Life, As of Late

It's been a crazy couple of weeks. It all started with apartment hunting right after the holidays, which led to 5 offers, pros/cons lists of each place and a final decision to downsize by nearly 500 Sq. Ft! Then there was a snow storm the weekend we were planning to move, which cancelled the move; the unpacking of way too much stuff in a space that can't hold it all; a massive and furious moving sale, plant dig and numerous trips to donation drop offs; and finally being able to celebrate missed birthdays and dinner parties. In between it all, midterms and now finals! There were days we couldn't look beyond the next 24 hours and we couldn't imagine when the moving would finally end, but we're all moved into our new place and living among boxes until we can come up with creative and stylish storage solutions. Although it was a move we were forced into, we couldn't be happier in our new home.

This kitchen will be greatly missed for its massive size, its insane amount of storage and the many great meals we prepared for family and friends.

This cupboard took us two weeks to pack up! Every time we opened up the cupboard and tried to envision where we'd put all this in our tiny new kitchen, we'd have mild heart attacks. It all currently lives in a large box on the kitchen floor with no clue as to what we're going to do with all this.

We traded all that space, quaint neighborhood and living with a yard for these views (and we haven't missed or regretted the decision).

After turning in our keys at 11pm on a Tuesday, we had late night happy hour burgers at our beloved neighborhood spot 5Q. We remember dreaming of this place on our travels during days when we just wanted a beer and a burger. It felt ceremoniously appropriate to spend our last night in the neighborhood here.

We finally made a trip to the grocery store, but for such things as cleaning supplies, wood furniture shims and cat food. On the way there, we saw notoriously long-wait Screen Door had no one in line. We decided, at the last minute, to stop for dinner, and now we understand why this Southern food restaurant is always so packed. Our beef brisket and fried chicken dinner was absolutely delicious, plus their wall of house pickles was an inspiration for our new kitchen. 

We've been living in our loft now for 3 weeks. Just recently were we able to go home after work, instead of back to our old home to pack and move more things. Which meant we finally had an opportunity to explore our new neighborhood and was overjoyed to find out our favorite taqueria in the city just opened up a spot only 7 blocks from our new place! We're going to be eating our way through their menu.

We're also ridiculously close to the new World Foods Market, which we were surprised to find reasonably priced general produce and fresh foods, but their pantry items - no so much. They also have fancy specialty foods, which we think we'll indulge in from time to time.

Our first evening out with friends in a long time was to amazing little bar Tanuki. This bar is definitely of another realm, specializing in Okinawan drinking foods. The food was insane! We opted for the highest price point Omakase (Chef's choice) and almost immediately the food started flying at us. It was dark, there was drinking snacks in front of us, good company and Japanese horror movies on screen, needless to say we only capture a few photos before giving up and digging into our meal. 

Pictured are light Korean beers Hite, fish sauce caramel corn (insanely good); trio of salads (octopus, jellyfish and seaweed; and kimchi bacon and blue cheese buns. Not pictured, but part of the meal was buttered trout over rice; braised duck and shaved brussel sprouts; hanger steak; pork cheeks; house kimchi; edamame; soy sauce squid jerky; spicy cinnamon tea quail eggs; crab legs in herb sauce; fresh oysters; broiled mussels with manchego cheese; miso soup; and probably a few more items we simply can't remember. There was so much and it was all insanely good.

The weekend wasn't over yet, we still had a belated birthday celebration, this time in the form of a brunch at the Country Cat. Right on par with our meal at the Screen Door, the Country Cat's food was comforting and delectable on this rainy late winter/early spring morning. The food is whole hearted American breakfast bumped up 10 notches. The usual breakfast suspects were there - Cast Iron Skillet Fried Chicken ($15), the spoon bread was so yummy; Chili Pork over Grits ($13); Insane Pork Fat Biscuits & Gravy ($11); and Chicken Fried Steak ($12). The Proud Mary (their version of a Bloody Mary) was delicious as well. Oddly enough the only plate a picture wasn't take of was Anne's Braised Beef Hash, with chunks of braised beef the same size of the home fries ($12).

