drape the fabric over those so it wafts in the breeze like orange sails. I don't seem to get much wind inside the balcony. There was a pretty strong wind blowing the afternoon and evening I was working on this and at least from the direction it was blowing it didn't seem as if it would blow things down or away the way the winds do here in the mountains.
I hope these maintenance guys are good tempered! I also want them to hang a mirror, which you can sort of see in this photo...
...which is just setting on floor next to the settee right now, and a large metal leaf candle holder (not shown) on the wall behind the plant stand.
Well, while I've been trying to create this blog and waiting and waiting, as usual, for my photos to upload, I've used the weed whacker on the weeds around the cabin. The drought seems to be over up here in the mountains...my neighbor tells me they have been getting rain almost every day...and everything has greened up very nicely, and grown like...weeds. I could hardly find the fox bowl when I arrived yesterday...
...and, in fact, it was raining and we were without electricity for about an hour after I arrived.
I did not see Vixen at all the last time I was here just for a few hours, but she came just a bit ago. I heard something really crunching the kibble I'd put out and had moved up on the deck while I attacked the weeds. When I checked, it was she...
...I gave her a couple of eggs and two small pieces of chicken that had been in the refrigerator at the apartment too long and which I had deliberately brought up here for her. Her coat is so strange. Very sparse and curly. If she doesn't get a better coat before cold weather I don't see her surviving the winter.
It has grown quite dark so I think we're probably in for more rain. I'm glad I got the weeds "whacked." I've got to bring in some things I've been spray painting and I'll blog more about those and some other things I've done here at the cabin since I arrived as well as some decorating I did in the apartment bedroom last week. My internet subscription here in Eldora ceases at the end of July and I may not be able to arrange for internet at the apartment for a couple of weeks, so I'll try to cram in as much as possible before I dismantle the computer and move it to the apartment on Tuesday.
More later, Teddee
