Our Busy Season!

We had a great Mother's Day celebrating with our moms!

Friday after work, we headed to Trussville for a couple of days. It was a nice change to see my family two weekends in a row! That night, Jenn and I made a pie for Mom as a Mother's Day dessert. We ended up running out to Publix twice because we forgot all of the ingredients the first time...oops! It was worth it though...that pie was yummy. If you're looking for a rich, creamy chocolate pie, you need to try this Rich Chocolate Truffle Pie. Another allrecipes.com winner!

Mom threw a small graduation party for Jenn on Saturday for lunch. It was a lot of fun! We ate hamburgers, several sides, and the best strawberry cake I've ever had from Edgar's Bakery.

That night, after eating pizza and a tiny sliver of pie (because we were so stuffed from all that food), Travis and I headed back home. We are both teaching Bible classes at church right now, so we had to be back in town by Sunday morning.

We ate lunch with Cheryl, Emily, and Melissa on Sunday. Travis is getting to be a pretty good grill master because the steaks were awesome! He's had his eye on a nice grill for a while (because we still haven't bought one), but he's waiting on it to go on sale. Hopefully we'll be able to get it sometime soon though!

Last night, with Alisha and Tyler back in town, we all ate supper at Phil Sandoval's. It was our first time to eat there, and it was really good.

Now after eating all that food this weekend, no wonder I felt like I needed to go running this morning! :)

I guess I'm unofficially a mom to the kitties, so of course they wanted to celebrate. In honor of Mother's Day, they left me a nice present to find when we got back home Saturday night. One of them had thrown up all over the carpet and rug in our living room...yuck! Luckily, we got it all cleaned up pretty easily. I think it must have been a combination of eating too much at one time + a hairball. Gross. They must have felt bad about it, though, because when we got home last night from supper and running a few errands, they'd left me a nice present on the bathmat in the guest bathroom. Yesterday afternoon, I "deadheaded" a few flowers in our flower beds, and I'd brought them inside and thrown them away in the trashcan in the study. Well, someone (probably Miss Gabby) decided to go digging in the trash, and she carried one of the flowers all the way from the study into the bathroom. Ha! What a silly cat. I guess I'd rather find dead flowers than the alternative though... :)

Speaking of our flower beds, flowers are blooming, and shrubs are growing...so I guess we're doing something right! It's really cool to go outside every day and see how all of the plants are growing and changing. Here are a few pictures so you can see for yourself!

Astra Double Blue Balloon Flower

I love the color! These are in our left flower bed...

Our hydrangeas are blooming too!

Lots of daisies popping up now...

Very pretty!

Everything is really growing!

As usual, our summer is starting to get really busy. We don't have a free weekend until mid-June! This weekend, we've got 3 parties/showers to go to between the two of us. Next weekend is Memorial Day weekend, and I'm hoping we can go to the lake for a couple of days with my family. Then the next weekend, we leave for Fripp Island! Can't wait for that! Not sure if I've mentioned this already, but we are going to stop in Savannah for the day before heading to Fripp. Neither of us has ever been, so we're looking forward to it. Any suggestions on things to do/places to eat? I'm thinking we'll definitely have to try Paula Deen's restaurant!

Well, that's about it for this update. We're just staying busy as usual! :)

Curb Appeal: Before and After

As of Sunday afternoon at 4:35 PM, Travis and I finally finished our landscaping project!!!!! We are SO GLAD to be through. As with most all of our projects, this one turned into something bigger than we ever anticipated...both in how much money it cost and how much time we spent on it. I just hope it will be worth the effort. I know how much money we spent on the project, but there's no telling how many hours we spent researching plants, going to nurseries, digging holes, breaking up huge chunks of red clay, moving drainage pipes, lining rocks along the flower beds, planting flowers and shrubs, and mulching. It has definitely consumed most of our free time since mid-February.

Since neither of us had ever done anything like this before, we were pretty much just learning as we went along. That's half the fun of it, right? Here are some things we learned along the way:

1. Drainage pipes in flower beds are a hassle! We patched holes in it once and later rerouted it trying to move it to the best possible spot, and it still ended up being in the way! Note to self: The next house we buy will either need to have beautiful flower beds already or a different drainage system. Or, maybe we'll just live in this house forever :) I don't want to even think about moving after doing all this work!

2. Sometimes it helps to have a map. I laughed at Travis for drawing our flower beds on graph paper with measurements, but it really was helpful when we got to the nursery to know how much room we had for planting. Yay for an engineer husband!

