Spring is in the air

  So far this spring I have spent a good deal of my time outside. It's so gorgeous I have to take advantage of all the outdoor time I can get before the temperatures start getting closer to the triple digits and I lock myself inside in the nice, cool air conditioning.

  One of my favorite parts of owning a house is having a yard. Back in the old apartment I did a little gardening and even had a small vegetable garden. Our patio was pretty much over-grown with all of my gardening endeavors. Since we moved in to the house during the fall and our focus was on the interior I didn't have much time to enjoy the yard before the cooler temperatures came in and killed most everything. Not to mention the horrible drought last summer and the fact that the house sat vacant on the market for several months during the hottest, dryest months. Our yard was in very sad shape. After talking to the neighbors and discovering the previous tenants did very little yard work I thought it would take forever to get the yard looking good.

  Luckily I was only half wrong! The front left and far right side of our yard barely have more than a sprig or two of real grass, it's mostly crab grass and weeds. With a little TLC I've had some luck at the front of the house. I'm hoping by the end of the summer we will have the front filled in with lucious St. Augustine grass so next spring we can work on getting it to spread to the other less fortunate areas of the yard.

  I have a pretty nice vegetable garden in the works and can't wait until I can reap the rewards. I've already gotten a few strawberries and a tomatillio, but I also have carrots, romaine lettuce, zuchinni, yellow squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, raspberries, grapes and watermelon hopefully on the way!

  We took advatage of a sale on fruit trees at Lowe's and planted two new apple trees and a peach tree in our side yard. I'm not counting on any fruit in the near future but hopefully a few years down the road with some luck I will have lots of fresh fruit as well. We are also fortunate to have two large, mature pecan trees in our back yard, so I'm hoping for a good harvest later this year. Mmmm fresh pecan pie, I can almost taste it now..

 Our front patio is now looking quite nice with the addition of the new love seat I got from the antique festival a few weeks ago. I've got most of the furniture painted (all except the big table) and I love how it turned out, the new white paint really gave it a new life.  I also finally got around to filling the planter with polka-dot plants today.

  Earlier today I came across a wonderful surprise. While taking a break from pulling weeds I noticed a mockingbird fly into the tree right near our back porch with a worm in it's mouth. I took a peek and found a nest; there was a tiny little baby bird inside of it too! I am delighted, this is exactly why I love having a big backyard.

  I never would have guessed a little nest was hiding just behind the leaves, but lo and behold..

  Since you may have noticed our sad looking shutters on the front of our house in the first photo, I guess I should offer an explanation. When my parents visited last month they did quite a few projects around the house, installing gutters along the front, re-screening and painting our screen doors and even dug up all the ugly shrubs that I hated along the front windows. Once the shrubs were gone I noticed how the paint on the shutters was peeling, so on my last day of vacation I took out the scraper and decided to repaint the shutters. I quickly found out it was easier said than done! Although there was only two layers of paint on them it did not want to come off easy. Using paint remover only left us with a bubbly, gunky mess that burned our skin when we accidentally got some on us. So our shutters have looked like complete hell for about a month now. A few days ago we finally broke out the sander and got a good deal of the paint off, but we are going to have to hand sand all the slats, ughhh. Hopefully we will finish them up in the next few weeks since I feel a little embarrassed this project has sat unfinished where all the neighbors can see for so long.

 We've also made some progress on our guestroom, one of the 'final frontiers' inside of the house. It's still got a ways to go but we've got most of the painting finished.. or as 'finished' as it will be since we quickly figured out for ourselves how difficult red paint is. If I had known how many coats and how blotchy it would end up I would of chosen orange paint instead. After 4 coats we decided we were going to have to live with it being imperfect because we were not going back to the store to buy yet another can of paint.

   I had some luck at an estate sale yesterday. I'm excited to start reading the Better Homes & Gardens "New Garden Book" from 1961 and the thermometer/barometer will go on our back porch. I am totally in love with the Santa Claus card holder and punch bowl set. Since it was the final day of the sale everything was 50% off so I scored all of this (plus a cake knife with a starburst handle that still must be rolling around in the back seat of the car) for only $17.



   Wishing you all a lovely spring and green thumb for all of your gardening adventures until next time!

The Search

  Happy new year ya'll, I hope everyone had a very happy holiday season! Now that they are over I'm hoping I can get around to blogging more often. I check my favorite blogs constantly waiting for new posts and then never update my own; I know, I am a total hypocrite! But I just finished my latest project and thought I would take a minute to share.

  I've been looking for a new light fixture for the ceiling of our hallway for ages now. I picked up one from Ikea a month or so ago, and even though I loved the way it looked, it hung way too low due to our 8 foot ceilings. Anyone over 6 feet tall risked hitting their noggin on it, and since I have several tall friends it had to go.

  Finding a replacement wasn't as easy as it sounded. I scoured the web, ReStore, Craigslist, and big box stores for a light that was small enough for a hallway, short enough to hug tight to the ceiling but still with a mid-century flare to fit in with our decor. I was about to settle on a mediocre, expensive fixture I found online... and then my local vintage store came through for me when no one else could!

   It wasn't perfect, but boy did it have potential! I fell in love with the stars, and I couldn't wait to see them lit up! We decided to take the risk and pick it up for $25 even though it needed rewiring, painting and was missing the mounting hardware. After a trip to Lowe's we picked up all the supplies we needed to restore it for around $30. We used a wire brush to chip off the rust and old paint and then used Rustoleum spray paint to restore it to the original white. The wiring was simple enough, so we didn't even need to pay someone to rewire it for us. All it took was a simple wiring kit from the hardware store.  With a few hours of work we had it looking great! The mounting was by far the hardest part. We found the supplies easily enough, but it turned out to be one of those projects that seems simple in your head but executing it somehow turns into a chore and takes 20 times longer than it should (I've come to find this is the case with pretty much EVERY home improvement task we take on!).

  Here it is all painted up and ready for it's big debut.

  And here it is lit up! Isn't it majestic? The stars are beautiful and it fits in perfectly in our hallway. I'm sure everyone will have a hard time believing it's not original to the house.

   Do any of you have any new projects you've been working on? Or projects planned for the upcoming year? Our list is about a mile long of things we hope to get accomplished this year, but we are slowly chipping away at them one by one.