Dirt! And Lots of It

The past few days I've been spending time at my favorate garden center The Natural Gardener, which also happens to be about a mile from our house.

The girls and I filled a wagon full of flowers and plants for the front rock beds. Most of them are in the ground.

I went back the next day to bag my own dirt. I'm so glad that Skip came with is on his lunch break to watch the girls. I shoveled 10 50-lb bags. Holy crap, I get why it's so much cheaper to bag it yourself. I was so tired by the end that I had a hard time getting the bags in the trunk of the car.

I built a couple of raised veggie beds in the backyard, one from cedar board and the other from stone, then filled them with the 500lbs of dirt. The veggies go in tomorrow.

Stay tuned for pictures.

Weeds

I dreamt last night. It's been a long time since I've slept like that.

Today was great! We got alot done with the house. Skip and I went to Lowe's without the girls. I forget how easy it is to get things done without them. Don't get me wrong I love those two little sweeties.

We bought a new range/oven and microwave to replace the old, non-functioning, avocado green dutch oven. We bought a glass pendant light for the guest bathroom is completely changes the looks of the room. Who know one light could do that. After I paint the walls I'll post pics. This is probably be our first complete remodel project.

For my summer vegetable garden I had planned on building 3 4'x4' boxes. Change of plans after finding out that cedar for each box costs $55. That's way more than I had budgeted, so I bought enough wood for one box that I'll hopefully get to put together tomorrow and I'm going to create the other raised beds with some stone that we have on the property.

I keep going back and forth on where I'm going to place the veggie beds. At first I thought that the only place that would get enough light is in the front yard next to the drive way, but now I think I might try to place them in the backyard so that I can work on them while the girls play. There's not much direct sunlight in back. I'm going to have to cut some of the large branches from a couple of the trees to make it work. Or maybe I'll there will be some in the front and some in the back. I don't know.

And speaking of rocks... I got to spend some more time in the front stone bed this evening. There was a light rain this afternoon and the weather was in the 70s. After the girls went to bed I pulled weeds until it got too dark. There's something very meditative about weeding. I can't put it into words just yet. I'm relieved to know that there are still bugs in our yard even though the sprayed pesticide for ants all over the yard a couple of days before we moved in. Arg. So much for my organic garden. At least for a few months. So far I've seen ladybugs, ants (ha!), doodlebugs, caterpillars, butterflies, a stink bug, a cricket, some beetles, and something that might have been a lacewing (still not up on all my bugs yet)... oh, and Zoe found a pink caterpillar.

I spent about an hour weeding and only got about 10' or 15' done. Oh but I have a huge bucket of weeds as my price at the end of the day. What do I do with them?

Moving Day

We moved. Mostly. The movers came at 8a and brought all the big stuff to our new house. We still have bits and pieces at the duplex. It's all been very surreal. It hasn't sunk in that this is *our* house. I still feel like the bank or the previous owner or someone could change their mind and we'd have to leave.

Skip's parents drove down this afternoon and got us started on the wood floors. Donovan mowed the front yard.

This afternoon I pulled weeds int he stone planting beds while Paige took a nap in the stroller. The weather was perfect: 70s, overcast, slightly breezy. I learned my first gardening lesson - weeds are much easier to pull when they have been watered. We have lots of sticker bur weeds. There are also hollies growing all over the front lawn. Not great on bare feet. I need to research how to get rid of them. Oh and the large holly bushes in front of the house are getting yanked up ASAP.

I dead headed the roses, which leads me to lesson 2: I need clippers :)

Holy Molly Guacamole!

We are going to be home owners in one week! We close on May 3.

The house is a 4 bedroom 2.5 bath with a study. It's the biggest house that we've seen at 1800 sft and it's in Skip's favorite neighborhood Oak Hill.

It's on a beautiful corner lot with tons of trees and almost a third of an acre. I never thought that we would be able to get a house like this.

It was build in 1974 and I seriously believe that the decor has not been updated ever. There's green floral wallpaper in the kitchen and orange and pink floral wallpaper in the kids bathroom. There's more wallpaper in the dining room.

The kitchen sports avocado green counter tops with matching stove and oven. All of the windows are covered in heavy blackout curtains.

With four bedrooms everyone gets a room. The girls will have their playroom and Skip and I will each have our own office. One (or both) of the offices will double as a guest room so for our all out of town friends and family, please come visit!

The formal dinning room is going to be our library. There is also an in between space that the listing agent called a study. We'll be using that area as our TV room. I thought that we wouldn't be able to get any of these things in our first house. These were all long term goals.

We have BIG plans for updating basically everything. We'll start painting as soon as we get the keys. The paint colors I'm looking at are bold. We'll also be replacing the carpet with laminate in the main living areas. All the light fixtures, window treatments, etc need updating. At some point will also overhaul all the baths, knock down some walls and the update kitchen but probably after I go back to work full time.

