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.

I think we discovered the weight limit for carrying things in our SUV....
Much better! Good thing we only live a mile from Lowes. That was just the first of three trips this weekend.
We had great weather this weekend, perfect weather for doing yard work. We decided to work on our raised flower beds in the backyard. We started bright and early on Saturday with the first trip to Lowes to buy the materials. We picked out the blocks we wanted to make the walls and loaded 75 onto a nearby flat cart. Then... I noticed that on the handle of the cart, in very small letters, it said "broken" and sure enough, the cart was missing a wheel and wouldn't move. Ugh! We had to unload all of our blocks and put them on another cart, not a good way to start the project! (fyi, the blocks weighed 18 pounds each) Luckily some nice Lowes employees helped us load the blocks into the car. After unloading the blocks into the garage (if you're keeping track, that was the 4th time we moved the blocks in less than 2 hours), the first thing we did was decide on the shape and spray paint the line on the grass.Then we dug a 4" deep trench for the wall.
Next we filled the trench with 2" of rocks and then 2" of sand to create a base for the wall.
The first row went down pretty quickly.

**at this point I stopped taking pictures. We put down a layer of garden cloth and used construction adhesive between the rows of blocks. We went back to Lowes to buy more blocks and dirt. By Saturday evening, the flower beds looked like this:
We really underestimated the amount of dirt we needed to fill the beds.

Sunday morning we went back to Lowes (after stopping by Panera to treat ourselves to an iced coffee, yum!) and bought a lot more dirt, some compost, mulch, and a few more plants and flowers. Of all of the things we've done on the house, this was by far the most physically demanding project and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to move tomorrow (it hurts my arms just to type this!) but I am proud of us, we were able to get the project completed by mid-day today, and even had time to do some yard work out front.
I can't wait to see how it looks as the plants grow and it starts to fill in a little more. Right now it's not very visible from the deck and that's where we spend most of our time, but it makes a huge difference already as you look at the house from the back, and I think it makes the deck look more finished. At some point we'd like to put in a patio too... we have so many plans, but only so much time and $$. This ended up costing a little more than we had planned, but hopefully from now on we'll only need to buy a few annual flowers each spring.

Project break down:

4 bags of rocks
4 bags of sand
80 blocks
35 bags of top soil
5 bags of compost
4 bags of mulch

This is what we planted (you can stopped reading now if you're not interested in this kind of stuff, this is more for me so I can keep track):

2 wine & roses weigela
1 goldmound spirea
1 rose glow barberry
3 moonshadow euonymus
2 knock out rose
6 african marigold
18 petunia

I realized when I posted about the guest room I forgot to include photos of our other 2 rooms. The office is coming along, the top cap for the baseboards turned out to be the wrong color after staining (even though we followed the same process as the crown molding, which is a perfect match, grrr) so we need to somehow fix that and install it later. But we started to set up the desk and the bookshelf. We are also keeping a few boxes in this room, just to get them out of the way. We have a functioning office! I would like to eventually get a new desk chair, new blinds, hang something on the walls...
The den / brick room is kind of set up, we plugged in the tv and set up the elliptical (exercise) machine. The other half is just being used for storage. We still need to remove the wallpaper and paint, but I think that project is being pushed back because we can still use the room as it is while we work on other things.

Last weekend (when my parents were here visiting) it rained. And rained and rained and rained... Since many of our plans involved being outside, I asked Mom and Dad what they wanted to do instead, and surprisingly, they wanted to help work on the house. They must not read the blog enough if they thought that sounded like fun :-P So on Saturday we discovered a cool new store (more on that later) and went to Lowes to start looking at plants for our backyard. Sunday we went back to Lowes to get some stuff for the house, installed a few new things on the front porch, and also started working on the hutch. We need to finish all of those projects, but it's supposed to be really nice this weekend and I'm excited to start working on the yard! Oh, and in case you were wondering, we also went out to eat a lot and did other fun things :-)

Currently, our back yard has no landscaping. We have a nice deck, a 1/2 dead giant tree, and some chain link fence. We want to put some flower beds in and do some landscaping by the deck and in front of the garage. We have a few plants ready to be planted, but first we need to decide what kind of landscaping we want. I thought I wanted squared-off raised beds in front of the deck and along the garage... and then I was thinking maybe more free-formed beds would be better... and now I can't decide.

What do you think? Should we follow the lines of the deck and make 2 rectangular beds? Or should we make them be more organic in shape? I think that in plan, I like the curvy beds, but when I look at the picture I'm seeing the rectangular beds...

We (mostly) finished the guest room just in time for my parents' visit over the weekend. There are still a few things left, like painting the inside of the closet and staining the baseboards that were hidden behind the shelves to match the rest of the woodwork. But, for the most part, it is done and it makes me happy to be able to check another room off the list. Here is the before, complete with "built-in" shelves and the green vertical blinds with matching ceiling fan:

That door is to the closet.

After clearing out the room and patching the walls, the first thing we did was paint the radiator. It was the last radiator that needed to be painted in the whole house! Yay! It was yellow before.

Then we had to do some electrical, um, investigating... The green ceiling fan never worked so we had to do some testing to see if it was the fan, or the wiring, or? Turns out that one of the old wires was broken up in the ceiling, luckily we were able to reach in and fix it. We're not going to talk about how Mike shocked himself while up on the ladder or how I had a small fireball come out of the wall switch while I was holding a piece of metal up to the wires. Nope, not going to talk about it. Good news is that it now works :-)
After much debate, we decided to go with another ceiling fan. Normally I'm not a big fan of fans (hehe) but we couldn't afford some of the other lights that we liked. And I really do like fans in bedrooms while I'm trying to sleep.

You can see that we started painting in the picture above. When I first started thinking about the guest room I really wanted to have nice light neutral bedding with a dark color on the walls. The furniture we had for this room was light wood tones, I thought it would contrast nicely with darker walls. Then our friends gave us their extra bed frame (light colored) and I found all white bedding... so I picked the most perfect shade of dark blue, Rainstorm by Sherwin Williams, and had Lowes color match since SW wasn't open when I was ready to paint. I had to go back and forth to Lowes a few times because they really messed up the color match the first time and I ended up with bright aqua. Yikes! Mike was nervous, I don't think he was fully agreeable to painting the room so dark. But now with the white duvet, white curtains, and light furniture in place, he really likes it (or at least that's what he told me). I love it, the room gets a lot of natural light from the big front window so it still is very bright during the day. I think it looks very calm and relaxing, even though the walls are dark. It makes the bed and the big window become the focus of the room. I realize that some people might not like it as much as I do though, I think Mom's words were "wow, that's an, um, interesting, color choice..."

This is my favorite picture, I think the white radiator looks especially beautiful against the dark wall :-)