Spring is here?

I'd like to say Spring Has Sprung, but seeing as we had a freeze just last week and it may or may not snow later this week, I think I won't jinx it. Even though the weather gods have been dealing out their cruel trickery this month that didn't stop me from beefing up our front porch with some potted flowers. 

Nana spotted these awesome containers that are nice and tall, but square (which apparently is a rare find in this part of the world) for a great price (like, 12 bucks - and if you're like my husband who doesn't know the price of things past a peanut butter mocha - pots this size and style would normally sit around 50-70 fat dollars.) 

Once the containers were home I filled the better part of the base with mulch (that we dug up from our beds before replacing with rubber mulch) so that it wouldn't weigh a million and a half pounds. Then I put in a saucer similar to this one but it's actually made out of a much thicker black plastic with watering holes. I swear that they have it - it took us a trip to Home Depot then 2 different Lowe's to find it (it ended up being at the one by Woodland if anyone here cares). But the point of having that saucer is to help water irrigation by letting the water drip down through the holes and into the mulch (which is another aid) so it doesn't just sit all up on the surface making the plants float. 

Finally, it was time to fill! We stopped by a cute little flowering tent in Owasso and picked up a bunch of the stuff then I found some pops of color at the Herb Festival. 

We have a good mix of tall height (with the fan looking thing), some medium height, some pops of color, and some trailing things.

I also added in some Rosemary to one of the pots and will probably add some other herbs down the line just so I can have a year round filler.

Then I filled a small terra cotta pot we had with a couple of trailers and a fern thing.

This is one of my purchases from the Herb Fest! It is awesome. This woman makes all of the containers out of reclaimed wood and they are all different shapes and shades. Then she adds moss and succulents along the grid....then after the roots take hold you can hang it on the wall! 

It'll go on the front porch since I think I've reached my limit on succulents on the inside...

And these succulents are all ones I've had I just finally have been able to bring them outside.

Hello, sunshine!

And this is Gary.

Grande Knock Out Rose With a Shot of Nitrogen

Hey guys! Just a quick thing that I found super duper exciting today! Did you know that coffee grounds are great for your soil and gardens because they are rich in nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant growth? And that it keeps away ants, slugs, snails and cats? Did you know that if not used for aiding in soil growth they would be sent to a landfill? Well, did you also know that Starbucks bags up their coffee grounds and saves them for customers daily for free? I didn't, until today!

I walked into my local Starbucks to grab my daily fix and saw a bin on the floor full of large grounds of coffee and I was like, "hmm...that's weird." Until the words "free" on the side really caught my eye. I looked closer and saw the label read that these were meant to be used for you garden and soil and is super eco-friendly. So I double checked and lugged one up to the counter and said, "for real, is this free?" And sure enough there were going to let me lug away this big ole bag out of the store to use as free plant bed nutrients. So I did, thanks Starbucks! The guy at the counter told me that if they don't have some sitting out next time I'm in I can always ask them to start saving some just for me and I can just stop in and ask for my bag. How sweet!

Though I'd share this knowledge I came across today and maybe your local Starbucks or coffee shop has something like this they can offer for you!

Trimmy Trim Trim

Since our house sat on the market for a little over a year before we bought it there were some jungle like growths going on with our trees, especially in the front yard. We're lucky enough to have two large Crepe Myrtle trees planted by the guest bedroom window and a fully grown Eastern Redbud Tree (Oklahoma State Tree, represent!) that's planted by the driveway. However, both of these guys needed a haircut, bad. So thanks to my Aunt C for finding us a multipack of gardening necessitates because we were finally able to trim them up. 

Here is a shot of the Crepe Myrtles with their 5 o'clock shadow. It kind of blocked the guest bedroom window from getting a lot of light from the west and just looked a little messy. 

We learned that by having all these little guys down at the bottom that they are taking water from the main trunks (rude). And since these are Crepe Myrtle trees and not bushes they need not look this bushy. 

Ta-da! All cleaned up and fancy looking. Now you can see our guest bedroom window (which we eventually want to put shutters on - a big list of future projects will be coming soon). 

I think it just brings so much more curb appeal to the front porch area with them cleaned up. I think it makes them look taller as well so that must make them feel pretty good. 

Here's a shot of the Redbud all hairy and stuff. You can't even see the front porch or front door. 

You can't really tell in this photo but some of the limbs were hanging over into the driveway and made it almost impossible for a passenger to get out on the side without getting scratched in the face by our Redbud. So off with their head limbs! 

But we had to be super careful while trimming and had to pay attention to which branches and twigs we were removing because we have this little guy living up there. We think it's a dove nest and boy are they feisty so we don't want to tick them off.  

