They are building a new house on the lot next to ours. I’m a little sad to see it filled with a house, but not at all sad that today they removed a bunch of the messy, overgrown, half-dead pine trees that bordered our lot. Hurray!
As an added bonus, watching the tree felling process kept Alethea and Lydia busy all morning. It just might be the next olympic sport.
I know we’ve put a lot of energy into the front porch this summer, so it’s hard to believe. I myself never intended to give up our current house, but this deal is just to good to pass by: Click Here to See Our New House
We took a little four day vacation together as a family this past Saturday-Tuesday. It was actually two mini vacations rolled into one slightly larger one. We spent two days at a lake with friends and two days camping on the North Shore (Lake Superior) with my family. Here are my favorite pictures from the trip:
As you can tell, the girls were a little out of their element, and from time to time it showed, but we really did have a good trip. They were troopers and apart from Lydia’s bedtime melt-down on our first camping night and some serious whining from the back seat during the car ride home, we all stayed happy and well-occupied. Alethea was more daring in trying new thing than I expected her to be and both girls were surprisingly careful about keeping a safe distance from the fire, which I was happy about. Alethea says her favorite part was roasting marshmallows and I’d say both girls also enjoyed the wild raspberry picking/eating along the trail we hiked.
I’ll admit that I am extremely glad to be home to my own bed, hot water and indoor plumbing, but it was totally worth the sore back and showerless days to see Alethea and Lydia having fun exploring the great outdoors. In fact, we’re already planning for next years trip. Can’t wait!
No, the front porch isn’t done yet. We hit it hard this past weekend and I am happy to report that all of the masonry and major construction is done. We are sensing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but still have some painting, staining and other finish work to do. Soon. It will be done soon. But in the mean time…
I am ashamed to say that I have been hoarding an embarrassment of picture frame riches in my garage for the past 12 months. Can you believe that I have had half-a-dozen large and beautiful empty picture frames for a year now and haven’t managed to do a single project with them yet? *Hangs head in shame*
But this past weekend that all changed. I finally got one of them transformed and up on my wall. Here’s how it went down…
Last year we got a stack of great frames from Peter’s parents who were cleaning out his great-aunt’s house. I loved this one in particular:
I thought it would make a great frame for a mirror, but I wasn’t sure where one might get a custom sized chunk of mirror. I thought I might have to call one of those glass specialist trucks, but since that seemed likely to be pricey, I made a quick call to Lowes first. I found out that yes, Lowes does cut custom sized mirrors (up to a certain size), but the guy on the phone was a little fuzzy on the details.
I had a bunch of other stuff to pick up for the front porch project anyway, so the girls and I made a trip one morning to grab what we needed and check out the mirror cutting situation. Turns out that you buy a large piece of mirror (I think it was 30″x36″) for $17 and then they cut off the piece that you need. I wish I had known that ahead of time, because I only wanted a 15″x20″ chunk, but after the guy cut it, he asked me if I wanted the rest of the mirror. And what was I going to say, “No, I paid for it, and it’s perfectly good mirror, but please throw it in the trash”? Nope, couldn’t do it, so I ended up with not one, but two 15″x20″ pieces as well as two smaller 15″x16″ sections. (Anyone else sense more mirror projects in my future?)
Back at home, I headed outside to freshen up the picture frame with several coats of gloss white spray paint. While the paint was drying, I attempted to photograph my recent Lowes acquisition.
Is it a mirror or a portal to another dimension?
So photographing a mirror ended up being a little tricky, but I tell you, if I had known how simple the actual project was going to be, I would have done it ages ago. One trip to Lowes, a few coats of spray paint, put in some staples with a staple gun, bend staples away from frame, insert mirror, bend staples back and ‘voila!’ it’s done! One gorgeous framed mirror for around $20, with paint and extra mirror pieces to spare. Love it!
Lydia thought it was pretty great too.
We had a good time playing with the mirror together.
So that was my adventure in DIY mirror framing. Right now the finished product is hanging in my dining room, but I’m not sure if that is its permanent home. We’ll see where it ends up. I feel like it could look good in just about any room of our house.
It might even look good outside. But with our super slick new front porch, the mirror probably wouldn’t get the attention it deserves. I’d say it takes something pretty adorable to distract from something so fabulous as a nearly finished front porch.
Wouldn’t you agree?
Update: To view the completed front porch project, click here.
There is little doubt in my mind that this summer will go down in our family history as the “Summer of the Front Porch Project”. What was supposed to be a relatively simple 4-6 week project in May and early June has grown and evolved (as DIY projects are prone to do) and we are now pushing to finish our front porch facelift by the end of July… cross your fingers… and maybe your toes too.
We’ve spent nearly every free weeknight and weekend in the past month slowly chipping away at this, bit by bit. And we’re making progress. We like progress, not as much as we like ‘done’, but progress is good too.
