Remember our, um, lovely, mailbox? Obviously, at some point, the plastic mailbox was picked out to match the plastic door. Yikes. As much as I loved being known as the house with the orange plastic fleur de lis mailbox, I really wanted a new one. I had another one picked out but it was very expensive for a mailbox and we were having a hard time justifying spending so much money on it. Fyi, this is a common discussion at our house. Well designed always seems to = more expensive. During the rainy days of their visit, Mom and Dad decided that we should look at Lowes for a new mailbox. I guess they didn't like the orange plastic one either. Somehow, I never noticed this mailbox before. I thought Lowes only had ugly mailboxes with more ugly decorations on them. I wanted something plain. Less is more. But this one came with lots of "optional" colors and stickers and if you just leave those things off, it was neutral enough. And since we were replacing the mailbox, we thought we should probably just go ahead and get a new (brighter) light fixture... I realize that the new fixture looks tiny, but it's much better than what was there before and it gives off a lot more light, which I really like. I kind of want to wait and see how the new (original) front door looks once we get to that project. We might upgrade the light again at that point, and then we could put this light above the back door since that one also will need to be replaced eventually. I'm very excited about the front door project, hopefully we'll be able to get to it sometime this year. It's going to make a huge difference to the house. I put plants in those pots a few weeks ago and got the hanging baskets over the weekend. Mom and Dad also decided that we should "just look" at trees while at Lowes... and then we came home and planted our new cherry tree. In the rain. Mike and I finished up the tree project over the weekend by putting down the mulch and planting a few flowers around it.It is a kwanzan cherry tree, a few of our neighbors have them and I loved how they look in the spring. Our tree is only about 5.5' tall right now, but eventually, it should look like this:It has a medium growth rate, so it should grow between 1'-2' every year.