Flower power!

I decided to re-do our flower beds. For like the third time.

Because I can't make up my mind apparently.

That and because my flowers keep dying. But these ones are surviving. Even with the recent heat wave we've been having. It also apparently helps that we haven't gotten any super heavy rains that beat up my flowers.

We had this killer weed problem going on out front so I spent some serious time out there with roundup and pulled those suckers out. After I did that Steve and I went to the store and picked up some dirt, mulch and flowers.



Steve was very excited that I decided to take on this project. And that I made the decision while he was out for the day so that I pretty much just suckered him in to it when he got home. But he knows how to make his lady happy: give her what she wants haha


We dug holes, planted flowers, filled the bed with new dirt and mulch, and also removed the rocks. That was Steve's request. He didn't really like them and I didn't really care either way so we removed them all. Now at least our front bed and the neighbors look like they're connected. Which they are ;)

We only had the energy to do the front beds this day so I did the back beds a few days later when Steve was at baseball. When we did the patio we had filled the back that is up against the house with sand. Which was a great idea when we needed to keep the patio stones from moving. Not such a fun idea when I had to remove all that sand to make way for the dirt.

The back took me MUCH less time. Mostly because our patio sits higher up than the ground so I didn't have to dig as deep and I filled in the beds with dirt and mulch to hopefully curb the weeds. Which I am actually convinced that dirt people put in their dirt bags so that you have to buy weed killer. Whatever.

Either way, I'm really fond of our back beds. I think they make the back look much more complete.

And yes, I realize that there is a little bit of a spacing difference between these two but I planted the first ones before I got to the side of the house with the spigot and dryer vent. So I just left them spaced this way. They aren't perennials so I'll get to replace them next year and fix the spacing then.

I think this is probably going to be one of my favorite things to keep up with at the house.

Bench

Several years ago my father made me this bench.


It's basically half a picnic table. Actually, it is half a picnic table (my mom has the other half). But it can be a table (which is what we use it for mainly) or a bench.

It's been sitting outside for oh like 5 years. Completely untreated. And it was starting to look... not great. I decided I wanted to stain it. Steve got out the powerwasher and went to town on it. It looked so much better just after the power washing. But still it needed help because there were tons of little splinters because of the power washing.


I headed to Wal-Mart and picked out some stain. And also got some brushes. Steve was annoyed that I picked out crappy brushes but I told him I wasn't planning on trying to get this dark mahogany stain out of these brushes after I was done so he was ok with that haha.

Steve had offered to help me stain the bench, but it was a rather warm day and he had been outside all day for work so I told him if he wanted to hang inside I was perfectly capable of doing this myself.

And so I went to town with the stain.


By the end of this project I was covered in stain. But that was because I forgot about the fact that this thing turned in to a bench seat and that I should probably do the back of it... but it was in table mode so I didn't want to move it around while it was wet so I started to just stain the back/bottom while it was in table mode. That really didn't last long because like I said... covered. Like I wasn't sure if I was going to get it off my hands. It did come off fairly easily which was great.


I'm pretty proud of how it turned out and I dug out some stuff that used to be on our deck at the old townhouse to put on the table. It's great extra seating or a food serving table for when we do BBQ's. I'm also really happy with the stain. I wasn't sure if it was going to be too dark, but I think it looks great and I'm sure the sun will fade the stain a bit.

Our storage closet.

I figured I wouldn't leave you in suspense on the storage closet. That and I can be kind of forgetful so I figured I'd better get to writing about it now or I might not remember I was supposed to.

Steve ended up coming home early on Saturday to help my dad out with the closet. I told him he didn't have to because dad wasn't expecting him to be there, but it was rainy that morning so he decided this is where he needed to be.

Dad got to our house around 10 Saturday morning. And they pretty much began right away. They moved the last little bits of stuff (dresser, glass pieces, extra flooring) out of their way and got to work.

