spargel - white asparagus

After working on the house on Saturday and Sunday we were in the mood for some German food. Because I knew that Zum Schneider in New York's East Village is serving white asparagus right now we had to go. It is so yummy!

White asparagus is typically served with boiled potatoes, smoked ham and butter sauce, or sauce hollandaise. Also love it as a creamy soup. Sometimes I find it at supermarkets in NY/NJ as well. This year the white asparagus I found was very thin. The thinner it is, the harder it is to peel, by the end you are left with virtually nothing and unlike green asparagus it needs to be peeled.

There is even asparagus season in Germany (April-June). All Germans know this as "Spargel-Zeit" (translates "asparagus time"). You can read more about it here (scroll down a little bit) and the article also explains why it makes your pee smell funky...

memorial weekend to-do list

Like most holiday weekends since buying our house, the upcoming memorial day weekend will be used to start/finish a project. This weekend we want to fix up the front door, paint and hang the bedroom door and get the house ready for the arrival of P's parents next week.

We already got the house numbers a while back at the DWR Outlet in Secaucus. The mailbox we found on sale on www.dwr.com (they don't have them on their website anymore, that's why I linked to the manufacturer's site). In order to be able to complete the project this weekend we also bought a stainless steel kick plate and hinges at Home Depot, a lamp at a local re-store and two cans of exterior paint.

I'm not divulging the paint colors yet but you are more than welcome to take a guess ;)

feeling peachy

The peach colored hallway is no more. I painted it last weekend. Now the hallway feels more like a part of the house. The color is Horizon (OC-53) by Benjamin Moore. You can see that the dining room on the right is slightly darker, it is painted Stonington Gray (HC-170) as is the living room to the left. We chose a lighter gray for the hallway because it doesn't get much light, as you can see in the pictures.

Finishing the hallway means that all the downstairs rooms are painted and are just waiting for the finishing touches. Yay!...Ok, the powder room isn't painted yet but I only use it to clean my rollers and brushes and don't really use it for anything else right now.

Also I discovered that the paint on one side of the vestibule door is coming of in big flakes when you gently peel it away, so much easier than stripping.

post icff party

Last Wednesday I attended an art opening at atelier showroom in the New York Design Building hosted by surface magazine to show some support for my friend Benjamin Boland. Check out some of his work and more on his website...

atomkraft? nein danke!

On my way to the train I always pass this house which has an Atomkraft? Nein Danke flag in its backyard. It is kind of odd to see this flag in a backyard in New Jersey since I've only known them from Germany. It reads Nuclear Power? No thanks. Guess that means there are other Germans living in the area...

It reminded me of my childhood, more so the mid eighties after Chernobyl. There were a lot of demonstrations against the dependency on nuclear power after that.

Makes me want to get my power through a provider that supplies energy generated from renewable energy sources. After consulting Google for only a couple of minutes I found this, have to really do more research on that subject...

Just wanted to share my flag sighting ;)

yard

Now that brainstorming about the backyard is in full swing I am ready to show the not so nice part of our house. Our entire backyard is covered in concrete and most of it is in bad shape. Maybe I should rent out some parking spots for our neighbors ;) Seriously who puts down concrete in their entire yard?

There is also a newer slab of concrete in the far back of our property which is about 1-2 inches higher than the old slab. Not great for using the space at all and it also diverts water towards the house. The little sliver of grass does not belong to our property which basically ends where the concrete slab ends. So the makeshift fence is not ours either.

We have never used the wooden deck, besides for storing our trash cans. It is too small to hold our old table and the 4 chairs.

I took the photos a while back, notice all the bare trees, it makes the yard look even sadder...Looking forward to changing the yard, getting a privacy fence in the back and being able to enjoy it :)

front yard

Today was probably a great day for our neighbors - we managed to work a little bit (4 hours!!!) on the front yard, including weeding, trimming and ripping out some plants/bushes. Our yard was the worst within a couple of blocks around us, now it moved up a rank or two. It is not the way we want it yet but we are still looking for inspiration for what to do with the front yard. Don't want to start planting until we have a plan.

another vestibule update

I have been busy again last weekend trying to finish up working on the vestibule. Next step was painting the door to the hall closet. First I needed to spackle all the holes and dings in the door as well as hide the screws in the "kickplate" (see second last photo - although this is another one of our lovely doors because I forgot to take a good close up picture of the before conditions). The door looked kind of weird and lost with only having trim on two sides so I bought a piece of matching trim and attached it to the top. Already much better! Also used some leftover trim on the "kickplate" too...

See the duck in the first picture, it was left by the previous owners as a door stop to keep the door closed. Well we don't need ducky anymore because I installed a magnet to keep the door closed. The hinges are still the same, just stripped the paint off and the little door knob I found in my tool box. By using mostly existing items I managed to spend only about $37 on the project so far (Quart of tinted primer $15, trim $8, ceiling medallion $10, lamp holder $2, door magnet $2).

There is some weird trim action going on on the right side of the door. Not sure what purpose the piece in the upper right corner is serving but I was afraid of ripping it out. Should I paint the little piece of wall framed by the trim dark as well or should I leave it white? Debating this with myself right now...

The existing "kickplate" looked similar to this one before I worked my magic ;) I countersunk the screws and then filled the holes with spackling paste, sanded everything and finally painted the kickplate.

This is how the underside of the door looks like - not pretty but you can't see the ugliness now that it is hung.

living room

Finally I took pictures of our living room. The last big project in this room, the fireplace, had been finished a while ago. We still haven't gotten around to hanging anything on the walls, you can see some frames leaning against the wall left of the fireplace waiting to be hung. And still undecided which of our "artwork" will be hung above the mantle. Here's some old pictures of the living room right after closing on the house just to give you an idea what we started with.

We already owned all the furniture besides the book case. It's the Besta system from Ikea. The metal boxes (usually there's only two of the big ones) were our makeshift coffee tables when we moved to the US nine years ago and we never changed it. The big lamp was my very first home related purchase I made in NYC, even used money from my first pay check. I bought it in a store on West Broadway called DOM, which I already had known from Germany, sadly it closed pretty much shortly after I bought it.