Here is a shot of the after. We kept some of those low hanging limbs because we were able to move other limbs that have been weighing them down so I'm thinking they'll start to grow upwards here pretty soon.

We hope to get a nice flower/plant bed around the base of the Redbud and add some things by the Crepe Myrtles. We have been debating on planting another tree in the front yard or maybe just some privacy bushes. All of this is going to wait until next year because we've already passed the good planting and transplanting times for the season. 

But first we'll move on to the backyard and trim up some hairs of one of the trees and hopefully some of the limbs. We have two trees in the back but...one is dead. So I think Uncle J (the everything man) said at one point that he could take it down for us...so I might have to do some pestering once it's not 100 degrees outside. 

Here is what our backyard looks like currently. As you can tell we need grass like, bad. And what's funny is that it's this tree in the photo that is now dead. I don't know what happened in between this picture being taken and now, but it's not growing any leaves and the bark is turning all black like it's burnt. 

Here is the living tree that needs trimmed up. We'll probably take it to quite a bit above the roofline. I like the look of super tall trees and B has a fear of any limb or twig or leaf being too close to the house. 

Here is the creepy weird burn looking marks on the dead tree. I know that they weren't there when we first looked at the house but were there by the time we moved in and have only gotten worse. 

Here is the monstrosity that needs to come down so you can see anyone's hesitation in offering to help, but Uncle J already said the magic words so he's committed for life on this one. 

This is the strangest part though, although this tree is dead and not producing leaves and is burning on its own, it still produces the most painful spiky balls. It has these on every limb and twig in bunches and every time someone breathes a ball drops from it's limb and clutters up our yard. Try stepping on one of these without shoes. Ouch Town.

And here is our pitiful grass situation. Maybe it's the lack of sun? Maybe it's just the lack of maintenance? Either way hopefully by this time next year we have a blanket of soft, cushiony grass. 

And our yard sprouts these things. What are they? Who knows? Weeds? But they hurt. They are almost as spiky as the spiky balls and they just pop up in clusters all over the yard. They need to go.

And then finally there is this. This is our back fence line that meets up with the side of the yard of the people who live behind us. These plant/weeds are growing on their side of the fence but hang over to our side of the yard. And this is the after picture. After B trimmed the overhang about 3 feet. So this part of the yard has no grass, no spiky balls, no spiky grass clusters, nothing.

Needless to say the backyard could use some TLC in a bad kinda sorta way. We have a tree to trim, a dead tree to remove, grass to be grown, spiky balls to get rid of, a back fence line of tree/bush/weeds, and about 10 other things to deal with. Don't even get me started on the fact that our backyard consists of about three different types of ground material. It's kind of divided into thirds with 1/3 being regular old dirt, 1/3 being a type of dirt and hay mixture and the final 1/3 being sand. Yup our yard doesn't know if it belongs in the suburbs, the country or the beach. I wish it would make up it's mind. 

Mail Time

While we had the fam down here helping out with some wooden door countertop renovations I figured I would add a couple of small projects to their lists so they could take a break from worrying about putting my kitchen back together. In all the excitement of trying to sneak in another project without anyone noticing I forgot to snap a before picture but you can kind of barely see in the picture below our previous arrangement. The light was a weird modern curved glass with etched lines over a black rectangle, the house numbers were faded black cursive that were hung diagonally, the mailbox had been painted black and was really goopey looking and finally the doorbell was black with a white center. We didn't really want to spend a lot of money sprucing up this part of the house since the arrangement isn't something we want to have permanently so we used left over oil rubbed bronze spray paint to do most of the work for us and we found a our new light at Lowe's for under $25 - including electrical tape and a new light bulb (we were able to use a 10% coupon we got in the mail from our MyLowe's card, Lowe's free rewards program).

So to begin we took everything down and gave the siding a much needed bath. Some of the dirt and grime we weren't able to get off, but unless you're here inspecting it then you can't really tell (and if you are here inspecting our 65 year-old house's outside cleanliness then you need to leave). So then we started with the easiest part - the doorbell. We taped off the surrounding area with painters tape, but then realized we might still get some spray overage. 

So we added some printer paper to cover a bigger area from my ORB spray and it worked great. 

Here's the area after we sprayed see how the ORB didn't even reach the edges of the printer paper - we are so innovative. 

Here is a closer shot of the doorbell all one color now and we think it looks great. 

Then we got to working on the mailbox. We used left over paint stripper that we used on our wooden doors. Both the lid and the base of the mailbox needed multiple coats and we found that these things had been painted multiple times (black, then blue, then white, then nautical red and white stripe) so needless to say there were years of coverage that needed to go. 

We also realized that what currently looked like to be a flat surface metal mailbox was actually a nice textured metal (it had just been painted so many times that the paint gooped up and filled in the texture). So with enough paint stripper we were able to get most of the colors off and most of the texture raised again. 

