Pansies for a Pansy

I planted all 36 of those pansys.

It took almost two full afternoons.

Before our house was built in 1999, there were four towers in the projects that stood here. They are the four white rectangles on the right side of the picture.

This makes digging in our backyard a little bit of an excavation since I'm pretty sure ninety percent of the bricks from those buildings are in my backyard.

But I did it. I planted all the Pansies. I didn't however, have the strength to dig a hole big enough for the apple tree. That will have to wait for Andrew.

Yard Update

Just a refresher. Remember when our yard looked like this:

And then it looked like this:

Well, no more. Andrew's family was flying out Saturday afternoon to head home from Andrew's graduation, and they dedicated the day to our yard. His mom is a landscape designer, and it was so much fun to pick out plants with her. 

Andrew wanted to expand our deck. I vetoed the expansion, it just seemed like too big of a project. So he and his dad took off part of the railing, and added steps all around the side. His dad is basically  a construction genius! It makes our deck feel twice as big (compare it to the first picture on the blog). 

The planted trees to create more privacy, planted delphinium and moss, spread bark, and bought some tomato cages to support our vegis that are HUGE! The garden is so much fun, and the neighbor kids still love watching everything grow. 

Thanks family, for all your help! It was so fun to come home from Chicago so such a transformed backyard. You're welcome back anytime. :)

Debacle Regrouped.

Turns out all it takes is a really patient husband to hang pictures. It's not a job for the impatient, late at night apparently. :)

And so our Friday night date was spent in our living room. Here it is Mom: our living room! There are still things to do, but all in good time. It took us a year to get this far. Maybe a rug and a new coffee table will enter our home in the next year. There is a HUGE open space over the fireplace. Maybe a TV some day?

And of course, there are more pictures to go up. Baby steps. It took a year to get four up. Maybe we can double that in the coming year.

And the pictures are hung! They are all photos from our travels, taken by our good friend Brent and Andrew. Come visit to see them closer (tempted, anyone?).

Neighborhood Garden

One of the really great things about working in our backyard, is that we are getting to know so many of our neighbors.

Most people go into their backyard for privacy, and then don't see their neighbors, we have the opposite. Our house butts up against a whole nother row of houses, and that means we see LOTS of neighbors.

The kids are SO excited to help with our garden. They carried a lot of sand for our patio, with lots of expressions like, "I want to help!" and "You are so nice!" Yes. I am so nice. Great job carrying a TON (literally) of sand. That was nice of me.

None of the kids have experience in gardens, and they LOVED digging and watering and planting. We have LOTS of talks about how I HAVE to be in the backyard for them to come in the backyard, and that we love helpers, but only when we are there with them.

I'm a little nervous about having a garden. Not because I'm worried that the kids will destroy them. Or the rats will eat them. Mostly that I KNOW these plants survived just fine before they got to me. So now if they die, it's REALLY my fault. Eeek!

I'm slightly worried that our neighbors are going to love the garden a little TOO much. But these kinds of interactions are one of the reasons we bought our house where we did. And so far, we're off to a good start.

Picture Debacle

We have yet to hang a SINGLE picture in our house. Not a one. We've lived here a year, folks. We have the pictures. And the frames, mostly. (A few were dropped en route to the new joint. Who knew they would be nearly impossible to replace?!)

This past week, I decided this needed to change. So I began the process of changing out pictures into new frames.

Total failure. Nothing will sit in the the frames straight. I've eaten half a bag of left over Easter jellybeans in the process of REALLY trying to get this done tonight. (I'm sure I'd have eaten the WHOLE bag, but I took care of the other half on Sunday.)

And so our living room will look like this. Probably for another year, at the rate we get things done over here. Because I'm going to bed.

That is all.

P.S. Kudos to all you folks with kids. I don't know what I would do if I had to pick all this up tonight so my kids didn't destroy it in the morning! I also have no idea how you might keep a house clean! I've cleaned what feels like every room in the house, everyday this week, and there are still piles everywhere, and NO rooms seem to be clean.

Sigh.

And so I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll be a better housekeeper tomorrow.

Maybe not. :)

Yard Update

Here we are about 5 pm on Thursday. See a few days back to remember what the yard looked like as of 5 pm Wednesday.

In the 24 hours between these two photos, it is estimated we carried at least a ton each. Literally. We took all the sod out, and initially created a pile behind the fence. We couldn't put it directly into the trailer we rented, because we needed to take the sod cutter back on Wednesday night, and the dump was already closed (we figure the backyard had about 1 ton of sod). That was all we did Wednesday night, get the sod out. Thursday morning we went to Home depot and picked up all the pavers, gravel, and sand needed for the patio. I'm not lying, I think that was about 1.5 tons. Remember that we have no direct access to the backyard, so we had to carry all of it from the trailer, to the backyard. Then, we loaded up the sod into the trailer, took it to the dump, and unloaded it all.

We took a break from carrying things at that point, and built the boxes for our raised bed vegetable garden. We had REALLY serious rain storm in the forcast for this weekend, so I thought it best not to plant anything until Monday. I know plants need rain, but I didn't want them all to wash away less than 24 hours after being planted.

Because of the rain, we felt a real sense of urgency about getting our patio put in. Having just dug up all the grass, we didn't want the backyard to wash away. We dug out the square for the patio, which was really much more of an excavation project (we found really neat things in our backyard) and decided that the two city lights in our backyard provided more than enough light to keep working. This the progress we made Wednesday night, working until about midnight.

We've made serious progress, but still have a lot to do. Check back later in the week to see what plants join the yard, among other things....

Before

Here is our weed patch about 6 pm Wednesday.

(aka backyard, but really, can you call that a yard?! No. Weeds. That's all it was)

The next step pictures will be posted soon. But now it is dark. So you will have to wait for light. But I  bet the suspense will bring you back to this fine blog of mine soon.

(But don't come back too soon, we're headed to the cannery for Saturday morning, and then will be spending the day in DC. )

Post-Thanksgiving Festivities

Some people decorate for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. Some people go shopping.

Not us. We had bigger things to do. Remember how we moved into our house the last week of school? Then I went to Girls Camp two days later? And then after a blissful week of camping, we left two days later to go to Utah, and then onto Thailand and Nepal? Oh, and remember how we got stuck in Nepal, and came back with 48 hours before we needed to teach?

Yeah. Because of all that, we did get the house set up, and most of the house looked really nice. Except for the basement storage room, where we always kept the door closed and said, "We'll deal with that over Thanksgiving."

Well, true to our word, we did. And the evidence is below. (Please don't judge us for the "before" segment. I know, we're gross. Please accept our pledge to NEVER let that happen again.)

Our House!

Here is a video Andrew made while I was away at Girls Camp. Enjoy!

Adults. For Real.

It's official. We're adults. We own a house.

Project

Before

I realize that in this picture you can pretty much only see me, but try and focus on the walls. In my house there is this random room in between my bedroom and the bathroom that no one has ever used. This partially because it's hideous and partially because it has no doors and is just in a weird location. When Caitlyn came to visit I spent more time in it then I had ever had before because we used it as the room we packed our backpacks in. After spending a grand total of 1 hour in the room, I decided something had to be done. The brown textured walls and ceiling made me never want to spend another minute in this room.

After

And so, upon returning from hiking I spent the rest of spring break painting the room green and finding some furniture to go in it. It's not quite done, but it's getting close and I think we might actually spend time in this room now.