3. Digging those holes is no joke. I never dreamed it would take as long as it did to get everything planted, especially the shrubs. We followed the directions for digging the holes (twice as wide and 1.5 times as deep as the pot), and that made for some MASSIVE holes. Poor Travis did all of the digging, and I was the measurer. He's gotten quite a workout since we started this project; I think he dug 17 holes this past Saturday alone.

4. Even concrete foundation can't stop a man on a mission. When we got ready to plant our cute little hostas along the side of the house near the front porch, it didn't take much digging to find out that the house's foundation was taking up most of the room where we were trying to dig. No problem for Travis. Since we don't have a jackhammer (ha!), he resorted to using the pickaxe to chip away at the concrete until we had enough room to plant our 3 little hostas. It took over 2 hours to dig those 3 holes. Now if our house starts sagging, I guess we'll say it was a bad idea...haha. But, for now, it seems to have been worth all the trouble!

5. Doing the job right ain't cheap or easy, but it usually works out for the best. I would say that "Do the job right" is probably Travis's motto for life. I'm always the one wanting us to get done faster, and he's the one saying "No shortcuts!". Well, even though it took this long to get finished, I'm really happy with the results. I guess we could have just gone to Lowe's or Home Depot and bought a bunch of shrubs and flowers without researching them beforehand, but hopefully this way, we've picked out stuff that won't get too out of control and will look good and grow well where we've planted it.

Now, without further ado, here are a few "before" pictures to show you what we were dealing with a couple of months ago:

Back in September....before our hard work began!

Little pitiful looking shrubs...and lots of weeds!

Back in October, we dug up everything!

A blank slate!!

And, now, the moment you've all been waiting for.....

HOORAY!

Side view (with the mailbox, trees, and driveway)

Now, for some close-up shots...

The mailbox!

Here, we planted two Daisy May Shasta Daisies...

What the daisies will look like! :)

Big maple tree with fresh mulch and new rocks!

The magnolia...where I'll be planting some day lilies later this spring/summer

The other maple tree!

Small flower bed by the garage door....our hydrangeas are really growing!

Left flower bed

Another view of the left flower bed

If you want to read about the shrubs we planted a few weeks ago, go here. Since then, we planted a Tropical White Canna on the corner by the green tower boxwood. Here's what it will look like in bloom:

Tropical white canna

We also planted 3 wolverine hostas in between some of the shrubs we'd already planted.

What the wolverine hostas will look like full grown

This past weekend, we planted some small flowers called Astra Double Blue balloon flowers in front of the shrubs. They won't bloom until summer, but hopefully they'll be really pretty and add some color to the left flower bed...

Astra Double Blue balloon flowers

Moving along...

The front entry area...ignore the dirty sidewalk! :)

You can see 3 small hostas on the right and 2 on the left...the right side near the house is where Travis went to town with that pickaxe!

Twist of lime hosta...one of our favorite things we planted!

Right flower bed

Right flower bed again

You can read about the shrubs and the Japanese maple that we planted a few weeks ago here.  On Saturday, we added some perennial flowers at the front of the bed. We picked out four different types. None of them are really blooming yet, so this is what they'll hopefully look like soon! :)

Arizona Sun gaillardia...also called a blanket flower

Professor Kippenburg dwarf aster

Snowdrop anemone

Tuscan Sun heliopsis

We tried to pick out flowers that will bloom throughout the spring, summer, and fall at different times, so we'll see how we did over the next few months I guess!

So, that's it I guess! I'm not sure the pictures do it justice, but it really is a huge improvement. And, hopefully it will look even better in a few years when the shrubs are bigger and more substantial. Right now, everything is still small, but even in just a few weeks, it's been amazing to see how much they've already grown!

Was it worth all the time and money spent? We think so!! :)

Travis says our next big landscaping project will be sodding the front yard, but that will probably have to wait until next spring. 

And, after that....maybe we'll be ready to tackle making some flower beds along the back of the house! At least we'd be starting with a blank canvas there!! Give us a few years and we'll have forgotten how much work this all was!! :)

The Great Outdoors

We are spending a lot more time outside than usual with our big landscaping project, and I'm really enjoying it. It's nice to enjoy the sunshine and see all of the plants and trees blooming again. God really created a beautiful world!

