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~

What I do when Matt is out of town

Sooo, for the past week Matt has been working in Milwaukee on a project that the Milwaukee shop needed help with.  And when he isn't home, I suddenly get super motivated and start cleaning and organizing all over the house.  Case in point.  On Tuesday night I decided that the guest room needed to be cleaned out and rearranged.  For no particular reason at all.  Granted, my mom is coming to visit next weekend (yay!) and the room will for sure be ready for her by then, but I figured there was no time like the present.  Wednesday night I got sucked into a book for the whole evening and stayed up way too late in order to finish it (you remember I am a dorky English major, right?).  And then last night (for whatever reason) I decided that our living room needed to be moved around.

This is a very old picture, but I'll explain the differences between then (2009) and early last night (since I was too impulsive to take a picture before starting....hmmm wasn't I supposed to be working on that?...):

Ok, so this was from December 2009.  The Christmas tree is obviously gone now.  The purple curtains have been replaced with white ones.  The coffee table is now the TV stand (next to the 1/2 wall on the right hand side of the picture).  The photos on the wall are different now (and being changed again soon).  The green chair on the left was moved into the office and the old couch from Matt's parents (right side of top picture) has replaced it.  Oh, and the window wall, half wall, and the wall behind the green chair are blue.....ok, wrap your head around all of that. :)

Annnnyway, I walked in the door last night, and those crazy wheels in my head started turning.  After walking the puppies, I dove into rearranging head first.  Our living room is long and narrow (maybe only 10-12 feet wide, by about 20 feet long) so creating a "conversation area" has always been a challenge.  With the couches in their current places, the old couch couldn't have any part of the coffee table (well, bench) and we were always dragging the new couch forward 5 feet so we could both eat off of the coffee table (we're classy like that).  Soooo, I moved the old couch to the opposite wall, in front of the windows and then pushed the new couch over towards the dining room about 3 feet.  Now the couches made an "L" shape, perfect for conversation. 

The side tables had always been a bit too small for our couch size, so I tucked them into the office and grabbed a spare side table my grandma had given me (that had been in the guest room looking awkward) and stuck that into the corner with a lamp on it.

Then I decided that the writing desk (from Matt's Grandma Dottie) which had been in the entry way since we got it (I wasn't sure where it would go in the house yet and didn't want to be moving it all over the place until a spot was found) and realized it would work nicely in the living room, on the wall where the old couch had been.  So I verrry carefully carried it upstairs into the living room (I'm a nut like that...I never wait to move furniture when Matt can help.  I beast it up and carry it myself), placed the 2nd lamp and some books on it.  The decor will change at some point, but I was running out of creative steam at this point.

Ok, here's a couple photos I snapped on my way out the door this morning.  First order of things....get a bigger area rug (this weekend probably) and scavenge Craigslist for a circle coffee table (which I will probably paint), hang different wall art, and search Etsy for throw pillows...Also painting the whole room grey.

Ok, so a quick explanation.  Ty Cobb (It's his 3rd birthday today!) has a bad habit of digging in the old couch (or the bed, or the backseat of the car) when he gets frustrated...so one side of each of the couch cushions have huge rips in them from him.  And of course the sides with rips in them are on opposite sides, so there will always be one showing, even when we flip and switch them around. : /  Sooo, that is why there is a sheet on the couch until we get a cover for it...or a new couch.  And how awkward does that bench/coffee table look?  :)  My search for a new one begins today.  Here's the writing desk:

The table decor definately needs some work, but it will do for now.  I tucked that little bench underneath for an extra seat for company.  But how gorgeous is that desk?!  I love the diamond detail on the front of it.  The diamond panel actually opens up and half of the top folds open with lots of cubbies and storage inside it.  I'll show it off another time. :)

So anyway, that was my Thursday night.  Oh, I also moved the dining room table around and did about 4 loads of laundry......I need a hobby.  Tonight will be better spent...It's my littl guy's birthday, so K9 custard (ice cream) and new puppie toys are in order for the dogs....and Matt just called to let me know he'll be home tonight....Dilly Bars for the humans!! :)  Yeah, we get pretty crazy in the Kendall household.

{Holy long hair!!}

{haha this was last weekend after a bath...he got a haircut 2 days later :)  }

Happy Birthday Ty Cobb!!! (Since he obviously reads this blog)

~S~