favorite plants

gotta give these plants credit for being easy and beautiful!

upright japanese plum yew (cephalotaxus harringtonia 'fastigiata')
this lovely creature was planted by the previous owners, who also valued easy-care specimens

upright japanese plum yew

japanese toad lily (tricyrtis 'taipei silk')
i picked this up at merrifield because it was so luscious i didn't care what it took to grow the thing. then i forgot about it. and it flourished. soooo impressed! welcome to my garden, toad lily. i'm getting more of you next year!

japanese toad lily

this is what it looked like in bloom (not my photo)

salvia 'hot lips'
another random find that turned out to thrive on neglect. has been blooming since i bought it 6 weeks ago. i think it's evergreen, too!

hot lips

coral bells, variegate boxwood, creeping jenny
no virginia cottage is complete without these! i'm proud of this pot i designed, complete with creeping jenny, kale, coral bells and a tiny variegate boxwood. it's been looking pretty for two months now with minimal water in full sun.

lauren's favorite pot

sage
can't get enough sage. almost as easy as rocks in a garden.

sage

guara 'snow flower'
a mabel favorite. literally zero care. this one's been going strong since july.

guara snow flower

variegated mystery shrub 
is it azara microphylla 'variegata'? since i threw out the tag, your guess is as good as mine. possibly dwarf form, because i was careful to get something that would fill up about 3-4' and the azara sounds huge. i know it's evergreen. anyway, it's doubled in size in the month since i got it. and of course, without cuddling.

who am i?

crepe myrtle 

happy fall gardening!

shutters!

our house was designed to have shutters and the windows just didn't look right without them. since we can't stand vinyl stick-on shutters and didn't want to shell a couple grand to have beautiful custom wood ones, we set out on quite the little diy adventure. this project was tricky and time-consuming, but we are proud to have done it by ourselves and on the cheap.
first, I ordered pre-made cedar shutters. they were rough sawn and arrived all ready to stain. they are half the size of our windows EXCLUDING the casing...meaning, if mounted to the sides on the brick they won't actually cover our windows. we got over that fact because they're $40/shutter instead of hundreds, and let's face it, they are house jewelry. but we like the look of quality if not paying for quality, so there will be hinges.

design craft millworks shutters - www.homedepot.com

the stain was difficult to choose. i wanted to see the grain, and i wanted it to be relatively easy to refinish them over the years, so i opted for a translucent stain by sikkens. the color we chose is dark oak. staining was pretty simple even though this was my first time. the fact that it was new rough sawn cedar meant i only had to dust the shutters to prep them, and the stain soaked right in. got some good quality brushes and tried to paint it on as evenly as possible and moved methodically through all 8 in one go. took about 4 hours, but the results were stunning.

sikkens crd translucent dark oak

next: hardware. i decided on connecticut style strap hinges with lag pintels because they're easy to mount on brick. there was all this offset/throw info online that i tried to follow, but it was getting complex so i decided on flush-mounted hinges to bypass all that jazz. a lag pintel i can understand. :)
after ordering the hardware from hardwaresource.com, i realized i needed to find lag anchors, a hammer drill and the appropriate size bits for masonry. after a bunch more research i got us a $79 makita. since installation by a pro would likely cost over $300 in this area, i considered the drill a steal! and who knows what else i may need it for someday.

corded 5/8" makita hammer drill

so. installation day. this involved a lot of holding up the shutters one by one, marking where to drill into the mortar, inserting the anchors in, screwing in the pintels with a wrench, holding up the shutters, measuring where to screw the strap hinges into the wood, screwing them in, attaching the rattle hooks for the shutter dogs, measuring where to screw in the bolt that holds the dogs, etc etc.

anchor shield goes in the pre-drilled hole

pintel screwed into brick with shutter hinge resting on top

phil has a hammer drill and he knows how to use it.

georgie got about as sick of this as we did near the end

 and what was the result of all that work?

wood shutters diy

cedar shutters

what a huge difference hinges make!

now THIS is the cottage-y aesthetic we were going for!

other than cleaning the gutters and some minor caulking and mortar repair...i'm done with the front yard until spring. 

whitewashing!

this week, for $10, I whitewashed (aka lime washed) our entire house. I'm wondering why anyone ever paints brick. this ancient technique has been used to disinfect and brighten all sorts of surfaces, and is still widely seen in europe. perhaps the best thing about it is that it fades softly over time instead of peeling. we wanted that aged look so I simply applied a watered down version. I mixed one cup of hydrated lime powder to 8 cups water and started slapping the mixture on the house with a masonry brush. we couldn't be happier with the results! anything that softens the hard 50's facade and brings us closer to the warm cottage aesthetic we love is a good thing. the whole process took about 4 hours.

a tree grows in fairfax

introducing our baby lacebark elm!

here is what the tree will eventually look like...assuming i manage to raise it right.

mabel

the pug just hasn't been featured enough!

fire pit!

we had a lovely fall evening with our new fire pit - and yes that's lamb phil is grilling - until the deck started melting. so we are looking into protective options for azek...ideas???

southern blue, a paver stoop and no more vinyl "shudders"

it's been a big week at chez dufresne!
i finally covered the blah concrete stoop with pavers and painted the front door. I went with "southern blue" by behr, after first trying a color called "caribe" that was just toooo much. painted the shed trim with southern blue as well. perhaps my favorite move was pulling off all the vinyl shutters (aka shudders) that made no sense. finally, i planted some liriope to the right of the stoop where there aren't any chameleon plant roots.