House Projects

We've been working hard since we moved in to get some projects done, a lot of which have been many years coming.  There's nothing like moving into a new house to motivate us to get stuff done!  

One big priority was a garden space.  Joe and I have both had the dream of having a big garden and lots of fruit trees for awhile now.  We've made some attempts, and have benefited from some mature fruit trees at different houses, but what with moving every year and renting often it hasn't happened yet.  So, we decided now was the time to make it happen.  We moved in a little late to do much but we decided to build and fill garden boxes so we'd be all ready for spring.  Thanks to some instruction and inspiration from my favorite cooking blog here, we got to work.

It took us a few hours on a Saturday to build the boxes.  Then, we had the soil and compost delivered and spent a good 5 hours filling the boxes another day.  That was some back-breaking work!  We also had to fill in a big dip in our yard with soil so we could put the boxes there in the corner (I don't know if you can see where the fence goes down).  It was fun working together with Joe, though.  I spent a few more hours spread out over a couple days staining the boxes, too, and they were finally done.

We can't wait to plant!

I spent pretty much a whole day finally checking something off my to-do list that I'd had on there for years.  We had a bunch of canvas prints that we'd gotten from Africa on different trips.  I decided to finally build some wood frames so I could mount them and hang them up.  It was kind of exhausting cutting the wood with a hand saw but super fun using a staple gun.  Now I need to come up with some more reasons to use that thing. :)

I finally got around to painting our little book shelf that we got from DI years ago.  It was pretty beat-up.  

Notice the decorations our children added:

I was actually kind of sad to sand out that heart with "E" and "N" in it.  At least the culprit was defacing property with a love of her sister in mind while doing it. :)

I love how it turned out:

Eli enjoying the bookshelf:

Here's a shot of our loft, which is mostly put together:

Finally, it was time to do the same to Elizabeth's dresser.  It is actually my dresser from my room growing up (and my sister's before that) and we gave it to Elizabeth way back on her 7th birthday when she requested her own dresser as a gift.  I told her she could pick out a color and we would paint it.  About a year after that we finally picked out a paint color and about two years later here we are getting it done.

Before:

After:

We had fun sanding it and painting it together (along with some help from Natalie and some neighbor girls).  Joe helped with putting on the new drawer handles.  I really like how it turned out, too.  We still have a little bit of that red paint left.  We'll see if anything else gets a makeover!