Five Things for Friday

It's going to be another beautiful weekend in Portland! Here are a few things I enjoyed this past week.

I was thrilled to see we have nesting chickadees in our birdhouse!  Here's a photo of the mamma bird bringing more nesting material to the house.

If you click on the photo, it will enlarge.  You can see the chickadee sitting on the house in this photo.  We have five birdhouses and these two are the only ones we can see from the backyard.  The others are on the side of the house.

I'm excited at the thought of spending some real quality time on my new deck!  Today I've included photos of the final "reveal"!

But first, remember what I started with?  There was very little room to open the screen door and step onto the porch.  There just wasn't much (more like any) landing space before the drop to the steps.

And now for the reveal!  Much better!  We can comfortably exit the house without falling onto the step!

I've had those two folding chairs for a while but have never had a good place for them until now!  That green plant in the bottom right is my gardenia (**love it**).  It smelled so nice last summer!

The lights have been installed!  You can see one of the deck lights here.  These use led bulbs and are very bright!

One more photo looking down to the patio from the deck where Jeff is enjoying a beer while he relaxes from installing the deck lights. The red concrete slab in the bottom left is the original porch.  It was easier and cheaper to build around it rather than take it out.  I plan on repainting it sometime this summer.

Ok, enough about the deck.  We've picked up some really nice FREE furniture lately!  It seems, with the nice weather, my neighbors start cleaning out their houses and putting unwanted furniture on the sidewalk.  Last weekend we picked up this great dining room table and 4 chairs!

I'm going to repaint the legs and refinish the top.  I haven't yet decided on what color though.

We also picked up this nice mid-century dining chair.  It needs the seat reupholstered but that will be easy to do.  I also plan on painting it but I may change my mind.

Needless to say, I'm getting swamped with nice furniture, so I believe a sale is in my future.  Probably around the middle of July.  Mark your calendars! If you're in Portland you'll want to come!

I'm still browsing around for new sandals.  I really like these on Etsy and they're 40% off!  This shop has quite a few cute sandals 40% off.

Last weekend we went to this awesome estate sale down the street from our house.  The estate was of a 94 year old lady who was a hoarder  collector.  She had some really nice stuff; dishes, baskets, fabrics (tablecloths, bedspreads, etc), and bikes.  Apparently, what was for sale was only about 10% of what was in the house.  It was just the stuff they could reach easily.  There will be at least 3 more sales as they work their way through, or rather into, the house.  Anyway, I picked up this cookbook.



It's got a recipe in it for an Irish Soda Bread that I'm definitely making this weekend!  It's also got a recipe in it for Shark Fin Soup that I'll pass on for obvious reasons.  It was published in 1972 and has a section for "Quick and Easy Soups".  One of those recipes is for a Bean Soup in which the ingredients include opening two cans of bean soup!

Don't forget to checkout Lora's Beauty as we're having a Mother's Day Special now until the end of May.  There's 15% off all purchases!  A vintage Mother's Day card is included with purchases ordered before May 8th!

Have a great weekend.  Besides making Soda Bread, I plan on working on some of that furniture we picked up.