Our Saturday Project

Surprise! We aren't dead or anything. Wow, it's been nine months since I wrote a post for this blog. My apologies. So what have we done around the house since then? Well, not much which is why I haven't posted. We started a few projects but didn't finish any of them yet. The reason I'm writing today is that we spent the day freshening up our landscaping and I've got some delectable before and after shots for you, as well as gratuitous chicken glamour shots because you know you want them. Here are the three flower beds we worked on before (Well, kind of before. I did not take photos of the horrible amount of weeds that were in here before I pulled them this morning. Some of them were almost as tall as me. Yikes.)

We went to a local nursery called Harb's Oasis because I had a coupon and because I like that place even though it's a bit of a drive. We came home with a Jeep full of plants.

These lucky guys got to ride up front with me. 

We got Coleus for the two beds around the Crepe Myrtles, and Coleus, Hostas, and Agapanthus for the big bed in front of our dining room window on the side of the house. We also picked up two kinds of basil and two kinds of mint to plant in the planters that sit on our patio railing.

 These are the planters I'm talking about.

 Planting the Basil.

Mint.

Basil.

Of course, while we were on the patio working on the planters/taking pictures, the chickens came over to see what we were doing.

First, we placed the pots where we wanted the plants to go. I couldn't really place the coleus because it came in six packs.

Harley is convinced there are squirrels in this tree whether there are or not.

We've been saving up newspapers and sales ads for a while to use as a weed blocker in the landscaping beds. 

 We didn't put cat litter in the flowerbed. We were just using that container for mulch.

Close up of the newspapery goodness.

Are you ready for the final results? Okay, drumroll please...ta da!

There wasn't quite enough mulch to completely cover the newspapers.

 We didn't do newspaper in the smaller beds because the plants were closer together.

So there you have it. I think that's a pretty good day's work, don't you?

Update: I woke up Sunday with the backs of my thighs just KILLING ME. I realized that spending the day in the garden basically means you are doing squats all day long. Owww.

Breakfast is Covered for a While

I forgot to mention yesterday that we also bought a new knob for the hall bathroom to replace the blue one and to go with our more modern theme. Here it is:

We also found clear drawer pulls to go with the clear acrylic knobs we purchased for the master bathroom. I looked around online and couldn't find any clear drawer pulls for less than about $25 each. The thought of spending $75 on three little drawer pulls was rather upsetting but I had more or less resigned myself to it when I happened to spot an endcap at Lowes with their specialty knobs and pulls. This was after several trips to multiple locations of both Home Depot and Lowes trying to get the right size and amount of hinges for all the doors and cabinets. You would really think I would have noticed them before, but while frantically rushing down the hinge aisle 10 minutes before closing, I saw them. The Hallelujah Chorus played in my head when I saw that they were less than half the price of the online ones and we managed to snag them and the hinges we needed before the store closed. Yay!

I think the clear hardware will look very snazzy once we fill in the old knob holes and paint the cabinets. Those glorious drawer pulls are the first thing I see when I step into the bathroom these days. I am in love with them.

Another minor project I tackled Friday was unpacking all of our art/picture frames which we've been putting off until the house is painted. I just couldn't stand it any longer so I unpacked everything and arranged the built ins in the living room, which until Friday were pretty much books on one side and nothing on the other. Here is the finished arrangement. Alton and I both reacted by saying that it looks more like people live here now. That's always a good thing to have going on in your house!

Another thing I'm in love with besides my drawer pulls are my Jonathan Adler cat bookends. My mom bought them for me at Barnes and Noble for a housewarming gift. They are on the right above the TV.



We actually are waiting until the walls are painted before hanging up our art, which is why some of it is currently just chilling on the mantle. I painted the orange Matisse copy and the other two are originals by my friend Beth.

And in other news, the chickens have all started laying eggs now! RZR has been laying for a few weeks now and the other two caught up a few days ago.

Our egg holder is overflowing! Aren't Rickshaw's green eggs so cool??



