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~

How to spend a hot and sweat Sunday

Hello strangers, if you don't remember me, my name is Steph and you sometimes check in on my blog.  It's been a crazy couple of weeks, so I apologize for not posting in so long.

I recently underwent a major career change.  As of this last Monday, May 16th, I am now a Specimen Receiving Technician in the Surgical Pathology Department at UW Hospital in Madison!  It has seriously been one of the best decisions in my life.  And what exactly does one do with that job?  Good question.  I myself didn't know exactly what that meant until about 3 days into the new job.  I work in the Pathology Lab and I am the person that enters all of the specimen/patient information into the computer, before the specimens are tested for various diseases (aka Pathology...I actually had to google Pathology to find out what it meant : / ).  At some point I will be doing more lab-like work, but for the first couple weeks, I'm simply observing and doing computer work.  Now, I have zero experience in this, however they hired me because I am tend to be anal about attention to detail and can be compulsive about organization (remember this project?  And this one?) and the department needed someone like that.  And even though I admitted to having zero experience during my interview, I was told that the bosses like being able to train someone from the ground up...which is me for sure.  But anyway, I am looooving the new job.  And all of the gross stuff that comes with it too. :)  On my first day I saw an ovary the size of a football.  On day two I saw a finger in a jar.  I think it can only get better and better :)

But anyway....back to the topic at hand.  Today Matt and I built and planted our garden!  We picked up three 2x4's at Home Depot (and plants and dirt) and then came home and built a 2'x8' frame, which we then brought into the backyard, filled with dirt, and planted our 2011 plants. :)  We picked out 6 different tomato plants, 9 various pepper plants, and Matt grabbed a watermelon plant (how weird is it that you can even grow watermelon in WI...).  Check it out!

{In case you are blind, notice the difference between the grass on the right and left side of the garden?...That's because our neighbor's yard is on the left and our's is on the right.  Our grass has actually come a long way and thanks to True Green doing some treatments this year, our yard will hopefully flourish}

And our lilacs!!! (they were not planted today, I'm just excited about all the plants and flowers)  I love them :) We have 2 purple lilac bushes and one that's a little different with dark pink flowers.  (The garden is to the right, up the hill from the lilac bushes.  That medium sized bush in the middle is Russian Roses, but they haven't bloomed yet.  Also, the Hosta, Russian Roses, and garden are on the edge of our property line.)

And the rhubarb...which is growing like a madman everyday, even though it was planted in crappy dirt behind the garage and I always forget to water it...

Here are the flowers I planted out front a couple of weeks ago.  We're ripping those ugly timbers out next weekend and putting in cement pavers/blocks, to make it a bit more classy looking. (Sorry for the shadowed picture...the flowers are a deep purple color, the ones on the far left still need to go into pots).

{I got the frog at Saver's for $2.99!  Matt hates it, but I love him :) }

Stay tuned for our plan for the rest of yard...I rattled off about 60 things to Matt this afternoon about what we're going to be doing this summer.  He's almost as excited as me....almost. :)

~S~