But the part I'm most looking forward to is the garden. I've been planning my garden for at least 10 years. In the front I'm going to plant naive plants in the rocks above the stone wall. I'll add some more plants to the borders in front of the house. It's difficult to tell from the picture but there are roses all along the front. They're blooming right now. I'm going to take out the holly bushes and add at least one Pride of Barbados and some other plants TBD.

The only part of the yard that gets full sun is the right side. I'm planting my vegetable garden there, at least for this season. We're going to get a tree service to check on the health of the trees and cut back some so that I can get some more sun in the back yard. Then I might be able to move the veggies back there.

I've never grown veggies. I've been doing a lot of reading and feeling overwhelmed with information. I think it's going to be one of those things that you need to do to get it. It's late in the yard to plant many things but I'm going to try to grow snap peas, chard, kale, spinach, okra, cantaloupe, eggplant, watermelon, carrots, asparagus and lots of herbs.

Next season I'll be adding more to the list. I'll also try to replace our lawn with slow growing grasses mixed in with some ground cover. Still looking into this. I wish that Buffalo grass would grow in shade. Mowing the yard this summer is going to be interesting.

The backyard will have a playground and kiddie pool for the girls. We're going to hang a couple of swings in the front yard from the oak trees.

We are going to make our property a certified wildlife habitat. It's actually very easy. Along with all the native plants animals will also find lots of birdseed to munch. I might make a brush pile. There will be some kind of bird bath. We'll have at least 3 or 4 bird feeders, and some bird houses and a bat house. I'm sure I'm forgetting some things but I'm planning on updating the blog as I go.

Zoe's Quotes of the Day

"I'm super duper angry!"

"You can only see what you can see."

Envision It

Last Thursday night I saw a listing for a house that looked amazing. Skip and I decided that we would both see it the next day. I knew that this was going to be our house from the beginning.

On Friday we met our real estate agent there around 1:30p. The house was as near perfect as it gets. The house has a great set up. It's on a cul-de-sac in my favorite neighborhood and backs to a large open space used to collect runoff rainwater. But details are what puts this house over the top.

I usually don't like brick, but somehow they made it work. I love the detail on the top of the front door. This motif was repeated through the interior as well.

The living room is beautiful, large and open to the kitchen and dining room. All of the house has wood laminate floors except for the carpet in the living area. The current owners installed a custom stained concrete fireplace base, and matching counter tops in the kitchen and bath. They are absolutely beautiful.

From the kitchen you can look out to the dining room and the living room. Notice the details.

It also turns out that the current owners share our taste in furnature. We have the EXACT same coffee maker, TV stand, side tables and Ikea dresser.

Love the floating shelves and bamboo blinds in the dinning room

Here's a pic of the master bedroom: small but not too shabby. The master bath was recently updated. The tub was deep enough for an adult to soak fully submerged. I think the bath cabinets are West Elm if I have to guess.

At this point I wanted to buy this house. I knew that this was our house without even seeing the yard in person.

There is a sunroom off the living room. What a wonderful addition. Perfect for the days when it's too cold, hot or mosquitoy to go outside and play. I envisioned our kitties spending a lot of time in this room. Oh, yeah, I forgot that they had our same Ikea kids table in the sunroom. They were using it for a plant stand.

The yard is amazing. The pictures don't do it justice. Again, it's the details. The proportions were very well thought out and there's plenty of room for my garden. There are two "windows" cut out of the back fence so that you can go behind the property out into the hill that leads sown to the water.

There's a gate around the side yard that looks as if it's hiding an A/C unit or trash cans, but when I opened it I found an outdoor shower. How freaken cool. There's also a fort that was built at the top of the fence and a slide. Zoe went down the slide about 10 times and then proclaimed "Let's buy this house!"

Can you believe this laundry room? I'm getting inspired to get more organized just looking at it.

And there's a workshop in the garage that is just screaming to be converted into a studio for Skip.

There's more that's great about this house, but I think you get the point.

I LOVE this house. We decided to make a bid on it that day and start getting everything in order right away.

Around 5p we get the news that there are 3 other offers. We decided to offer more than the asking price with no strings. Our agent told us that our offer was strong and thought we would get it.

We found out the next day that we were outbid. The house sold for almost $10k more than the asking price.

I'm so disappointed. I don't ever fall for houses like this. I feel like I've been rejected by a high school sweetheart. This whole week I've been going over this again and again. All the details that make this house so special. I don't want to look at other houses. I feel completely deflated by this process. Everyone says the same thing in reply - there's another house out there for you, at least you know you can find something you like, etc, etc.

So this post is my message to the universe. I love this house. I want a house that is like this or better. Prove my friends right and let there be another house for me.

Holy Crap! I finished a project

Socks for the Blue Dragon (aka Bennett)

I'm not thrilled with the way that the pattern does the turning of the heal, but otherwise I think these turned out to be pretty cute.