However, before I tell you where we are now, let’s take a look at just how far we’ve come already.
Here is our front porch a la March 2010:
This was about 14 months after we moved into the house, but our first year of home ownership was dominated by a highly sensitive infant who didn’t like to sleep… ever… landscaping wasn’t really a priority for us. As Alethea started doing better a night, we slowly came out of the fog of sleep deprivation, looked around, and realized things outside our home were looking less like a dream and more like a nightmare.
Our problems were plentiful, but just to highlight the biggest eye sores:
1. The pebble landscaping rock wasn’t a fabulous product to begin with, but it was made worse by the fact that no weed barrier had been installed under the rocks. Pebbles mixed with weeds just aren’t a good look.
2. The unattractive plastic edging was missing in places and coming loose in others.
3. The ultra cheap solar lights we stuck in there as our one attempt to spruce things up during our first summer in the home, didn’t work very well and just added to the visual clutter.
4. The grass. Oh the grass. You’d never know we’d used TruGreen the whole summer before, would you? I don’t blame TruGreen though. The house was vacant almost a whole year before we bought it and the lawn needed extreme TLC.
So in the summer of 2010 our goals were to replace the pebbles and the plastic edging with something more attractive, and to water and fertilize on a consistent schedule to try and resuscitate the lawn. (We actually talked about just ripping out all the grass and starting over, but that seemed like a crazy amount of time and labor, so we thought we’d try to work with what we had first.)
Fast forward sixteen months to July 2011…
As you can see, we replaced the plastic edging with gray square bricks, took out the pebbles to put down mulch, and had green grass growing! We loved the brick edging and were thrilled that the grass was making progress, but the mulch, well, turns out mulch is not in fact better than little pebbles. Little pebbles at least don’t lose their color and get all trampled down and gross looking. Yeah, we didn’t like the mulch and it didn’t keep the weeds from growing either. It’s a shame that my gorgeous orange begonia’s only friends at the corner were some vicious two foot tall stinging nettles.
Be still my beating heart. Begonias are my favorite shade plant ever. So exquisite! But I digress…
So we chalked the mulch up to a learning experience and decided to try again. This time with bigger, cooler rocks, complete with weed barrier underlay. And also, we knew we had to do something about our sorry solar lights. They just had to go.
After searching multiple home improvement stores and many corners of the internet, we finally stumbled upon these stylish, but affordable landscaping lights at Menard’s. Whoa, did I just use ‘stylish’ and ‘Menard’s’ in the same sentence? Crazy, but we do love our lights.
So this spring, when the snow melted and the azaleas were in bloom, things looked better than they ever had before.
Better, yes, but still not finished.
Nice looking border, cool rocks with some boulders mixed in, and the new lights of course. All good. But everything behind the good stuff is bad, very, very bad. The underside of our porch and bare foundation aren’t exactly polished. Enter our 2012 Front Porch Facelift Plan.
The first thing that we knew we wanted to do was to build a wooden screen between the support posts to block the view through to our home’s foundation. We considered several different styles, but thought that something similar to this inspiration photo would fit the character of our house best, only ours will be stained, not painted.
But what the screen won’t cover is the huge irregularly shaped post footings.
We threw around a bunch of ideas (paint them, build a wood box over them, clad them with stone), but every plan seemed to draw more attention to them and what we really wanted was to make them disappear. Then I had a thought. Would a large gray footing disappear if it was covered by some other large gray blocks? We stacked some up to find out.
We loved it, so building stone columns on the four footings became part of the plan. (The ‘columns’ will actually only be two sided, since the screen will cover the inner sections of the footings, we won’t bother to put blocks where no one will see them.) As you can probably tell from the photo, this was just a quick-trick-block-stack, when we build them for real, we’ll use mortar to hold them in place. Neither Peter nor I has ever mortared anything, so this could be fun, but we figured one has to start somewhere and a non-structural, practically stands up on its own stack of big cement blocks seemed like an easy enough project. We haven’t done it yet though, so we’ll see!
So we had screen plans and we had column building plans, but it didn’t seem like there was much point in sprucing up the whole underside of the porch if we didn’t spruce up the existing structure too, so the whole porch will be getting a fresh coat of paint/stain, including the previously untouched staircase. Why was it never painted? We just don’t know.
And since the stair treads and risers were a hodgepodge of different sized boards, Peter decided to replace all of those too. So our four task list was: 1) Sand/paint/stain existing porch, 2) Replace existing stair treads and risers, 3) Construct screen around underside of porch (including access doors on either end), and 4) Build block columns on each of the four footings.
So that’s what we’ve been doing, and like I said before, we’re making progress. At least I think we are.
This is progress, right?!?
