falling in love with fall

I've been been doing a few projects since I have a few more minutes of the day to myself.  I did have an extensive list of "things to do before it got cold", but many are still undone.    Now it is almost too late.  The cold is here.  Today I had the fireplace on all morning and the furnace has run occasionally in the night.  Sad, but not all bad.

One thing I have wanted to to do for some time is to paint my doors.  I thought I'd paint them black but when I was holding up 10 different shades of black paint swatches up to the doors and fixtures I ended up going with "black bean soup". 

Before I get to the painting part here is a fitting little anecdote for you all:

 Black beans are my new thing to put in everything!  Kids took a quinoa and black bean mixture to school for lunch today.  Or, I should say ... that is what I sent them to school with for lunch.  Upon returning back home at the end of the day I had 1 complaint out of 4.  Not bad.  Here's the part I thought was funny:  the one who complained still ate his all up.  One of the ones who didn't complain came back with a pretty full thermos.  When I asked this certain kindergarten boy why he didn't eat his quinoa, he simply stated he didn't eat it because he was full!  End of story, until the next black bean lunch!

Getting back to painting, black bean soup color is more of a dark brown.  I knew going into this project that painting doors is tricky.  I proved that to be so.  I used oil based paint for metal and it seemed to go on well.  However, when the light shines on it the wrong way, or maybe it is just the right way, it shows a few marks that I'd rather not  see.  I painted the man door into the garage, the garage door into the house and the front door (all painted inside and out) ... and the outside of the garden door.  I hope to do the inside of the garden door tomorrow or Saturday, but don't hold me to it! 

I love the new look:

I made this little vignette the other day with some wheat I took from the field last weekend (harvest pictures coming at some point), a 20 dollar clearance metal vase from a shop in town, a hand me down parrot from Phil's sister and finally the mini wreath I made from cutting out the middle of a margarine lid and knotting some t-shirt strips around it.  The best part was I have a whole bag of t-shirt strips from last year (or maybe the year before) when I was going to make a rug out of them.  Sometimes it just pays to put things off and just maybe this winter I'll get around to making the rug :)