It was so nice to have a weekend to relax, enjoy a meal not out of a plastic container and finally talk to our family & friends about something other than moving. So, what's everyone been up to?

Feeling Grateful

The end of 2012 and the first half of 2013 were really difficult months for us. It almost seems as if our year and summer didn't kick start until July. But after weeks of spending time with family and friends and settling into new schedules, we're really looking forward to the future and hoping to enjoy our summer to the fullest. Needless to say, we're feeling really grateful at the moment. Hope everyone else is having a good summer and looking forward to the rest of the year.

Musical Furniture - Our Dining Room

Getting prepared (and excited) about switching up some furniture in our home. It seems as if we're constantly playing Musical Chairs with our furniture. You would think that after all these years we would have honed in on our style, but with two great consignment shops within 4 blocks of our house we're constantly tempted by good deals and an opportunity to "minimize".

Over the years our lifestyle has changed a bit and we're trading up to suit our ever evolving needs. Our home is unconventional, to say the least, where we have opted to make each room useful to us by throwing out notion of what a typical living room or second bedroom or dining room should consist of. Below is our dining room, it's not going to change too much, but we're going to switch things around to make it more our style and more useful to us. A small reveal to come soon.

Building a Stone Patio

Last winter I was determined to get rid of the hideous/useless grass patch in our backyard, and vowed to have a new hardscaped patio before summer. Starting in February when the weather warmed up, the digging began.

But before we get into the details, let's go down memory lane. Living outdoors is really important to us, so each year we document our lovely yard and I was really amazed at the number of photos we have taken over the years. I guess we just want to record all our hard work, because let's be honest maintaining a yard in Portland is a constant chore.

Back in 2007 our yard was nice and neat, look at how tiny all the plants are, including the bamboo! I was really shocked by how square and maintained the grass patch is, because that won't be the case in a few years.

Fast forward a few summers and the yard is looking a bit run down, but the plants are filling in nicely.

Winter that year.

Early spring the next year, the grass patch is still nicely contained. You can see how empty it looks when the perennials haven't come back yet, as well as a shot of me and my bike.

Summer that year, the plants have filled in nicely and we are fully enjoying the yard every morning.You can't see it, but there's a reason why the table and chairs aren't in the grass - it's uneven.

The following spring, the perennials are finally situated (so I thought) and you can see the beginning of the grass patch morphing. It only gets worse from here.

Only a few months later, the grass patch has completely lost its shape and is beginning to sag in the middle, with strange divots in parts, and clover is slowing creeping in. Thankfully the summer flowers still encouraged us to enjoy the space.

Here is a better view of the ugly grass patch. We begin to notice during BBQs no one stands in the grass. People kind of walk around it.

Fed up, we decide to simply put mulch over the whole grass patch, which seemed to only give it nutrients, because within a year it came back fast and furious.

When we finally had a plan in place, we thought we would simply turn the grass over and let it decompose onto itself. However, we quickly learned sod was laid and we would have to pull it all up. Sod is heavy and the city will not dispose of it. So there was that conundrum. Most of it went into our compost bin and used to rebuild the sloping berm. After digging up all the sod we covered the dug out patch to prevent the neighborhood cats from turning it into a large kitty litter box, where it stayed like this for a month.

After we got back from vacation, panic started to set in as the weather became unseasonably warm and all the perennials started to fill in. So on the warmest spring day on record, we set out to bang out the patio in one weekend. After consulting numerous Youtube videos and calculating gravel/sand amounts needed, we secured a workhorse of a truck and started bright and early Saturday morning.

We had dug the patch too deep and spent a good portion of our first morning re-filling the patch with the dirt we took out. This turned out to be the most physically demanding part, other than the initial digging out of the sod. We laid a 10-foot 2x4 across the patch to measure the depth and ensure it was 7 inches at the drain end and 6 at the other end.  

Next we used garden stompers to pound the dirt down. Those stompers made for a great arm workout. After the dirt was fairly level and tamped down, we laid weed guard.