Dirt Under Our Nails and Paint In Our Hair

There are several projects we still want to tackle in the backyard, one of which is growing a vegetable garden. We still have a lot of work to do to actually set the garden up, but we took a couple of small steps last month when Alton bought two 55 gallon barrels (originally used to ship olives) for only $16 each and turned one into a composter and one into a rain barrel. The composter is complete and has been accumulating our plant and paper waste for a while now, as you can see.

Alton spray painted it black so that it would get hotter and break everything down faster. He built a base for it and the whole thing is on a pipe so we can easily flip it over to mix the compost up.

The rain barrel is not yet hooked up because we actually need to have gutters installed to direct rainwater into the barrel. This is it currently. We plan to spray paint it white as a base color to eventually paint some sort of fun design on it.

And in other backyard news, look how big the chickens are! They should be laying eggs any day now.

So that about covers the first half of this post's title. As for the paint in our hair, well our ceilings are not white. They are very light beige, which won't match at all once we paint the walls grey. So we decided to paint the ceilings white. All of them. So far we have only done the craft room because it was completely painted the day before the Art League came to see it. (Yay procrastination!)

Painting ceilings is not fun. Just FYI.



So the ceilings of the craft room were painted as well as the walls. I also painted a couple of cabinets that the previous owners left in the attic. Here they are before:

During:

And after:

And here is the entire room, all painted and neat:

Yes, the cat has an entire wall for her stuff.

Looking good, eh? We still need crown molding, a new fan/light, new blinds (the ones in there are yellowed and brittle), and new door hardware (which we need throughout the whole house). I also plan to get some curtains and to put up a big, custom bulletin board on one wall and a shelf on the other, over the L shaped desk. The craft room is really coming together. I even cleaned out the closet. :)







Change of Plans

So...you know how the last couple of post stated that the hall bathroom was our next project? Well, not so much. I guess I need to back up and explain our backyard plans before I tell you what our actual next project is. Our plans for the backyard include a lot of things that I will probably get into more in a later post. I'll just give a brief outline for now. We want to replace the fence because the existing one is a bit flimsy and already has a few chunks missing. It is also not all the way to the property line so we want to move it in order to gain a bit more yard (even though it will make our yard sort of trapazoid-shaped rather than rectangular.) We also need to find a good way to fully enclose the yard before we get a dog. This will probably happen at the same time as the fence replacement, so that is a big have-to-save-up-for-it project. We also eventually want to furnish our patio and build a porch railing around it. We would like to have a small vegetable and fruit garden and a storage/shop building some day as well.

I didn't think we would really even get into the backyard projects until after we tackled a good bit of the interior, but Alton wanted to go ahead and get the ball rolling on one project in particular. These guys:

Photo from here: http://crunchydomesticgoddess.com/2008/11/22/moving-on-to-the-chicken-crusade/

Yes, we are going to get chickens. We decided that having free, fresh eggs would be nice and after looking into them a bit more we found out that even a small number of chickens can effectively eliminate the bugs and small critters from your yard. (In Louisiana, the mosquitoes are the number two reason not to go outside in the summer. Number one is that it feels like a sauna.) So it seems like a good plan to us. We are going to get another backyard project finished in conjunction with the arrival of the girls, and that is to put a railing around the patio. We don't want them to get up there and leave any "gifts".

We plan to name the girls Scooter, RZR (pronounced Razor), and Rickshaw McGraw. Our cat's name is Vespa so we decided that when we get a dog we will name it Harley to continue the vehicle theme. I wanted the chickens to be included so we named them after various types of vehicles as well. This is the RZR for those who are unfamiliar:

Photo from here: http://www.polarisindustries.com/en-us/ATV-RANGER/2011/RANGER-RZR-Side-By-Side-Vehicles/Pages/Overview.aspx

Alton wants one, apparently. RZR was the name he came up with and was very excited about it, as you can see from the notebook page where we brainstormed for names:

We originally wanted to name them after bicycle brand names to fit our pet name theme, but I liked Rickshaw McGraw too much and then Alton came up with RZR and the rest is history.
So there you have it. Chickens.