Operation Yard Clean Up: Complete!

Two weekends of weed whacking grass and weeds and other undesirables growing in the yard later … we’re officially ready for new plants and to finally finish the front yard overhaul. Thought we had hired someone to do this for us? Me too, but that’s another story. How about some progress photos?

Before:

After:

See those plants in the corner there?

They’re my new arborvitaes. They’ll live on the right side of the house, and once they grow to the full height of 30+ feet, will balance out the grade change of our lot.

This corner by the sidewalk to the front door before:

And after:

How about this weedy spot to the right of the porch?

It’s looking much better these days:

Can you spot the magnolia bloom in the next shot? Wasn’t even on purpose!

On the right side before:

From the other direction:

Much, much better.

This weekend you’ll  find us planting approximately three dozen shrubs and trees and flowers. We’ll also be busy spreading the 10 cubic yards of mulch we’re having delivered tomorrow (yikes!). If we live to tell the tale, I’ll be back with a full report next week!

Around Here

I’ve been working on a hodge podge of projects lately. Lots of things started. Not a single one finished. How about a run down?

The landscapers came today to finish cleaning up the yard. Unfortunately I can’t start planting yet because we’ll have to wait 2 weeks for the round up they used to wash off. They’ll be back then to take up the grass and weeds they sprayed. In the meantime, there are a few areas I can get started on. Maybe this weekend!

Three or 4 weeks ago, I did go ahead and plant a bed around our mailbox. This little corner of the yard is looking much better these days.

I thought redoing our entry and hallway would be next on our interior to do list, but it’s been bumped in favor of the bedrooms. Our bedroom is currently my least favorite space in the house. The room gets very little natural sunlight and isn’t very inviting. We’ll purchase all new furniture and upgrade to a king sized bed and move the current queen set into the guest room.

In preparation, I painted the guest room this weekend in Ben Moore’s Camouflage. This room has historically been the spot for everything that didn’t have a home or that we didn’t feel like taking into the basement. I’m really ready to not be faced with this mess every time I walk down the hallway.

Pre-painting:

My plan was to empty out the room before I painted, but I quickly realized I could just push everything to the center of the room. Lazy wins every time. Clearing it out is on my list for this weekend. Promise.

I’ve also started some projects in the dining room. The dining table Steve is refinishing is probably 80% sanded. I’m trying to sell our current dining chairs on craigslist to make room for the new ones. As part of the dining room update, I’m making new curtains and swapping out the prints currently on the wall for silver platters I’ve been collecting.

One curtain panel is currently in process. Here it is with a swatch of the fabric I’m going to use for some pillows in there:

I was kind of sad taking the prints off the the dining room wall because I like them so much, so I decided to use them in the kitchen. Here’s where they started:

And in their new home:

The prints are free from Vintage Printable. If anyone is interested in them, you can find them here along with many others.

I also picked up these plates at an estate sale a few weeks ago:

I’m going to hang them on either side of the window in the dining room with the milk glass plates above them in the photo.

So I’m a little bit of everywhere these days. I’m hoping to get started on our bedroom soon (because why not start something new when I have 5 other things going?) – updates on that coming soon.

Betwixt Part Deux

This weekend may have been my laziest in a very long time. And it was wonderful. We should all do it more often!

In between hours spent on the sofa reading, I did manage to take on a very small sewing project. I’ve had a bolt of Shumacher’s Betwixt fabric in biscuit/ivory sitting in the family room for nearly 2 weeks. I wrote about wanting to use the fabric for pillows here last month.

A couple hours of cutting, ironing, and sewing later, I had myself 2 new pillows.

Not bad for such a small time committment!

I’ve also managed to enjoy these hydrangeas in the family room for 2 weeks now. I don’t think I’ve ever had flowers last this long before.

On the flip side, I decided to put my orchid, which has been living happily in the formal living room for 3 months, on the fireplace mantle.

As you can see, after only a week, it didn’t go so well. Wonder if it would eventually bloom again if I moved it back to where it was happy?

Happy Monday!

27

This week brought with it another year of life. I find that I have no problem getting older (though I realize this is easy to say when you’re still in your twenties), but the pace with which the birthdays come is concerning! Wasn’t I just 22? No?

Judging by the generous gifts I received, you could say it was a landscaping themed birthday (and I wouldn’t have it any other way). My in-laws gifted me this fancy composter:

Admittedly, I know very little about composting, but I’m excited to learn! I can’t wait to feed all my new plants with nutrient rich compost soil and reduce our trash output while I’m at it.

I also received several gift cards to Pike Nurseries that I am itching to put to use. And I am officially one step closer to being able to use them! When Steve and I got home from my favorite tapas restaurant for my birthday dinner, we found a crew working away in our yard. After spending weeks trying to schedule someone to do this work, it was a nice surprise for sure.