Then we brought out the left over ORB and gave both parts of the mailbox a good coat. 

Then we found some leftover paint in our garage that's this nice muted teal color (we still can't figure out what they used this color on though, we thought it was for our front door but our door is more grey then this color so who knows, thanks though!). The base of the mailbox has this nice detail in the center that gets lost when it's all one dark color so I wanted to bring in some color to highlight this area.

I took a Q-tip and dipped it in the can of teal paint and dabbed it over the area I wanted to accentuate. Then I took a rag and dabbed most of the access paint off. I wanted it to have an almost patina look so I didn't want this paint layer to be heavy. This photo also shows a nice view of the new texture we found.

And here it is all hung up and fancy looking. I love that we were able to bring out the old texture and of course of love the shade of kind-of-black-kind-of-broze the ORB gives it.

Here is a shot of our new light and numbers. We took the numbers down and also gave them a coat of ORB and rehung them straight. The light is kind of industrial looking and is rustic bronze metal so it fits in nicely with the mailbox. 

Here is an evening shot with all four areas redone and spruced up. We love the glow of our new light and the way it hangs down instead of resting against the house. We like that the numbers are straight now because it helps to keep everything uniform (no OCD in this house...). We are just dealing with the fact that the doorbell is positioned way too far left and falls in a weird spot beneath our giant mailbox.

We have debated for a future project of taking the mailbox off and taking out a brick to the right of the door and having a mail slot put in instead (the mail would then fall into our hall closet). We've also looked at new address displays at Lowe's, we really like the ones that are a plaque with the numbers and street name spelled out. But all of that will be down the road. I really appreciate the fact that we were able to change this area so much for under $25 by using materials we had on hand. Below you can see the brick wall where we would put the new slot. Check out those succulents on the steps, nice huh?

Here is a shot of our porch with another small addition. Nana and pops redid a four top patio table that we now have on our back porch so we moved our small two top to the front porch. I think it looks really cute and it gives us a better excuse to sit out here and spy on the neighbors drink coffee or wine.

This area could use some more potted plants and maybe something on the blank wall behind the left chair, but it'll get there. We are really starting to feel like we live here now and are trying to just take things a day at a time instead of worrying about 'the list'. I kind of keep forgetting there's a wedding in 98 days that still needs my DIY attention and our wallet's attention.

Knock Outs

As you can tell by the photo below the front of our house needs a little bit of TLC. We have big plans for the future (paint, new siding, wood columns, etc) but for now we wanted to be able to make quick changes that over time would grow into bigger changes.

So the best Nana in the world picked up some Double Knock Out Roses that would fit nicely in the space just below the porch. Our only requirements were that we wanted the space filled and whatever went there had to be easy to maintain. These only needed watered twice a day for the first week then down to once a day. We also need to trim off the dead roses as they come along so new ones can come in (I've had to do that only once in a week). The particular roses we got were from Walmart and were about 3 feet tall (and will eventually spread 3 - 4 feet wide) for $17.95 each, but we scored a heck of a deal. While looking around for them we saw them for as much as $25 for a much smaller size (from Lowe's and Home Depot) and most weren't Double Knock Out just the Single. We went with the Knock Out Rose, mostly because Nana told us to, but with research I'm really glad we did. These roses are resistant to black spots, are winter and drought durable, are pest and disease resistant, and are super low maintenance. 

Here's what they look like when you buy them off the shelf. 

After we pulled up all the grass the best Pops in the world tilled up the dirt in the area to make it easier to dig up the rather large hole we needed to place the roses in. 

Then Nana took all her nifty tools to dig up the dirt some more and loosened up some clumps. 

Then after digging half way to China (ha, just wait till we actually plant a tree or something) we finally had some roses in the ground! Then we laid down some black landscape fabric which helps block out weeds and grass. If we want to plant anything around the area in the future all we have to do is cut out a small section then we can dig down into the dirt and plant from there.

Picture this area this time next year and hopefully the rose bushes will be touching each other and filling in the space nicely. 

Then we had to decide on mulch. I went looking at Lowe's and found a nice rubber recycled mulch that you only have to lay down once and it's resistent to fading. However, it was about 4 times as expensive  as regular mulch. So we picked a color (dark brown) and went with regular mulch for now. Maybe next year we can splurge. 

We're really happy with the little bit of color it brings to the front porch area and we really, really can't wait until they grow some more and fill in. We owe a super big thank you to Nana and Pops for all their hard yard-work labor. Also my favorite phrase these days is, "Honey, will you water the roses?" - it just sounds so fancy. 

FYI: Knock Out Roses are apparently so cool they have a website dedicated to just them: http://www.conard-pyle.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/koplants.splash