Little Nash Rambler

Saw this darling car on the street near Fruitvale in Oakland last week. It's a Nash Rambler, I'd guess from mid 50s, in beautiful condition. This car totally reminds me of my youth - in early teens, my girlfriend Cathi and I would sleep in her Grandpa Max's Nash Rambler while visiting Lake Cochran in South Dakota. The seats folded down to make a flat surface - a perfect bed for two giggly girls!

Later, for the same reason (the folding-down seats), my mom wouldn't allow me to go out with a boy in my school who was a little older and very cute because he drove a Nash Rambler. She thought the folding down seats might be too much temptation for bad behavior. Who, me???

Adorable!!!!

Spring renewal: The front steps

It's starting to be time for spring renewal around our house and one of the first projects that came to mind were the front steps. Wow, we were looking a little derelict, if I must say so. I guess it had been at least ten years since the steps were painted and it showed!


Here they are just after we started to work on them, so even though we had started to scrape the bottom step, they honestly didn't look much better than this. Poor babies!

We scraped and sanded and scraped and sanded. One of the steps is concrete, the other two are wood, and the sides are stucco. We also did some repair on the stucco. By the end of the first day we had finished the prep and had primed the whole thing white. That white really stood out - I can't say it looked 100% better than the derelict look, but we were making necessary progress. We quit for the day.

The next day we painted, and when we were nearly done we realized we had the wrong color. It was red, as the steps had been before and as the trim on our house is, but it was really really red. I'm saying it didn't match any of the other reds, sigh. The other can of red paint, which did say porch and floor on it, was too old to use. It had gotten all gummy. I went down to the local Ace Hardware and got another can of that, the Porch and Floor, in Tile Red.

Bingo! It was the right color and an extra coat of paint never hurt anything. Especially since we got it done and dried before the next rain! Here they are  - aren't they gorgeous?

Only problem is, now the porch obviously needs paint too. Well, that's the way with house projects. One leads to another.

P.S. Those are cauliflower plants alongside the steps, and they each have a baby cauliflower down in the middle of the leaves. Yum!