They only got about 2.5 hours of work in, but they made great progress!

They trimmed up our boxwoods up front and cleaned up all the ivy and weeds growing under them.

They also removed the cleyera stumps that were on either side of this bed (they’ll finish clearning out the monkey grass next time). I’ll plant some small carissa holly bushes against the house and maybe fill in the rest of the area with annuals.

The cleyera stump in this corner by the steps was also removed.

They took out 2 large azeala stumps in this bed to make room for a dwarf conifer. I used marking spray paint so they know how large I’d like this bed to be the next time they’re out.

They cleared out a bed of ivy on the left side of our driveway (where the patch of dirt is now).

Next time they’ll clean up the areas around the crape myrtels …

… and take up the grass between these 2 crapes and the laurel to make room for something new. Maybe blueberry bushes?

They also cleared the ivy and vines that were basically choking the base of the azaleas before (this is on the far right side of the lot). They still have more work to do to the left. The rest of this area will be filled in with more azaleas.

On the right side of the house, the holly’s marked in paint will be cut to stumps to make room for a cluster of 3 arborvitaes. Steve’s aunt, a landscape designer, said the root systems don’t need to come out. The plan is to use the arborvitaes height to balance out the crazy change in grade on this side of the lot.

In front of the new arboritaes and behind the existing dogwood, we’ll plant a row of loropetalum in the this weed filled area. Hopefully that will be cleared soon too!

On the far right side of the lot, Steve’s aunt helped me establish this bed line with a hose. I came by later with spray paint. In the first curve we’ll plant a red bud tree.

Can’t you just see a sweet arbor with jasmine growing on it in between the beds I marked out here?

One day for sure.

In all it was a lovely birthday with a healthy dose of home improvement thrown in. Just like I like it.

Entry and Hallway Plans

Remember when my entry and hallway used to look semi-decent?

But then we decided the chair rail needed to go?

After the dust settled, we patched the walls …

… and called it a day when our attention turned toward the yard and dining table. To be honest, I’m getting a little tired of the unfinished look. While I wait for the right time to turn our attention back to the space, I decided to hunt down a new light for the entry.

In January we replaced the lights in the hallway from basic brass fixtures to these school house inspired lights from Lowes:

I’ve wanted something less generic in the entry but have had a hard time committing to anything. I mentioned in January that I thought I may go with this one from Amazon:

But I just never pulled the trigger. And I’m glad I didn’t, because I recently came across the Hundi Semi-Flushmount light  from Pottery Barn.

I’ve wanted a bell jar light for the entry, but our 8 foot ceilings wouldn’t accomodate one. I searched for a semi-flushmount version but never found anything under $400. So I was pleasantly surprised that Pottery Barn of all places came through for me with an affordable version ($199) of exactly what I wanted.

Of course I ordered it right away, and of course it’s on backorder until June 29th. Maybe (hopefully!) it’ll come back in stock sooner.

I’m hoping we’ll be able to turn our DIY efforts to the hall and entry soon. Here’s what the To-Do List looks like:

-Add crown molding

-Replace the attic stairs and door at the end of the hallway

-Add wainscotting the the walls. I’d like to go with something pretty traditional to match the style of the house like the pictures below.

Via

Via

-Add grass cloth wall paper above the new molding

-Have a rug custom cut and bound for the 20 foot hallway. I plan on having a piece of nice carpeting cut to the right dimensions and bound since 20 foot runners are either too expensive or too hard to come by.

-Buy a complementary rug for the entryway. I would love an antique rug for this area, but it’s completely unreasonable to pay so much for something so precious that will inevitably get cat vomit on it (just keeping it real).

-Buy an old chest to go in the entry. I’m hoping to find something with some storage in it, but I’m willing to deviate from that for the right piece at the right price.

-Figure out what to hang on the walls. A mirror in the entry perhaps? A collage in the hallway? I’m sure a plan will evolve as we go.

We have a nail gun on loan from my father, so the only thing in our way now is time. I find that the hardest part about most of our projects is finding the time to actually get them done!

Mailbox Upgrade

You know when you’re going to take on a super easy, quick project but then things don’t go exactly as planned and next thing you know, you your husband has spent half the weekend finishing it up?

Ugh. Welcome to my mailbox project. And maybe the least exciting before and after ever?

Since we’re about to re-landscape the yard, I figured it would be a good time to give our 53 year old mailbox a facelift.

Sadly, I didn’t take a proper before picture, and this was the best I could dig up. From August, 2010. 

