Progress and peg boards!

We're making progress on making our new place our own, most notably with some plants and a peg board!

It's been a while since I had a garden, so one of the things I was most excited about for our Maine home is gardening. We found a cool local gardening center with lots of native plants (and those that do well in zones 4-5, where we are now), and also some wild houseplants I've been wanting for a while.

First up were some air plants for our dining room table - they just hang out with no soil and can be used in decoration in a variety of ways. You have to soak them in water about once a week, which works with my orchid watering schedule.

Air plants, purchased from Longfellow's Greenhouse

I also knew I wanted some herbs, so I got cilantro, white onions, and sage. They are hanging out on our back porch, which we've now also painted since this photo was taken!

Potted herb garden

We also got some big planters for the front stoop and bought some creeping thyme, two soft little silvery leafy guys, and a celosia, which I've wanted since I was a kid. We had extra and planted them in the front garden, but the ones in the planters are doing much better.

We also had to have the screen door replaced, as the previous owners had busted it but not replaced it, and some other little tweaks to cabinets to get them moving better. 

The big project that I was really excited about was adding a peg board to my kitchen. Not only have I wanted one since we moved out of our first condo, but our previous owners left a wall cabinet that was totally not our style, and a peg board would be a great way to cover the damage that we knew would happen when we removed the cabinet from the wall.

Sure enough, the stupid cabinet was not only screwed into the studs, but was glued to the drywall. We could actually hear the drywall tearing as we removed it, which was truly horrifying. As you can see from the photo at right, some big chunks were taken out.

The next step was to get the 1x2 boards that would serve as the rails to hold the peg board onto the wall. Dave went to the hardware store to get the rails and peg board, and have both cut to a good length (Home Depot sells peg boards in 2x4 or 4x8 foot sizes, and we had a 4x8 board cut to 4x5, leaving a 4x3 square peg board to use somewhere else in the house.

We felt like real adults installing the rails with the power tools Dad gave us! 

We had the 1x2 boards cut a bit shorter than the 5-foot width of the peg board so that they wouldn't show as much, and then screwed them into the studs at several places. A lot of videos show that you only need two rails, but I wanted three to make sure that this was properly held up and that it wouldn't bow or sag in the middle. This took some measuring and leveling for sure.

Then you use some shorter screws to secure the peg board at intervals to the rails.

Already I felt that Dad would have been proud at this point, but when we got the peg board on there and everything was level, I really felt fancy.

Finished peg board! And it's level!

Home Depot and other stores sell packs of peg board hooks, which come in a variety of depths and shapes for your different tools. We bought a variety pack that included some things that were clearly more geared toward garage tools than kitchen gadgets, but we were able to use all the hooks and identify which ones we need to go back and buy to really fill it out. As with my first peg board, you can get brackets for shelves, which are the empty ones toward the top of this picture:

My gorgeous new peg board!

We have loved Maine and like our new home, but things didn't really start to feel like home until we have been adding personal touches like this. The peg board really brought it home and made it feel like my dad helped us move in. More than that, it was a reminder that even though he is gone, the skills and knowledge he imparted to me have stuck with me, even if I didn't feel like I could do it on my own back then.