It was beautiful in stl over the weekend, mid 70s, sunny, with a slight breeze. So beautiful that we decided that we shouldn't waste the whole weekend working inside. We decided to work on the yard... we have no idea what we're doing. For some reason landscaping and grass seed and trees really kind of intimidate me. I feel like you could spend a lot of money just hoping what you're planting will actually grow. It probably doesn't help that I seem to be really good at killing house plants.
But we decided to just go for it and see what happens. Luckily the woman who works in the garden department at Lowes was very nice and helpful. We wanted to start with planting some grass. About 1/2 of our yard is just dirt and dead weeds. See how sad Reese looks? He wants more grass to play in.

We decided to work on sections of the yard at a time, so that the dogs could still have a place to play. The first thing we did was block off about 1/2 of the yard from the dogs. I was in charge of putting the stakes into the ground. For some (great!) reason, the dogs really respect any kind of barrier, even if it's only a foot high, like the stakes and orange tape. Then, Mike and I started raking up the weeds and the dirt. That is hard work! We put down 2 giant bags of grass seed, and we've been watering it twice a day, per the instructions on the bag. I really hope this works. Many of our neighbors were outside over the weekend and asked what we were doing. Based on their responses when we said we were trying to grow grass, I'm thinking that it is very difficult to do in this area... Our neighbors (the yard that you can see in the above photos) have 4 dogs that live outside, so that's why they have no grass. We can't really use their yard as a good comparison. You can see how their dogs have worn a path along the fence and around their pool.
Come on grass! We should start to see grass in 7-14 days, I'll keep you posted.

We also painted the office! I love the color, we went with whole wheat, it's 2 shades darker than the antique white that we have throughout the house.
We're still working on the baseboard situation. We are also going to have to install crown molding in this room because whoever did the drywall work before did a horrible job. There are huge gaps along the ceiling.

I forgot to post a picture last week of the new rug we got from Ikea. I felt like our entry needed something. Well, something besides the new door, floors, and fixed stairs... I can't wait for those projects.
I really like how it looks with the light fixture. Hm, now that I see this picture, we really need to do something about all of those cords under the hall table! And we can probably put away some of our winter coats...