The box itself needed to be replaced due to peeling paint and overall dinginess. The paint on the metal pole was chipped and was getting pretty rusty in places so I wanted to put a fresh coat of paint on it. Easy peasy, right? A new box, a little bit of paint, and it’ll be good as new!

I ventured to Lowe’s and picked up a new mailbox a couple of weekends ago. I opted for plastic after an old man told me to save myself the trouble when he saw me inspecting the metal options. I figured he probably knew what he was talking about and went with the low maintenace option. I also picked up a wire brush, a metal primer, and oil based paint for metal in black.

Once home, I started going over the post with the wire brush. I found that the paint was coming up really easily, so I switched to a scraper to make the job a little quicker. There wasn’t really a good place to stop so I decided to scrape the whole thing. May as well do it right, you know?

Two and a half hours of scraping later, Steve came home from a morning at the office. While inspecting my work, we realized the bottom of the pole had pretty much rusted out and needed to be replaced. Things I wish I had known 3 hours earlier! Oh well.

You can see where it looks like someone tried to repair it in the past

Since we had electicity running to the mailbox (there’s a light on top), we wanted to find a new one with a light on it. I did a lot of research and couldn’t find an afforable option ($260 for a mailbox? No thanks.), and rigging up a new one didn’t seem worth the effort. So I purchased this low maintenance one from Home Depot:

I had to order it online, and it arrived late last week. In the meantime, we stuck the new box on the pitiful pole and called it a day.

This past weekend we removed the old pole (after turning off the electricity to the light) which took surprisingly little effort…

Then dug up the concrete base…

Made the hole a bit bigger…

And mixed up a bag of concrete. Next we placed a 4×4 in the hole making sure it was plumb and filled the hole with concrete. We back filled it with dirt after that and gave it a couple of hours to cure.

In the meantime, Steve cut the wires from the old pole, put them in an outdoor junction box to “kill it” and buried it for now. We’d like to put lights by the mailbox eventually since we already have electricity running to it, but this weekend wasn’t the time to tackle that project.

Once we thought the concrete had cured enough, we put the new post up which was as easy as sliding 2 pieces of plastic over the 4×4.

I do miss the charm of the old light, but that mailbox served its purpose for a long time. An upgrade was in order.

The 185 on the front of the old mailbox was the only thing indicating our street number on the front of the house. In anticipation of replacing it, I purchased this address plaque a few months ago. The plaque does include our street name, but I photoshopped it out for privacy.

In the next few weeks we’ll add bushes around the mailbox bed and some annuals to fill the dirt. I love watching everything bloom this time of year – can’t wait to get some more color in our yard!

Kitchen Complete

But before we get into that, let’s talk about yesterday morning. I woke up to find that an upstanding resident of Florida got their hands on our debit card number and spent the weekend dining at fine establishments (Checkers, for example) on our dime. Then I spilled coffee all over my car as I spent 60 minutes commuting 15 miles (usually only takes 30). It was a rough way to start a Monday.

But then Holly Mathis, who I have been inspired by ever since I came across her a year ago, wrote a nice post featuring part of my house and blog, and my day was filled with sweet comments from new readers. It was so wonderful to hear from each one of you! Thank you all so much for the kind words. I’ll need them as encouragement as we continue working on the rest of the house!

One thing we won’t be working on is the kitchen … because since the installation of our new dishwasher, it’s done!

Here’s where we started at the end of 2009.

Neither one of us liked the curve at the top of the upper cabinet doors and the brown Corian countertops still don’t do it for us. But we didn’t have the budget to change these things at the time, and neither one of us felt right about tearing out perfectly nice solid wood doors and expensive countertops. So we worked with them!

Before we even moved in, I painted the cabinets. And we continued to work on the kitchen slowly over time. In all we replaced the faucet, added the beadboard backsplash and corbels under the cabinets, replaced all the hardware, purchased new appliances, added a cabinet and open shelves on an empty wall, and redid the lighting.

And now we have a finished kitchen.

What a great feeling! I really love how it turned out, and I feel so lucky that we started with good bones (tiled floors, solid cabinets, nice solid surface countertops) and were able to make it ours relatively inexpensively.

That said, if I were to do it again, I would do just a couple of things differently:

I would have purchased a counter depth fridge. I had no idea fridges came in different depths, and my heart sank when ours was delivered and it felt like it stuck halfway out into the kitchen. I don’t notice it anymore, but I’m glad I know for the future!

I also would have purchased a wall mounted range hood. At the time, the added expense of wall mounted vs. under cabinet mounted didn’t seem worth it. Plus, we would have had to deal with taking the existing cabinet out and then redo the crown molding.

But don’t let these caveats fool you. I 100% love my kitchen. And I’m 100% happy it’s D.O.N.E!