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Stained concrete floors are all the rage in modern design. You’ve seen them at your local Starbucks… or hopefully you shun the corporate coffee house in favor of a local roaster and manage to catch a glimpse of stained concrete floors there as well.  They’re everywhere these days, and I think it’s a design technique [...]

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My friend Ida gave me a lesson on canning. We made strawberry rhubarb jam using rhubarb from her garden. We found that more pectin was needed to get the consistency right. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any more. So…we have some delicious strawberry rhubarb sauce. We meant to do that We used our the sauce over [...]

From a leaky air mattress on the floor to this! We finally purchased a real mattress: we opted for latex with a bamboo cover. We thought a real mattress (and a comfy one at that) deserved a real bed frame so Scott built one using untreated railway ties. The design was inspired by an article [...]

This weekend, we had some new friends over for dinner that we met at Ignite Spokane. After dessert, we chatted about the things we would have done differently if we knew what we know now and they suggested we write a blog post about it. What a great idea, I thought! They, like many of [...]

There are some environmental issues that are debatable, but one issue is undeniably true and bad: food waste. Food should not be in a landfill.  How can we condone the waste of food when 1.02 billion people are hungry in the world-and we’re not talking college kids with the munchies. This is serious actually. Sadly, [...]

We just completed the radiant heat installation (or the part that we are capable of, at least). Later, trained professionals will be coming in to to install the manifold and fill the pipes with water. We’re pretty proud of what we accomplished ourselves here though. And actually, it wasn’t as difficult as we expected. First, [...]

Trex is a beautiful product and it has so many great features: it is resilient and environmentally friendly. They’ve got tons of color and texture options to choose from. We went with Trex Accents® in the color Saddle and used Trex Hideaway® Hidden Fasteners to keep the look clean. Trex was an easy choice for [...]

This little guy here was once a Rancho Auto Parts shirt. Today, he has been re-born as a rag. This is the first of many rags we’re making to phase out paper towels. Paper towels are convenient, but is the convenience worth the number of trees felled, energy used in production, and waste created? We think not.