Spring planning, yo!

I've decided it's time for Spring.  Enough is enough.  Even though Madison had the most mild winter BY FAR since we moved here 6 years ago, I am ready for this snow winter business to be done.  And thankfully mother nature rolled her fat butt off of the right side of the bed and gave us some beautiful early Spring weather.  Now our front yard looks like this!

Pink tree!!!!  Though this tree looks kind of haunted most of the year, it has a one to two week period when it flowers and looks gorgeous.  Totally worth it.

I put away our winter wreath and hung our Spring/Summer wreath on the front door, along with this snazzy new doormat from Target. 

I love it.  So cheery and friendly, like maybe people will think "Wow, I bet those Kendalls are nice and friendly even though their dogs bark like they want to kill me every time I walk by."

("Us, killers? No way Jose")

Ok, now our landscaping has actually come a long way since moving in almost three years ago.  We added this stone retaining wall last Summer.  Matt found an ad on Craigslist for 100 blocks for $75.00.  Normally in the store you may have to pay up to $2/block, so we were pretty excited about the deal.

The hostas in the above front garden bed have just started peeking through, and we're going to start mulching everything this weekend.

And here are a bunch of yard/landscaping "Before" photos, with no afters, just all the planning we want to do this year.  I know, pretty jerky of me, especially since I have complained about people doing this before, and now I have become one of them.  One of those, wait for it....wait for it...wait for it....ok and keeping waiting because I have no grand finale for you people.  What a tease.

First off, a side of the house you've never seen before (unless you're one of my favorites and have come to visit...and if you haven't, well....), the right side of the house (when you're looking from the street).  This is by far the ugliest side.  We have done zero to it since moving in.

OK, not completely zero.  See that bald spot up front?  That was an out of control bush that Matt ripped out last year.  And see those stumps?  We cut down a couple trees last spring, but otherwise have not done a single thing to try and look non-Bumpas-y to this side of the house.

Ughhh, did you throw up in your mouth a little bit?  I know I did.  We're planning to lay landscaping fabric over the semi-defined weed area, edge it in, plant some small bushes, and then cover the area with mulch.  I think it will actually be a pretty quick and easy fix.  I would like to build something to hide the AC unit a bit too.

Keep walking forward into the backyard...

The window is one of the dining room windows.  It looks directly into one of our neighbors windows, so some more curtains are in order ( at some point...)  The fence is kind of ugly, but gives us some great privacy, since our neighbors are so close.  If you're thinking that those trees seem to be a bit close for comfort in relation to the house, well you would be correct, sir.  Though they are close, they're very narrow and offer the kitchen/dining room a lot of shade.  At some point, we'll dig up those stumps too, but in the mean time, we'll continue the edging and mulch up to the edge of the fence.

If you pivot back towards the front yard you see this.....

Ok....now if you look back at the backyard again (got that?) you would see....the backyard.

The telephone pole on the top left side is the top corner of our property.  The brush spanning the length of the yard is ours (it's about 6-8 feet deep) and goes over to the right until the green bush ends.  The tree on the top right is our Apple Tree...which sounds awesome, but has really just proved be annoying because it produces 457,349 apples every other year.  At least it's every other year though...and when it blossoms, it turns a beautiful fluffy white. :)  It just started flowering too.

(I attempted to be artsy...)

Once at the top of yard, if you turn back down towards the house you get this trashy attack view:

Yikes.  The black blob on the left side of the deck is our grill and the black blob in the center is the portable fire pit that we had to have (and have used 2 times in three years).  Our old mailbox is propped up behind the garage and the patchy weeded area behind the garage is....a patchy weeded area.  This is actually our big summer project this year.  We're going to enclose that whole patchy area with some stone blocks and then cover the area with Pea Gravel to create a casual patio.  We're going to DIY a stone fire pit and DIY some stone chairs/seats around it.  SOOOO excited!!! :)  We're hoping to rip apart the deck this year and redo that too.

Ok, we're getting there, I promise.  Almost done.  If you're standing on the deck and you look over to the left, you would see our Lilac bushes...which are blooming too!

We're also going to edge out and mulch this weeded area too.  And maybe plant a Birch Tree to the left of Ty Cobb.

And fiiinally, the garage side of the house.  Quite simply (and probably predictably) we're going to edge out the weeded area and add some plants and mulch.

