The Best Laid Plans

This week is spring break for the kiddos and they're off at Disney with the grandparents so it's a spring break for us too.  We planned a week of sleeping through the night, sleeping in on weekends and spending our nights and weekends getting to all those things we don't normally have time to do such as sanding and painting the front door trim which is sorely in need of it.

The paint is peeling and we have these funky black spots all around the trim.  The manager at our local Duron paint store said that these spots are from the trees around the doorway.  We have to sand them all off, prime, and paint.  We left Duron armed with all the necessary supplies to tackle this project.  Since we were at Duron, we even bought the paintbrush Sherry at YHL recommended.  They actually didn't have the exact model brush (it was sold out), but the manager assured us that this is the same brush but nicer.  It also wasn't $5 (more like $14!).  I hope it's as good as it's supposed to be.

Mother Nature seems to have a different plan for us:

We're having a week of rain!  The only day it's not supposed to rain, we both have plans for that evening.  All this rain is great for the flowers but not so great for our plans to paint the house exterior. 

We really want to get the door painted before it gets too hot.  Washington summers can be miserably hot.  There might be a small window Sunday morning that we can try to squeeze in this project.  I'm crossing my fingers :-)

Front Yard Fresh Up

Glenn is a little obsessed with the lawn.  Religiously he weeds, seeds, and fertilizes on a prescribed schedule that our local hardware store recommended to him.  But the bushes tend to get neglected since I've never paid much attention to them and Glenn's more focused on getting our lawn to look like a green carpet.

Our house came pre-landscaped and like many lessons learned, we should have paid more attention to the spacing and placement of the newly planted landscape but of course we didn't.  They've had seven years to fully take root and spread and one plant looks like a creature coming out from the black lagoon with arms and legs.



Glenn planned a full day of trimming the bushes, mulching, and seeding the lawn - the key word here is planned.  He got about half way done with trimming with the electric hedge trimmer and then cut himself pretty darn deep.  Luckily his digits were still attached but he was forced to take a break from yard work and go to the emergency room. 

However, being as obsessed about the yard that he is, Glenn didn't let a near dismemberment stop him.  He finished up the trimming and mulching when he got back from the ER.

Here's his finished product. 



The front yard looks so much better!  And more importantly - the Scary Swamp Thing doesn't look so scary anymore - sounds like a line from a kids story!

Friends:  Any thoughts, or ideas?  Please don't by shy and feel free to leave comments!

Container Gardening

I'm a horrible procrastinator.  We bought two of these large planters last year but never got around to actually putting anything into them.  This year we made some progress and actually filled the planters with gravel and top soil.  They've been sitting in this state for the past two weeks.



Rather than wait another year to actually put plants in the planters, blogging about our home improvement projects has really motivated us to finish these half completed projects.  Combined with a great sale on petunias at Lowe's ($0.50 for a six pack), we had the motivation to finish this simple project :-)

The only drawback was that the plants didn't have many flowers blooming but were otherwise healthy and at $0.50 a pack, we weren't going to be too picky.  On our way out we also saw the sign that Lowe's guarantees their plants for a year and since they're annuals, that's pretty much a lifetime warranty!

After an afternoon of playing with the dirt and flowers (with a short interruption when we thought Glenn cut his finger off with the hedge trimmer), we had these two pretty planters to adorn our front door.  Hopefully with some sunshine and a little water we'll see more magenta in the coming weeks.  If not, we're digging them back up and returning them to Lowe's ;-)

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Door Knocker

We found this really cool door knocker at an antique store on our honeymoon in Spain years ago. Being the procrastinator that I am, we never got around to installing it and then we moved. So in a way, it's a good thing I procrastinated so we got to take the door knocker with us. Luckily DH is pretty organized so he was able to find it in a jiffy when I finally got motivated to install it.

You can see it still has the price tag on it. Back then the exchange rate was something like 1.33 euros = $1 so it cost us about $15.  If we were to buy it today with the exchange rate, it would be around $30!  

This blog is really helping us (really me) get motivated to finish up these lingering projects.  I have lots of ideas but am lacking in the follow through so anything that helps get me over the hump is a good thing. Now all need to do it get the proper drill bit to drill into the door.  At the rate that I move, I'll probably get to it next year :-)