In any case, I’m off to work on the front porch some more now. Praise God for a Saturday that isn’t in the upper 90s and muggy. Maybe my stain will actually dry correctly this weekend. Here’s hoping!
Okay, so we live in the ‘burbs where nothing terribly interesting happens crime wise (not that I’m complaining). The past several months the community newspaper crime reports have been nothing more exciting than petty theft and DWIs, but a recent paper was much more entertaining. Mixed in with a whole lot of fireworks noise complaints, here were the highlights:
* “A hubcap was reported stolen overnight from a vehicle…. The other hubcaps were reported loose on the vehicle.” Anyone else think the police were skeptical about the “theft”?
* “A 53-foot semi trailer that contained scrap metal valued at about $100,000 was reported stolen from a business.” One word… HOW?
* “Theft of nachos without paying was reported from a business. A man ran out of the store without paying.” At which point an employee called out, ‘Dude, that’s not-cho cheese!’
* Let’s count the people involved in this next one… “A disturbing the peace call was reported. Women (at least two) reported getting into a taxi with a friend (one more, so we’re at 3 plus a driver) when another group of females (at least three) got in and stared a fight.” So by my count that’s at least 7 people… 7 people fighting in a taxi cab, oh and by the way, “Cell phone missing.” I guess when a cab is that crowded, it’s easy to lose track of one’s belongings?
* “Suspicious activity was reported at a business. Report of three males, female in vehicle with North Carolina plates washing windows.” I tell ya, you gotta watch out for those Tar Heel window washers.
* Natural selection at work… “Passerby called police and reported male was skateboarding the wrong way in traffic.”
* Now for my favorite, “Suspicious activity was reported. White car reportedly going from mailbox to mailbox. Occupants of vehicle were located by police a few blocks away delivering newspapers.”
Well, y’all, I’m going outside to shoot off some firecrackers. “Why no, Officer, I have no idea where those sounds were coming from, try the neighbor’s.”
A Swing at the Park:
Followed by a Dish of Ice Cream:
Rounded Out with a Trip Through the Garden Hose:
That was our lovely morning.
What are your favorite ingredients to make a perfect summer day?
Clothes and Cats, two reasons I’ve made trips to Roseville in the last three days. Vastly different motivations, I know, but both trips had happy endings, so I thought I’d share.
Tuesday I went to visit my favorite clothing thrift store: Clothes Mentor. I should be more specific, I went to visit the one and only thrift store where I buy clothing for myself. You see, I love buying things at thrift stores. Things for my house, books, vases, furniture, clothes for my kids, it’s all good! But I just can’t stand digging through piles of random clothing to try and discover (if I’m lucky) one thing I might possibly wear. I guess maybe I’m too picky.
But Clothes Mentor is different. They only carry brand name items that have been in stores within the last one or two years. The store is clean and bright and so well organized. Everything is by type of item (jeans, pants, t-shirts, long sleeved shirts, dresses, etc) then subdivided by size and then they hang it all in order by color, which is fantastic. I love it. If I’m trying to locate, for example, a black t-shirt in a size medium, there’s just one little place in the store to look.
Here’s my loot from Tuesday’s trip:
One pair of Apt. 9 jeans, one GAP t-shirt, one Banana Republic top, two Limited tops, a Stone Mountain purse and a pair of (totally didn’t need them, but couldn’t resist) BCBG red suede shoes. I think I did pretty good for $75 and change.
For anyone who wants to check it out, here is the link to the Clothes Mentor website. They’ve apparently got fifty-seven stores in twenty-three states, so there may be one near you!
Today was my second trip to Roseville. This one wasn’t something I was planning. It all started when I was getting Lydia out of her crib in the morning. I glanced out the window and noticed some movement in the corner of our yard. It was one of the neighborhood cats who appeared to be batting at something. “Oh good, he’s got a mouse,” I thought, then looked a little closer and realized it was a little bird.
Now I knew as I ran down the stairs that if Peter had been home, he would have thought I was being silly, but honestly, it wasn’t like the cat was hungry. The cat has loving, attentive owners who feed him on a regular basis. He didn’t need the poor baby bird for nourishment, so I intervened. I scooped up the cat and sent him off in the direction of home, grabbed a box and an old towel from the garage and took the little bird (who had an obviously injured wing) into the house.
The girls were very interested in the baby bird, but agreed to let him rest while they ate breakfast and got dressed. Once everyone was ready, Lydia, Alethea, Dee and the bird had a brief meet and greet before we all piled into the car and headed off.
Our destination? The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center on Dale Street.