I'm not entirely sure what's happening here. I believe they were marking the wood for the studs and jacks, but I tried to stay as far out of the way as possible.

More measuring and stuff....

And before I knew it I had a framed storage closet!

It should be big enough for me to put shelves on all sides of the closet with enough space for me to walk around in it. AWESOME!

And there will be light! Which I never thought of, but it totally makes sense haha. And I'm glad that no one got shocked in the wiring of this closet because that's been known to happen to my dad a time or two and I'm not ready to hear those stories about my accident prone husband ;)


Drywall up! They were moving and grooving on this closet that's for sure!
(and yeah...we're going to do the other side with drywall when we finish the rest of the room haha)


End of day one. They didn't get finished Saturday so dad would be coming back again Sunday to finish up. I was already ready to put stuff in it so they could work on the rest of the basement!

Sunday morning dad showed up bright and early Sunday morning. A whole hour before we thought he was going to and we were definitely still in bed but luckily for us we have a keypad on the garage so dad could let himself in. They only had a little bit more work to do so the day went pretty quickly and they were done fairly early which was really nice because it gave us the rest of the day to run errands and relax!!

All done! From the outside.


I was trying to get a picture of the whole inside from the doorway but it just wasn't working for me.

It's so big!! Which is great cause I've got so much stuff!


Buddy checking out the closet....and being really happy the nail gun was done making so.much.noise.


Buddy loves his grandpa.

Even though I definitely wasn't expecting to do this project last weekend I am really happy that they actually got it done. And I'm glad someone lite a fire under my ass to go through some of those boxes and throw some of the crap away and organize the mess of boxes we had going on down there. I'm also really excited to have a place to store my holiday decorations when I'm not using them; to unpack some of the things that I use semi-often but don't have room in another area of the house for; and to hide all of Steve's electronic crap that we just have to keep in case we need it one day (hint: we will never need it. we have not needed it in oh I donno three freaking years. and yes, baby, I know you're reading this :P ) And this will also bring us one step closer to having a fully finished house and maybe one day a fully unpacked house (ha. haha. hahahahahaha. yeah I know. it's hilarious that I think I'm actually never going to have boxes in my house.)

Our basement.

Let me tell you how hard it is to have enough stuff to decorate/fill a finished basement room in a house that doesn't have that finished basement room yet.

HARD.

And it makes the unfinished basement room look like you two have a whole bunch of junk that needs to just be thrown away.

And yes, I'm sure we'll come up with stuff we can rid our lives of. But in our old house we had a finished basement. And about 90% of this stuff was out in that basement. And in this house we decided not to have the builders do the basement because we wanted to do it differently than they did. So we're left with an unfinished room. That we filled with all of the boxes of the stuff that will go in there. Which was probably not the best plan. Because there was no organization. And I've tried a couple times before to actually get a handle on the stuff so at this point everything is organized in to piles of stuff (like books, steve's electronic stuff that I'm pretty sure we can throw 95% of away, baseball equipment, leftover kitchen stuff that I would use if it wasn't in boxes but I haven't figured out how else to store it yet, decorations for the basement, and the stuff I'm not sure what I'll do with yet). It's been tough. And we'd put it all in our garage so we could get started with the basement but the garage is full of wood to build out the basement so we're kind of in a Catch-22 situation here. We had settled on building a storage closet first. But I would need to clean the hell out of that room. I hadn't felt like doing that yet, so that project was just TBD until I did.

Well. I thought so anyway. I had no counted on my dad.

Friday night my dad called me to inform me that he would be coming by Saturday morning to work in our basement and build the storage closet.

Wow! That's awesome.

Except it kind of wasn't. Because this is what my basement looked like when he called me.

This is where the storage closet was going to go. But clearly the boxes and crap would need to go first.

This part is the most clean. But notice we've got 2 TVs down here. ONE of them DOESN'T EVEN WORK!!! Yet we must keep it.

