Making Our House a Home

We have now been in our new house for about a month. During that time, we have been hard at work washing down EVERYTHING, painting, laying laminate, doing repairs, and cleaning up the yard. Here are a few things we have done:

Turn the Meadow into a Lawn

Before:

 

During:

The lawn was one to two feet high in the back sections, so we decided to try mowing a shape into it. Nate went for a heart.

At first we tried to bag the grass, but there was far to much. It just jammed the lawn mower and made it stop. We will try that next time. The hardest part though was trimming. I spent 4 to 5 hours trying to get through the overgrown grass and weeds around our house with the weed whacker.

After:

The thick, tall dead weeds in the very back of our lot prevented us from going over everything back there. We have pulled some of them out, but we still have a ways to go before we finish getting rid of all of them.

Turn the Backyard Dump into a Garden

We wanted to put a garden in this year, even if it wasn't extensive. So, we decided to weed this flower bed area in our backyard and plant some stuff.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be much more of a project than anticipated. The weeds were a lot of work to get out, but we expected that. What was not expected was that we would find a weed barrier sheet buried several inches under the surface.

And what was even less expected was hitting lot of large landscaping rocks a few inches under all that. Digging these out was not much fun, and there are still more even deeper that we just didn't worry about. We also found large firewood logs, boards with nails, lots of long thick roots from all the trees in our yard, and some other junk, like large sheets of rubber.

Here is the finished garden. We planted tomatoes, peppers, green beans, zucchini, butternut squash, spinach, and beets. Actually, we are also going to cut down the funny little pine tree and connect the red brick border. We haven't quite gotten to that yet...


Re-doing the Kitchen

Before:

During:

After:

Flowers courtesy of Tom Bradshaw. Thanks Tom!

We just got our new blinds Friday for the kitchen. Man does it look better without newspaper on our windows!

A Children's Poem

One of my friends that was in illustration with me at BYU, Meridth Gimbel, recently entered a contest online for one of her poems. The contest has kids reading the poems. Whichever poem gets the most views wins the contest.

I love the poem Meridth entered into the contest. It is a lot of fun, and the girl she got to read the poem makes it even better. Go watch/listen to it here! (And if you like it, share it with your friends as well.)

Happy Anniversary!

As of today, Nate and I have been married for three years!

I feel like I must be one of the luckiest people in the world to be married to such a terrific husband who loves me so much. He is a husband that works to understand my desires and finds ways to help me reach my goals. That is why he agreed to buying a house with a place for a horse and other animals!

It is nice to have a husband to get excited about our new riding lawn mower with too (with a free steel dump cart to hitch to the back).

Who else would have made me and my family a authentic Italian lasagna dinner for my birthday complete with antipasti, primo, secondo, and delci?

And it is wonderful to have a husband who goes to work every day to support us then comes home and helps out with whatever we need to get done, whether it is fixing dinner, cleaning, painting, or working on other various project around our new house and yard...

Having a husband who knows how to work, save, budget, play, cook, hike, laugh, comfort, and so much more, is one of the greatest blessings I could ever have.

My husband is truly someone I can confide in, trust, and count on to make me smile. Happy anniversary Nate! I love you!