Thoughts?  Ideas?  Suggestions???  We have a lot of work to do this Spring and Summer, but we're excited to maybe have a classy yard for once. :)

~S~

Flower Power

Remember the $3.99 Trader Joe's flowers I picked up a month ago?  Well take a look at how they're looking today:

Seriously!  Is that amazing or what?!  I switched up the vase because the other one was looking a bit grimey.  And granted they're starting to look a tad rough around the edges...but 4 weeks after buying the flowers and they still look this awesome?!  Best $3.99 I have ever spent.  If you had asked me on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night in college I would have said the Big Mac extra value meal after the bars was the best $3.99 I had ever spent...but now, well...those Big Mac's were pretty tasty...  :)

~S~

McSpring Cleaning

Quote of the week:

S: "I think I'm going to purge a ton this week"
M: "Ummm...what?"
S: "Not like puke my guts out, but cleaning stuff."
M: "Oh, I was gonna say..."

I lovelovelovelovelove Spring cleaning.  My house may not always have the cat tumbleweeds vacuumed, or table tops dusted (or any laundry ever put away), but when it comes to Spring cleaning I go nuts.  I love going through a space and pulling everything out, then starting the organization from scratch. 

My first conquest this Spring.....underneath the kitchen sink.  This has been a pit for every kitchen cleaner I think we need (even though we have 13 others that are half full) or any random kitchen esque item that I don't know where to put.  Here's the mess I was dealing with:

Yeah...somebody call Hoarders, because I definitely have a bit of a problem.  See that blue tote/caddy...on the right side...in the back...sort of being smothered my cleaning products?  Yeah, that was supposed to be my cleaning supply organizer.  And there is an empty box and an old bottle of soap in it.

First step was to pull everything out....and then I was left with this almost usable space:

And you probably noticed this...unless you aren't wearing your bi-focals:

Ughh, purge me.  So once that was wiped down, I was onto step 2, which was organizing all the crap I had put aside.  I divided it into three piles.

1) Keep and put back under the sink
2) Keep, but put where it belongs (aka not under the sink)
3) Toss that crap out

The top right is Keep and put back under the sink.  The left is keep, but put where it belongs, and the bottom is for el trasho.  Almost all of the trash pile is empty bottles...I am lucky enough to have a man in my life who can never put food back into the fridge, but will always put empty containers back into cabinets.

And yes, in the put somewhere else pile, that is lighter fluid and a small gas tank for a grill.  So safe.  At least I had a fire extinguisher under too, right?  Oh and dog poop bags...one always needs those in the kitchen.

I brought the put somewhere else pile out to the garage, the trash pile to an unguessable place, and then organized the keep pile.  I found a cute white tote at Target for about $6, which I put it all into.

Much better, huh?  And if you're wondering about the upside down mason jar...well It's holding our loose kitchen sink pipe in place.  Yeah, I'll get to that at some point.

I'm hoping to work on the two bathroom sinks this weekend...and hopefully drop off a bunch of Goodwill donations we've had sitting around for months. 

Start any Spring cleaning yet?

~S~

Seriously Spring...hurry your GD butt up

I am ready to be done with Winter.  Like now.  Like yesterday.  So while Madison can't quite decide if it's going to get nice for 6 days, then snow, or be cold/rainy/windy/nasty for a week straight....I decided I needed a little inside Spring cheer.  Enter Trader Joe's $3.99 flower bouquets.

And please enter Sour Patch Kids jelly beans.  Yesss!

The amazing table runner you see above is from Target and I fell in love with it when I stopped in to buy only paper towels last weekend, but like that ever works out at Target.  The yellow napkin I already had, the white bowl is from Goodwill, and the two little owls are salt n' peppa shakers I found at Marshall's.  I'm currently obsessed with owls.

And what's a nice photo shoot with out my trusty assistant?

And by trusty I mean photo hogging scene stealer.  Show me love. Work it. Own it.  Meeeeowza.

Ok.....too much creepy alien arms and not enough cute....




Ahh yes,  there's my cute moosie cat  :)

So, not only is the table runner new, but the actual table is too.  Matt and I found it at Slumberland in the clearance section for $100 last fall.  Seriously, isn't that an amazing deal?  We've seen others exactly like it there since, and they have been starting at around $400 (on clearance for that much too!).  The bar stools actually go with our pub table and are way too high for the new table, but it looked quite sad all alone in the dining room.  We've been scouting around for some new, shorter chairs, but haven't found anything yet.  And since we use the table for eating like twice a year, it hasn't been too high on the priority list.  I have white wood chairs in mind something like this from overstock.com.

We'll see.  Since the table is such a dominatrix of the dining space, I don't want to get anything too tall or bulky. And I figure with backless stool, we can tuck them underneath for more room when they're not in use...which will be 99% of the time.  The little door underneath open up for a storage cabinet and there is a hidden, built-in leaf inside the table too, which is awesome.