Believe it or not I'd actually organized this side. I mean it doesn't look like it, but I knew what was over here and I'd been trying to actually use some of the stuff in these boxes so they were kind of haphazardly just strewn about.

So yeah. I had plans for a relaxing Friday night to myself while the hubs was at UVA for baseball. And my dad totally ruined that. And only because he would be at my house at 10 and there was no way I was doing it before he got there.

So I buckled down and got to work. I cleaned for HOURS. I threw away TWO bags of trash. I was so proud of myself. I even managed to get some laundry done while I was down there since our washer/dryer is down there too. I was on a serious roll. And I still had some time after I was done to lay down and relax for a bit. I mean I passed out pretty soon after I laid down, but a good nights sleep was really nice too.

Here's the after.

WOW! It hasn't looked this clean since before we moved in haha. That dresser needs to go. Those glass pieces? They are trash. They belong to an entertainment unit we don't even have anymore. (I always joke that I'm the hoarder, but in all reality I think it's truly my husband with the problem. love you baby, but for real? get that glass out of my house!)

And ok. So it doesn't look like I got rid of much but I did. And I consolidated a lot of stuff. Steve's got a lot of electronic/computer/tv/wire stuff down here and I tried to get it as organized as possible and in to as few boxes as possible. We still have 21 boxes of books, but I'm going to try to get some of them unpacked in our bedwalls in our room. And I'm sure I could have opened up this side more if I'd stacked all this stuff up high but I didn't really want to risk it falling over. Some of these boxes (of books) have been in our storage unit for a long time and the boxes just didn't enjoy being squished for that long.

So there you have it. The beginnings of the tackling of our basement. It's going to be a project in and of itself, but we'll get there. I didn't realize how long this post was going to be because I had intended to show you the closet that got built, but that'll just have to wait for another post.

Spring cleaning!

This weekend I kicked my houses' ass on the cleaning front. Friday night Steve was out so I tackled our foyer/hall closet downstairs.

It was a serious disaster when I started. The whole area was. We'd just been busy, and lazy about cleaning, and the result was stuff just throw every which way.

BEFORE:

We've got a LOT of coats.

I'd already pulled this stuff down from the top of the closet by the time I decided on snapping pictures. But our scarves/gloves/hats were pretty much falling out of their baskets after being rifled through all winter.

AFTER:

After a little reorganizing and matching of pairs of gloves and of hat/scarves combos and also getting another basket (which is odd cause we didn't actually buy anything new this year in the way of winter wardrobe so I'm not sure how I suddenly needed another basket to keep all that stuff organized.


Buddy was...."helping" haha. But I'm glad I finally organized this closet. It's nice to know where stuff is and to be able to grab something quickly without fear of something else falling on your head!

Check out our dirt :)

So WAY back in November I promised pictures of the progress of our house. As we all know I am a slightly sucky blogger. I'll admit it and even go to meetings if necessary ;) Either way, as promised, I am providing pictures of our dirt....exciting stuff. I'm throwing in a couple of the model because I'm so generous :)

OUR DIRT!!!!

Blizzard 2009. Our dirt covered in snow.

Upstairs living room....there will be a downstairs one when the basement is eventually finished

1/2 of the kitchen, the other 1/2 is a little nook for our table.

The sun room! (see the kitchen table off to the side near the island?)

1/2 of the Master Bedroom

One of the other bedrooms upstairs. This is the bigger of the two and will be the guest room and the other will be the office.

This ladies and gents is our house. Well, close to it anyway. We will not have french doors in the sunroom because mr. pocketbook will not allow it but one day I will have those. Especially because you will walk out from our sunroom to the backyard and I like the look of the french doors. Alas, I couldn't convince the wallet ;)

I am very excited about our house. We get to buy real, grown-up furniture and that excites me. Yes, we had furniture from our other house and what we cannot afford to replace right away we will not but there are some things that we just must replace before we move. Don't worry I will stop sucking at my blog and keep you posted on those purchases :)