Ombre AND Chevron? I die*.

Aura Bedding via Oh Joy

*PS: Does anyone know if another season of Rachel Zoe is on the way? Or is the show dunzo?

Happy Monday! We spent the weekend lying low recovering from late-week colds that made an unwelcome appearance! We mostly did small projects around the house, I sewed, and got caught up on American Pickers.

To start the week, I wanted to share some photos from a recent trip I took to St. George, Utah, to visit my childhood best buddie, her husband, and darling kiddo. It rained the first part of the weekend, but the last full day there, the clouds parted and the brilliant landscape came barrelling through. Beautiful, no?!

We made it to the park also, and I snapped some shots of the awesome canopy over the play structure (it gets to 110 degrees there in the summer!!). I also included some fun pictures of her cutie pie at the end. When I showed up, she was super excited and all day kept saying “Yah, Bwi!” (Bwi being her version of Bri, of course It was darling – i’m already hoping for my next trip back.

do people doubt this?

I have been trying some new desserts lately. (the french king cake was one…)  Um, yum, dessert is a hobby. The whole thing… making it and then eating it.

Again, is anyone out there surprised?

Regardless, I have had a ton of stuff in life going on in the past few weeks.   I feel like the weekends come…. I really just look forward to mixing, smelling, slicing and eating some delightful creation.

One weekend, I whipped out an Orangette recipe that I have always just wanted to taste.

A French-Style Yogurt Cake with Orange.

(the Orangette/Molly version has Lemon instead of the Orange.  But really, we are crawling in oranges around here this time of year and I LIKE oranges better so why not?)

adapted from my favorite, A Homemade Life.

There are three components, all I think amazing.

for the cake:

• 1/2 cup plain whole milk yogurt, well stirred
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 2 tsp. grated orange zest
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 cup canola oil

for the syrup:

• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar, sifted

for the icing:

• 3 T freshly squeezed orange juice
• 3/4 cup powdered sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Grease a 9in round cake pan.  Line the bottom with a circular piece of parchment.

In a medium bowl, whisk flour, baking powder, and salt.  Add zest and whisk.

In your kitchen aide mixer, combine yogurt, sugar and eggs.  Add flour mixture and stir to combine.  Then add the oil until it is yellow and smooth.

Pour in the pan and bake for 28(ish) minutes.  A pick will come out clean and take it out immediately.

Cool the cake for 15 min and then remove from the pan.

While the cake is still warm, you should syrup it on a wire rack.  Mix the juice and sugar together.  Spoon the syrup on the cake slowly over the whole cake.  I even put a cookie sheet below the wire rack so that I could catch all the delicious liquid and repour it on top of the cake.

{my cake, just syrup-ed}

Now, let the cake completely cool.

Mix the icing ingredients together and spoon that over the cool cake….

YUM.

I waited to serve this until later that evening, so the icing was firm.

SO fresh and yummy and sweet and springy.

When you’re working on your house, the last thing you want is to have to re-do something because you did it wrong. Its not satisfying, at all, to re-do work because of your own stupidity. But, then again, DIY is all about learning, right? In our case, we’ll consider this another in a long series of “Things we learned because our house is old”. Remember back in our Lemon House to-do post from the beginning of this year when we said we’d share with you what was wrong in the bathroom if you looked up. Well, here’s your chance to find out the details of a DIY gone wrong.

The story starts with paint. When we bought house, summer of ’09, we bought nearly all our paint from Sherwin Williams Harmony line, in Eg-Shel finish. This included a 5 gallon bucket of our trim/ceiling color: Alabaster. Harmony paint is Zero VOC and the Eg-shel is really a lovely finish, which we prefer to semi-gloss . Also, at the time (this has since changed), SW Harmony didn’t come in a semi-gloss finish, which meant that if we wanted to stay with this line of paints (no VOC) and not go to a different store, we were out of luck in the semi-gloss arena.

After painting our bedrooms, the living room, and the kitchen, we finally got to our bathroom remodel. In addition to new fixtures and tiled shower surround, this also included new paint. Since we wanted to go with a bold accent color for the walls that was different from anything we had previously purchased, we did the “right” thing, and bought a quart of SW Duration paint in “Lakeside” for the walls. Duration is low VOC, but not NO VOC, and has additional anti-microbial properties for mildew resistence in wet locations (this is where it starts to get tricky. . . ). Its still an “Environmentally Preferable Paint”, but not quite as odor free as we would normally prefer. But, we decided this was the best paint for the job.

So, whats the problem you’re asking? Well, after painting almost every other room in the house, we were pretty smitten with the SW Harmony Alabaster in the eg-shel finish for ceilings. And we had a bunch left in our 5 gallon bucket. We trucked right along and painted the ceiling of our 1922 non-vented bathroom in a zero VOC eg-shel finish.

BAD IDEA. When its recommended that you use Semi-gloss paint in wet locations, listen. . . Also, when companies make anti-microbial paint and you have especially moist conditions because your house is too old to have a bathroom fan, listen. . . Otherwise you end up with. . .

MILDEW!

Little spots of mildew that grow on the surface of the paint and expand with every shower you take. Not what you want in your freshly reno’d bathroom, eh? This has been a creeping problem since early 2010 and it was about time to do something about it!

So, I went back to the SW store and bought a quart of Duration Low-VOC Anti-microbial paint in Alabaster to match the ceiling and trim we’d already painted. Harmony now comes in a semi-gloss finish, but still lacks the anit-microbial properties of the Duration, which has been performing great on the walls, so I didn’t take any chances.

I gave the ceiling a wipe-down with diluted bleach (Lavender scented to make it a little more palatable). Honestly, it came off super easy, probably an earth friendly vinegar solution would have done the job just as well. I was glad to know that it hadn’t penetrated the finish of the paint, it was just living on the surface, so no damage to the plaster ceiling had been done. Phew! One coat of semi-gloss paint later, things were looking just the same as they had when we first finished the bathroom project - which albeit frustrating, is what we were going for. I also gave the mirror and window trim a quick swipe of the wipeable paint for good measure.

While I was in the bathroom in my painting clothes, I also decided to finish up some trim paint on the edge of our tiles that has been needing some attention. We had a pretty messy edge at the point where tile, drywall mud, and new paint came together. Not wanting to just run the bright turquoise to the edge of the tiles, I decided to trim it out in gray to match the dark grout we chose for tile. Lucky for me, we chose a medium/dark gray for our exterior trim last summer, and have plenty left to use for little things like this around the house. Exterior paint = GREAT for moisture, so hey, no new paint required!

I taped it up (trying out Frogtape for the 1st time), used a foam brush to quickly swipe a paint line down the side of the tile, then ran my finger down the edge with a wet rag to wipe paint off the ceramic finish for a nice clean line. Super easy, and it literally only used about 4 tbsp of paint.

So now with new ceiling paint and trimmed out tiles, our bathroom is dare I say, finally 100%!

And now, a gratuitous shot of early-spring-sun that was cascading over our lovely tile. . .

Its time again to show you our mantel this month! When I was setting it up last weekend, I was inspired by early spring citrus hues, fresh bright foliage starting to poke up from the earth, and of course, St. Patty’s day. I love having fresh flowers around the house, so I popped in some crisp white tulips and a festive little shamrock plant that I couldn’t resist buying last week.

These photos were taken in the golden glow of a spring Seattle morning last week (one of the few moments where it stopped raining before today).

Somehow we ended up with some little woodland creatures again, but we’ll just consider that a visual segue from our February mantel The sisal chicks were picked up at World Market from their easter collection.

Happy Spring Friends!