My sister’s friend told me about it a while back. They take orphaned or injured wild mammals (including rodents), birds and reptiles. While the pictures in the lobby of the Trumpeter Swan and the baby beaver were a lot more impressive than one little fledgling Yellow Bellied Sapsucker (which is what they tell me our feathered friend was), it was still an exciting little excursion for me and the girls. During the ride down I got to answer Alethea’s bird questions: “Are the birds in the sky dirty too? Or just the one we found?” and “Why don’t birds wear shoes?”
So now you all know where to find deals on designer duds as well as a place to take injured squirrels, all in Roseville, Minnesota. Aren’t you glad you stopped by? And why don’t birds wear shoes, anyway?
Lydia turned eighteen months old on the fifth of this month. Happy one and a half years birthday, Baby Girl!
Unfortunately, my general lack of blogging the past five months has extended to my children’s updates, so my last Lydia post was in January. Sorry! I just went back and read what she was doing and well, she’s changed quite dramatically since she was 12 months old. Here’s what’s going on now…
At Lydia’s eighteen month check-up she got a passing grade on everything but her milk consumption. She loves yogurt and cheese and (of course) ice cream, but milk is not her food of choice. Despite that, she has grown and her current stats are: Height – 30.25 inches, Weight – 25.2 lbs, and Head Circumference – 48.5 cm. That means she is in the 15th percentile for height, 66th for weight and 93rd for head circumference.
Lydia’s motor skills are progressing nicely. She walks confidently on most terrains, tries to run, turns in circles while playing the ‘spinning game’ with Alethea and climbs on everything. She also has good fine motor skills and enjoys coloring with crayons, sticking stickers onto paper and picking up little bits of anything off the floor to eat them.
Her vocabulary is also growing by leaps and bounds. I’m not sure how many words she’s said, I’ve lost track, but it seems like she’s got most of her daily use nouns and verbs down, you know: hug, cup, truck, brush, pants, up, bye-bye, yellow, car, juice, pillow, boat, star, bath, etc. She says Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa, Poppa, and her own name: Dee-dee-ya! Lately she’s even been putting two words together like today when she pulled The Runaway Bunny and Are You My Bunny? off her bookshelf and said to me, “Buddy book!” I replied, “Yes, those books are both about bunnies, aren’t they?” And then she held them out to me and said, “Two!” (I’ve been working on counting skills with Alethea lately and I guess I didn’t realize Lydia was paying that much attention.)
As far as her family relationships go, she continues to love Mommy and Daddy fairly equally and nothing pleases her more than when everyone is all together. Whenever she gets up from bed, she always asks the getting up parent where the other parents is. She also adores Alethea, as in, I’m pretty sure she thinks Alethea can walk on water. Despite this Alethea and Lydia have had a rocky five months or so where they almost never played together and generally couldn’t even be in the same room at the same time without constant discord since Lydia had a tendency to mess up whatever Alethea was trying to play with. However, that seems to be resolving itself to a great degree lately as Lydia has become more adept at playing pretend. Alethea has also discovered that Lydia is largely willing to do whatever Alethea tells her to. Alethea has been known to use that knowledge to her advantage from time to time.
Lydia’s looks haven’t changed a whole lot in looks over the last six months. She’s gotten a little taller, a little slimmer, and has a bit more hair than she did at 12 months. Her eyes are still a really interesting gray around the outside, fading to brown at the center. I’m kind of half waiting for them to go all brown, but now that she’s 18 months, I’ve started to let myself hope that her eyes always will be this beautifully unique color:
Things Lydia likes right now are Baa-Baa (her stuffed lamb), bee-yup (to “wrap up” in a cozy blanket), playing outside, reading books, and trying to get her hands on whatever toys Alethea is playing with. Her favorite foods are red grapes, yogurt, anything sweet, and whatever is on the floor after a meal (even if it is something she refused to eat while she was at the table).
She dislikes most vegetables, not being allowed to play with Alethea’s toys, going into her crib at night, being told ‘no’ about anything, and most of all, having to go to the nursery at church on Sundays. She really likes the toys in there, but can’t stand the idea that she isn’t allowed to leave when she’s ready to go find Mommy and Daddy.
We love you, Lydia Grace! It’s hard to believe that you are already closer to being a two year old than to being just one, but we are trying to soak up every moment with you, our happy, goofy girl!
I just dropped my iPhone into a can of paint. It sank right to the bottom…. very quickly.
This ranks right up there with the time my pink Motorola RAZR went flying out my car window onto the interstate outside Philly, although at least this time there aren’t PA State Troopers to witness my shame.
The phone isn’t working at the moment. I’ll let it dry off and see how things look in the morning. I’ve been telling Peter for months now that I need to go and get a new phone, but I’ve been putting it off because I kind of resent spending money on electronics that will just become outdated anyway. Barring a miracle though, I’d say that now I really actually need to go get a new phone. I suppose that’s what I get for painting at 2am.
So anyway, if anyone needs to get a hold of me… call the house.