This past weekend was dedicating to outlining our flower beds, trees, and mailbox with rock. I just have to say....what a big improvement!!! I was pretty nervous about it before we bought the rock at Reseda. I had a hard time picturing how it would look with our red brick house. Plus, the rock was going to cost over $200! So, if it didn't turn out very good, there goes all that money down the drain! Luckily, although we are pretty frugal in most areas, our house projects usually spare no expense as far as Travis is concerned. So, he wasn't worried about it at all. That is, until the guy at Reseda loaded the pallet of rock into the back of the truck. I think Travis was about to panic thinking that Jeff's truck was going to fall apart under the weight of the pallet. Luckily, the truck did just fine, and we made it home with all the rock and the truck in one piece. Whew! :) Thanks again, Jeff and Melissa, for letting us borrow your truck! Hopefully we can get it back to you after this coming weekend! :)

We bought the rock early Friday afternoon and spent the rest of the daylight hours starting our project. Since we obviously couldn't lift the pallet out of the truck ourselves (where was that forklift when we needed it?), we had to take the rocks out of the pallet by hand and load them into a wheelbarrow. It wasn't too hard. Travis commented that this part of the project was the most fun yet "because it was a lot like Tetris". Trying to fit the rocks together was pretty fun and a nice break from digging holes! We got the left flower bed and small semi-circle bed finished on Friday, and we were so happy with the results!

Yay!

Double yay!

What a difference those rocks make!

Saturday, we woke up early and got started a little after 7:30 AM. We got the right flower bed done by about 12:30 PM. Before laying the rock down on that side, we put in a metal liner to keep the grass/weeds from growing into the flower bed. We decided not to worry with that on the left flower bed since it is lined by the sidewalk. Installing the metal liner was pretty easy. You just lay it out and hammer it down with stakes. We put the rock in front of the liner so you can't even see it from the road. It looks great!

Putting in the metal liner

Unloading the rocks

The right side is finished

Yay!

After a break for lunch, we went back outside to start outlining around the trees. We have two maple trees and one magnolia tree in our front yard. Previously, they were outlined with really ugly red brick that didn't even match the color of the brick in our house. It really looked bad. The new rocks are another big improvement! We had to stop several times during the afternoon because quick rain showers would pop up. So, we'd go inside for a few minutes to wait it out. But, finally we got finished!

It all matches!

Our last project of the day was outlining the mailbox with the remaining rock. We were almost out of the rock by this point, but luckily we had enough to finish. Soon, there will hopefully be some pretty flowers planted here!

Yay!

By the end of those two days, I felt like I'd done about 1,000 squats at the gym. So much bending down and standing back up! But, it was worth it!

I have to confess that we're not quite finished with the rock part of the project. Before we lined the left flower bed with rock, we dug a shallow trench for the rocks to sit in. They are stacked two high, but you can really only see the top layer because of the sidewalk. However, on the right side, you can see both layers clearly. We are going to go back and add some dirt back under the rocks on the left side to make both layers visible. We think it will look better overall that way. We are planning to do that tonight, so hopefully it will be pretty quick and simple!

This weekend, we are planning to finish this landscaping project for good! We want to plant a few flowers in between the shrubs and then add a layer of mulch to all of the beds. And that should do it! Next week, hopefully I'll be able to post some good "before and after" pictures!! :)

Although landscaping has taken up a lot of our time lately, we are still somehow getting our normal weekly activities done too. You know, things like working, sleeping, eating, running, etc. Once we get this landscaping finished, I think we'll take a few weeks off from house projects. I have a feeling our schedules are about to get pretty busy anyway with a half-marathon, graduations, teaching Bible classes at church, birthdays, vacations, and Guntersville camp coming up anyway. May and June especially are always pretty hectic!

Speaking of running, I took a week off before running for the first time again last night. Apparently, the week off only served to make me MORE out of breath; it did nothing for my foot. It hurt as bad as ever if not worse. It's been pretty discouraging the past few weeks to be getting slower instead of faster, but oh well. At this point, I'll just be glad to finish the race and "retire" from long distance races. I think my body is better suited for 5Ks anyway! The race is a month from tomorrow, so I'll just have to tough it out until then...

I'll leave you with a few pictures of Gabby and me. In the middle of a rain shower on Saturday, I decided to try to snap our picture...

Doesn't Gabby look excited to be in the picture? :)

Oh my. I can't help laughing when I look at that! Luckily, Travis didn't mind snapping a much better pic for us. I know Gabby was relieved to get both of her eyes in this one!

I love her!!

I love Felix too...he just doesn't cooperate too much when he's held. A.K.A. bloody-battle-with-Travis-on our-anniversary. He'll never live that one down! At least it's somewhat funny now looking back on it :)

There's always something going on around here, that's for sure!!