Our garden is growing!

I am sooo glad we decided to do this. And when I say "we", I mean, "I am so glad I decided to do this and talked Chris into helping me." =)

Aidric absolutely loves his garden. Every single morning, he asks to see his cucumbers (still inside, as we sowed the seeds about 3 weeks ago and are just getting ready to transplant them). When we go outside, he fills up his purple watering can and carefully walks around, giving his plants just the right amount of water. He can't wait to see if there are any more "green things" coming up from the ground. I can't wait until we actually get vegetables and he realizes things will get even more exciting!

He is currently MOST excited about our sunshine flower. (sunflower) We sowed the seeds inside about 3 weeks ago and have been watching it grow in a paper cup in our windowsill ever since. We finally transplanted it yesterday, but I'm honestly not sure how it's going to do. Aidric was carrying it and in his rush to push past Juliet and get out the door, he tripped and took it down with him. It was in a fragile state when we got it in the ground.


That's Juliet's head poking out from the other side of our 2 tomato plants. (We planted these about 2 weeks ago with help from cousin Gracie. They were seedlings when we got them, but have REALLY grown since then. We saw the first flower blooming on them today!)

As for Jules, I wish I could say she is as big of a help as Aidric, but that would be a complete lie. She is quite the little pest in our garden! She wants to get in and DIG. Unfortunately, I think her digging is the reason our basil is not really taking off. It sits at the edge of the garden Juliet likes best =)



Speaking of the basil, this is it. We put these seeds in about 2 weeks ago, I think.


Here we have one of our pepper plants. This came in a set of 6 seedlings- a variety of hot peppers, including jalepeno, serrano and caribbean.


Aidric is pointing out one of our lettuce plants. I'm so excited these are growing! We put 2 varieties in...a butter leaf and a romaine. I THINK this one is the butter leaf.


Here are our onions. I know this is a really hard picture to see- they are the stringy like things you see in the square closest to the wood.


Finally, our flowers. We sowed 6 seeds, one in each of our square foot spaces. We now have 6 seedlings and I'm so excited to actually get flowers. Aidric is going to looove it!! The flowers are nasturtiums and I got a variety pack, so it will be fun to see what colors come up!

this is what it looks like..

right now. I decided that waiting until I have rooms finished would make this blog REALLY slow. So, the other day, I took pictures of all of the rooms....in their very unfinished states! Maybe posting this will motivate us to have another very productive weekend!


Front Door


Looking in from the back of the house:



Dining Room


Guest bedroom (also my home office)





Playroom:





Living Room




Juliet's Room





Aidric's Room





Chris's Office:


Can't post the ones I took of our Master bedroom. Those are going to require an after to go with them!

We were very busy this weekend!

I wish I had more to show for it! For my own records though, I'm just going to make a little list of everything we were able to check off our to-do list this weekend!

INSIDE
-cut and hung trim around doorways (downstairs bath, playroom, dining room, kids' bedrooms)
-caulked trim..filled in nail holes with wood putty..then sanded
-painted trim around doorways (downstairs bath, playroom)
-installed base boards in laundry room
-cut Juliet's closet doors down to the right size
-cut board for media center storage
-painted board for media center storage
-organized (for now) media center components
-cut boards for shelves in playroom
-painted boards for shelves
-hung the shelves

OUTSIDE
-built a raised garden bed
-purchased and mixed up soil components for organic vegetable garden
-sowed some seeds inside for later transplant into garden
-dug out grass and tilled the soil around avocado tree
-fertilized the avocado tree
-started the very ongoing process of organizing the garage (including clearing off the back porch, which was home to all of our tools and supplies!)

So that I don't leave without a single picture, here's a quick shot of the raised bed and all of the soil components, prior to our mixing them up. I've never gardened before, but I'm so excited to get started!

A not so pretty "before"

The playroom is a DISASTER. Way too many toys and way too little space. The closet in there is tiny and has one shelf that is about 6' up.

So, I talked Chris into building me some shelves today and then I painted them. He got them hung, but I can't take the after picture until I get some storage containers and labels going!

Here is the "before" so you know how dire things were! (and kind of still are....since the shelves are empty now)

After #2: The Kids' Bathroom

I really love how it turned out!! There is only one thing left to really do- some sort of simple window treatment. We don't need it for privacy, b/c the glass is opaque and the window is really high and hidden by a tree in the front yard. But, I do think some kind of white fabric in that area would look really nice and truly finish the room.

I wish I had more "before" pictures of this room, but this was all I could find.


You can see the "in progress" pics here

Here's the tile before Chris scraped and re-grouted it:


And After:


hmmm, now that I see the shower curtain in pictures, I guess I could add, "iron or steam wrinkles out of shower curtain" to the to-do list

This picture shows one of the 2 light fixtures.


shower curtain, bath mat and towels from Target


Towel rack I received as one of my birthday presents =) I was planning ahead! (though I did originally plan on putting in the downstairs bathroom, I realized we have a linen closet in there and needed it up here more.)

OK, "hang more towels on bottom rod" is going on the to-do list. I guess I'm really NOT done with this bathroom!


Ikea "sideboard" that my talented husband "hacked" and turned into a vanity!
Since I'm pretty impressed with our frugalness (is this a word?) on this project, here's a breakdown:

Ikea sideboard: $273
Sink and faucet from Overstock: $232
Polyurethane: $8
ridiculous amounts of piping to get the job done right: $30


close up of faucet in cabinet


what it looks like underneath


And this is Chris's side of the vanity (Oh, did I mention while this is the kids' bathroom, we are all four using it right now? The master bathroom is on the the "to-do list" as well, but we're going to finish up all of the areas we are currently living in before tackling that project!)


You can see both light fixtures together here.


Finally, the mirror. We reused the mirror that was already in the room. It had to be taken down, since we lost 9" of this room and that came from the wall the old vanity was on. Here are some before pics, and actually you can see the old vanity b/c the mirror is sitting on it.




After! First, I scraped a ton of old paint off the edges. It didn't all come off though and there were also a lot of scratched areas under the mirror. So, I taped off the edge and did a frosted glass look to hide the damage.(simple spray paint) It worked great, EXCEPT for the very edge where the slightly opaque frosted look didn't do the trick. So, I went back and re-taped and used a hammered aluminum spray paint to do a metal looking edge. I think for the $6 it took, it was a perfect fix!

First "After" Picture: the kitchen

Honestly, we didn't do too much to the kitchen, so it's a relatively easy "after". We (Chris) cleaned, primed and re-painted the cabinets. I found some great, fairly inexpensive new knobs and pulls. (12 pulls and 29 knobs for UNDER $60!) A new paint job (Benjamin Moore Bennington Gray) and a faucet from overstock and that pretty much sums it up!

Before:



After:








Still on the "to-do" list: replace the very strange "outer space" light fixture