AAcccchhooo!!

Gotta love when everything starts popping into bloom around here....allergies are going haywire, not much can be done when you live in an area surrounded by farms and "hay" is one of your allergens...phooey.

However...I think a good part of today's troubles come from disassembling the Victorian sofa we bought a while back.  We had started peeling back the fabric to see how it was all put together and discovered the "padding" was actually layers of raw cotton and hay...ick.  Face mask and gloves on and I started taking the layers apart...apparently some of the crud still got breathed in because I'm having a horrible time with sniffling, sneezing sometimes stuffy.....ugh.  However....did discover what appears to be an old quilt that was used as part of the padding, and that will be slowly taken apart over the next few days so we can see what the fabrics were like.  According to a paper clipping we found, the couch had some work done on it in 1918!!!  wowzers!

That's just *some* of what I pulled off the sofa frame last night...interesting, huh??  I do have pictures of the "nekkid" sofa frame, but haven't uploaded them yet. 

We also remembered what we used to power out the old stain on a railroad trunk - oxyclean!  SO that's what I used on a small part of one of the sofa legs....OMG...it totally worked and now, instead of super dark wood, we are starting to see the cherry of the original wood..woohoo!!!  Told hubby that we should just make a big bucket, roll the sofa outside and spray all the wood buts down now that there's no fabric left on it....don't think he'll let me do that, though...lol

That is what the couch looked like when we first got her home (I say her because hubby has dubbed her Victoria - not too original since it's a Victorian sofa - but oh well)....the fabric actually started out as dark green with gold/reddish/pink designs in it, but had oranged...not even brown...that stuff looks orange!!!  I will be airing out the pieces so that I can use them as patterns for the new fabric....but for now....off to see the local lab for a blood draw that is needed for my check up later this month....

sunshine and gardens

FINALLY, we have sunshine!!  We've had a week of off and on rain and no sunshine whatsoever.....this weekend, it seems that the sun decided to come back for a visit.  So, today we managed to get more work done in the bonus room until it was time to take a break (before our backs went out completely).  Then, this afternoon, we put in our new garden plants....we tried to do the seed starters this year, but that was a no-go, so off to Milmont......this year, we have a Cherokee purple tomato plant that we got from the Staunton farmer's market, and from Milmont, we purchased Homestead tomatoes (beefsteak), grape tomatoes, yellow sweet peppers, orange sweet peppers, container cucumber plants, sugar baby watermelons, and seeds for buttercrunch lettuce, romaine lettuce, and collard greens...not to mention "popcorn" that my son picked out.

Not sure how much will take root, but we'll give it our best shot....have caged the Cherokee plant since it's fairly large already and have put the small fencing around the planter where the watermelons and the solitary grape tomato plant is.  We always put one tomato plant in the planter so that the dog has access to it....it keeps him out of the other garden areas and he eats off his own plant when he so chooses.....

Will get pictures when I have the chance.....