Poppy painting and my vacation

So...after we finished the hardwood floor project we went on a vacation for 8 days.  Our trip was to the Washington DC area with a stop in Ohio both coming and going. We were originally  from Austintown, OH and still have family there and, as it is the half way point to DC, we were able to see both family and friends on our over night visits.  Our son Brian and wife Sarah live in Falls Church, VA and their daughter Megan and husband Paul flew in from their home in Hawaii so we had another mini family reunion with them.

 Soon after we got back home I finally had a chance to finish the painting I had started 3 weeks before.  I call it "Poppy Trio".  Size is 11X14.

 I am not going to bore you with vacation photos but I do have a couple to show you.  We took a "Duck Tour" of DC and I took tons of photos of all the landmarks but will only post one of them that I thought was artistic.

Here is another photo that I took in Falls Church.  Brian and Sarah live in the Mosaic District on Strawberry Lane where there are lots of interesting little shops.  Roger and I took lots of walks exploring the area and when I spotted this cool art work on a wall I just had to have a photo of myself taken with my new friend.

While staying in Brian and Sarah's high rise apartment I realized it was a gallery of many of my paintings.  Because they are a military family they have moved quite a few times and every time they move I do a new painting for them.  Over the years they have accumulated a fair size collection.  I took photos of all of them but since there are so many, I decide to make them into a collage.  Here are the paintings I did for them over the past 10 years or so.

Roger has built many stained glass windows for the various homes they have lived in but the windows stayed in the houses when they were sold.  They have only kept one which is a hanging panel.  The blue stars represent the two military family members.  Brian served in the Air Force for 26 years and is now retired and Sarah is still active duty and can retire in about 4 years.  Here is the stained glass panel.

Large Home Project

Over the past year this has become a home improvement blog as much as an art blog.  At the end of this month it will be one year that we moved to MI.  Since then we have been spending most of our time working on our new home.  I haven't had as much time to paint but doing the house remodeling has been fulfilling  my creative side.  I have to admit I don't do much of the actual work, I am just the idea person.  Roger and our son Brian are the workmen in the family but in the case of our most recent project I was able to join the work crew!

We bought this house from a family who had young children and pets so the carpet was not in good condition and we wanted to change the floors but weren't sure what we wanted. In Arizona all the floors in almost every one's houses was ceramic tile.  No one had carpet.  When we had people visit from back east they all loved the floors but said it wouldn't work where they came from because the floors would be too cold in the winter.  We found out that was true so tile was not an option. We finally decided on hardwood.  After months of comparing different kinds of wood we chose bamboo.  On Sunday, July 31 we started work.  We had friends from Ohio visiting us for the weekend and they volunteered to help us pack up our chess set collection and move the heavy furniture. (A big Thanks to Mark and Mary.) They left on Monday morning and Brian arrived on Monday afternoon.  By the time he got here Roger had removed the carpet so they were ready to lay the floor.  It was easy to do because it is a floating floor and the pieces snap together.  Brian installed the sub floor, Roger cut all the end pieces and I snapped together all the straight pieces. It took one week from start to finish.  Here are photos of us working and the finished floor.

I love my new floors and all the other home improvement projects we have done.  It is really starting to feel like home.  If you would like to see the other things we have done just click on "old posts" at the bottom of each page and you will be able to see everything we have done to the house in the past year.

I thought I would show you the painting I was working on before we got into doing the floors.  Here is how far I got on my painting of poppies.  We are going to take a short trip so I will not be able to finish it until we get back.