Next we laid down paving gravel and continually measured to make sure we had laid an even 3 inches down before stomping again with the garden stompers.

Once the gravel was laid, we covered it and stacked all the pavers for tomrrow. Then we called it a day. It was way pass dinner time, it was Quattro De Mayo and we had plans to see Los Estupidos play that night.

The next morning, still sore from the day and night before, we got up early and prepared to lay the sand. We used 1-inch plumbing tubes to ensure we laid an even 1-inch layer of sand before the pavers were placed.

Mike used to lay tile for a living, so we used a couple of his techniques to ensure the edge was straight, that the gaps between the pavers were even, and to prevent the whole patio from bowing in a curve. After all the pavers were laid in and straight, we nailed in edging all around to make sure nothing shifted. 

Now came the fun part, we scoop sand onto the pavers and slowly swept it into the gaps between each paver. Then we sprayed down the patio, let it dry, then swept more sand over. Last, we filled the gap, created by the edging between the patio and the flower beds, with soil.

We then move large established plants into their new spacious spots before we situated the patio furniture we purchased last year at 75% off. This patio looks inviting from our kitchen window and we can't wait for all the plants to fill in. That night we were able to enjoy our handy work with Sunday dinner outside. We are ready for the warmer weather and now have a proper outdoor space to enjoy it. Summers not even here yet!

There are many people/places we need to thank for making this possible.

1.  Han's 1980s Ford F250 - what a worn-in-ride and boy can this beast haul. 

2.  Northwest Compost Products - easy and affordable bulk landscaping materials. Those guys who ran the folklifts looked like they had a lot of fun with those machines.

3. Lowe's - due to advance internet pricing and browsing, only 1 trip was needed to get everything from the weed guard to the edging and pavers. Bonus was all the materials (heavy pavers) was forklifted directly into the truck. No heavy lifting on our part.

4. Portland Tool Library! Big ups for this amazing City of Portland non-profit resource center. Without them we don't know if we could have done this. We used their garden stompers, the largest gravel rake I have ever seen and an awesome tool called a concrete hoe! The right tool for the right job and the Tool Library really allowed us to do this patio correctly without the cost of purchasing expensive tools for just this use.

5. Cedo's Falafel and Christopher's Grill for nourishment when we simply couldn't afford to stop and make something.

I can't tell you how much we love this new patio. The yard finally looks nice and tidy, although I'm not sure I like the christmas cactus there, that thing has gotten huge over the years.

Birthday Lunch & Southern California Beach Time

After birthday celebrations with my siblings in Las Vegas, we rented a car and drove across the desert to Los Angeles where we met up with both sets of parents for more birthday celebrating. We had lunch at a delicious Vietnamese restaurant, Chateau Brodard, then we checked out one of Southern California's sunny beaches - Huntington Beach.

If you have been keeping up with this blog, you know we have complained about how terrible the Asian food is in Portland, especially Vietnamese, so we were very excited to have a nice healthy lunch of traditional Vietnamese food.

{Chateau's Special Spring Roll Sampler with Roasted Duck, Soft Shell Crab, Seared Ahi Tuna and Pork Rolls, each with its own sauce}

{Pressed Shrimp & Rice Noodle Thread Plate - huge portion and oh so good}

{Grilled Pork & Eggroll Noodle Bowl}

{Fish & Chicken Noodle Soup}

{Hanoi Style Smoked Pork Noodle Soup}

I was so busy catching up with everyone that I completely forgot to take a photo of my charred vegetarian noodles and Mike's dad's Vietnamese beef stew (which he lapped up every last bit with a baguette).

Next we hoped in the car and headed out to Huntington Beach for some of that terrific California sunshine and sand. We walked up the chilly and windy pier, did a little bit of shopping at the sidewalk sales along Main Street and was fortunate to be there when the Farmer's Market started.

Mike started this annoying habit of photographing me taking pictures and this is the result.

It was a lovely day, the weather was absolutely perfect! I was so lucky to be able to spend time with both sets of parents on my birthday, a real treat.