How about you guys...have you had to force some spring into your late winter?

***Update*** After writing the post early this week, we received 4-5 inches of snow overnight on Thursday.  GD Winter.

~S~

Master bedroom make-over!

Ohhhh this has been such a long time coming.  It is recommended that the master bedroom is the first room you make your own when you move into a new place, but for Matt and I, we always do the opposite.  We do the kitchen first ( I looove to organize the kitchen cabinets), then the living room, bathrooms, and usually the guest room and office.  We have nice furniture, curtains, ect... for the room, but never do more than set it all up quickly.  I finally decided that enough is enough and we needed to make our bedroom a bedroom.  Well, this happened months ago (like almost a year ago) but since our bedroom is hardly ever clean, I never had the chance to snap some photos of it. Well friends, I have finally cleaned up our room enough to share it with you!  Mom, please pick your jaw up off the floor. :)

Here's a very poor before shot of our bedroom from about a year ago (It was laundry day):

Ughh. Even without all the laundry thrown around, it's just plain ugly.  And boring.  And ugly.  Those curtains used to live in the living room when we first moved in, but then got moved in here.  They're a gorgeous plum/eggplant color and block sunlight like nobody's business, but they don't match anything.  Something needed to be done, and fast.

Here is the view from the bedroom door.

Last February I found the new curtains, sheets, bed skirt, comforter, blanket, and pillows at Target (yep one stop shopping).  The new bedding is casual, comfy, yet has a little bit of elegance too (or so I like to think).  Which is the whole idea/plan behind the bedroom makeover.  The hottie dresser in the corner I found on criagslist for $50.  It apparently is some brand of furniture well know in Michigan and the seller's grandparents received it as a wedding gift.  The TV is from the living room because we recently purchased a new one (which I can now see without squinting at).  If you're super observant, you may have noticed the dresser on the far left is the one from the guestroom.  I moved it in here because I didn't want to share the new one with Matt.  I'm such a nice wife.

Ok, if you sweep to the right of the picture above (and look to the right of the window on the right.  Right, got it?), you'll be looking straight into the room, instead of at an angle. 

 The doors on the right go into my closet (shown here).  The little tan bench was a snatch up from my curly haired friend Rebecca, when she moved back to Canada (hiya buddy!).  I totally draped that scarf about 12 times before it looked "natural" enough for my liking.  Normally the bench is full of clothes that I tried on, but didn't feel like hanging back up.

Ok, moving on.  Here is the view from the corner by the tan bench, which gives you a better idea of the layout of the room.

I'm not 100% pleased with the art situationon this side of the room yet, so at some point something will be changed.  I also hate how the dresser and headboard clash so much, so at some point one of them will be painted or re-stained.  Probably the dresser...and it may be painted white.

Ok, here is the view from the corner by the new dresser (behind the TV).

The open door is the bedroom door (duh) which leads to the hallway.  If you pan over to the left a bit, you see our closets (which are never ever closed unless I've psycho cleaned and actually put away laundry for once...this has lasted about 3 days so far!)

Here's a shot of my bedside table:

I've been searching for a different lamp shade, but haven't found what I have in my head yet.  And I may paint the lamp a different color too (weird).  See that white penis shaped thing?  Here's a close up of that:

I think it's actually an appetizer dish, but I use this little Goodwill find ($2.99) for my hair ties, bobby pins, chapstick, and jewlery that I forget to take off until I get into bed.  The top of my table used to be a mess of bobby pins ( I found 38 on there when I cleaned last week...) so this has helped me keep things a bit more organized.

Here's Matt's side of the bed:

The mirror used to be brown (and in our entry way) but I spray painted it white to use in here.  The art print was something we found at Art Fair on the Square in Madison 4 years ago.  The blue thing is a piece glass we found in Door County and front picture is a photobooth strip of Matt and I from 2003.  That was an impromptu project a couple months ago, which I'll share with you soon.  And yes, that is a giant metal flashlight to club intruders with next the the picture.

So, far I'm pretty pleased with how far our room has come.  It only took us 6 years of living together to have dressers in the bedroom, so that's something.  I would still like to paint the walls a different color and add a giant rug to the room.  All the bedrooms are over the garage, so the floors are always freezing cold.  We've actually thrown around the idea of putting carpet in our room too, but we'll see what happens.

So, what do you think? Looking ok so far? Want to bet the room won't be this clean in a week?

~S~