A garden update

Our bearded irises finally opened and looked so beautiful I had to take some pictures and share.

 

And another picture:

 

 Beautiful, huh?  I love the color and the delicateness of the petals.

And last but not least our first artichoke!

Ah, spring! :o)

A bit of paint distressing

So I haven't gotten around to working on the chairs just yet.  They do look really nice in the dining room, and I'm excited to get started on them, but there are other projects I need to finish first.

I've had this really cute magazine rack that my brothers gave me for a birthday gift a few years back that has been hiding on the far side of the sofa.  Not because it needed to be hidden but it just became a catchall for books and magazines and the mess of that needed to be hidden!  So I decided it would be hidden no more!  But I also decided that the blue that it was painted wouldn't quite go with the blue dresser already in the living room ......... and I wanted a chance to test out some paint I had bought for the dining chairs!

So I got to work ............ well, here's a before picture first:

It's a nice shade of blue but it doesn't really work with this blue from the dresser (in my opinion):

The color I chose, Martha Stewart's "Enamelware" is a lighter blue but I think it works better with the blue of the dresser.  Here you can see it on the magazine rack after I primed and painted it:

It's a different shade of blue, with a slight greenish tint but I think it works well with the other colors in the living room.  I also wanted to try to show-off the details of the magazine rack, especially those cute floral cutouts so I got out some sandpaper and sanded all the edges down to the wood surface to give a nice contrast.

Here you can see the finished product:

And a bit closer of the edges:

And the floral motif:

 

And here it is holding my home decorating/fix-it magazines and inspiration binder of ideas I've cut-out from past issues.

Hopefully now that I have the magazine rack visible my magazines will find their way there instead of scattered over the coffee table!

The perfect dining chairs

Today Brian was going out to dinner with his friends after work so I thought I'd take a bit of a detour on my way home and stop by a consignment shop I hadn't been to in a while.

I found this really cute cake stand in a light-light blue:

Here's another angle of the base:

 

I thought it would go perfectly with the other dishes in our china cabinet.  Add a little blue to the white and yellow dishes we already have and play-off the blue stripes of the shelf paper.

But that wasn't the real find, the real find was these lattice back chairs!!!

 

Check out that back!

I'm really excited about them.  I've been wanting to get some new dining room chairs for a while, but chairs can be expensive! I found a set of four of these for $10 each and they seem pretty stable and the cushions are nice and soft. I can't wait to paint them and get new fabric for the cushions. I'm not sure exactly what colors to go with, I'll probably do some internet searching tonight. Since the dining room is a rich and bright green color I'll have to work with something that will fit in with the current color scheme. I was thinking maybe white with a patterned fabric something like this:

 From Coastal Living

Or maybe a really light-light robin's egg blue with a simple off white canvas fabric.   Something sort of like this:

 From Lulu Interiors

I'm not sure what to do?!  Any ideas??

Painting a thrift store vase and pitcher

It was "50% of everything " at our local thrift store yesterday so I just had to stop by after work and take a look.  I ended up finding a metal pitcher and a metal vase for a grand total of $2.30!  They weren't perfect but I had a plan for them.  So here they are after bringing them home:

I decided to spray paint them both "Heirloom White".   Here is a picture after painting them as I was letting them dry:

 

Next I decided to lightly sand the pitcher around the embossed design and edges to reveal the metal underneath to help show-off the detailing: 

I decided to put them on my desk in the guest bedroom.  Here is an after of the vase, I just love the cutout design around the top!  It is now my knitting needle holder :o)

And here is the pitcher, all it needs now are some fresh flowers from the garden :o)

Overall, I really like how they turned out, especially the pitcher.  It's better than I I had expected! 

Getting our hands dirty

This past weekend we tackled the backyard.  Brian worked really hard to remove most of the weeds from the flower beds and I mowed down the weeds around the garden.  So things went from this:

 

To this:

We can actually see the bricks around the flower bed!  

Now we need to get busy planting flowers!

Our garden is starting to look exciting.  The strawberries are flowering and beginning to fruit:

While trimming the artichokes plants back I noticed we had actual artichokes!  (There's two in this picture, if you look close you can see one tucked away on the bottom right).

And the apricots are growing!

 

We do have some flowers growing around the yard.  There are a few late blooming daffodils:

The bearded iris are about ready to pop:

 

And I love the fan-shaped leaves of our ginkgo tree!

I even was able to pick flowers to fill some vases on our kitchen windowsill :o)

So that's the yard progress from the weekend.  Now we just have to start filling in the empty spaces and wait for things to grow!

My big yard sale find

"Big" find is a bit of an exaggeration.  This weekend the weather was beautiful so we decided to spend Saturday morning yard saling.  We made a list of the most interesting yard sales around town that we found on Craigslist and then Brian made a map of the best route to take.  I was really excited before we set out.  I was going to find some neat furniture to spend the weekend painting ..................... but all I found was a $3 mirror:

I had hopes for it even though at first glance it sorta made me grimace.  Here you can see the details a bit more ................. and the dust :o):

So when we made it home I got to work giving the mirror a couple coats of spray paint in "Heirloom White".  And it turned out looking really good, even Brian approved ......... although he didn't think of it as much of a find when I first showed it to him! :o)  Here's the after:

And a bit closer:

I decided to hang it in our front bedroom so guests staying over will have a mirror to use.  I think it works pretty well with the room color.  I would show a larger view of the room but it is a mess right now.  Brian is working on shelves for the closet so all the stuff we usually have hidden away is strewn about the bedroom ...... and I'm also working on re-painting the bookcases so books are everywhere too!  A bit of a disaster zone :o)

So even something that starts off looking a bit grungy can be made into something beautiful with a few layers of paint :o)

The Creation of a Backyard

I thought today would be a good time to talk about our yard since we have been trying to tackle the weeds there this week.  When we moved into our house the backyard was pretty much non-existent.  The previous owners had fenced a smaller area of the property to reduce the amount of yard work they had to do.  Therefore, one of our first major projects was to move the fence back to enclose our entire property. This would give us a large yard and garden area, especially since we wanted to have our wedding in the backyard!

Here you can see the small "backyard" area that we started off with.  The house has a decent size side yard around the corner of the house to the left, so the previous owners had some yard but not very much:

Last spring we got to work first mowing down the wild grass (i.e. weeds) and planting a few trees.  Here you can see where our property ends (where the tall weeds begin).  Those tall weeds are what our yard initially looked like!

 

Here you can see Brian working hard with his gigantic roto-tiller we rented:

 

And another view looking back towards the house from where our property ends.  You can see the old position of the fence.

Here's a picture of the beginnings of our garden.  We made frames for the beds from 1"x12" redwood boards.  We dug them most of the way into the ground to help keep the plants somewhat contained.  That's part of our plan to keep the raspberries in their beds :o)

And here's a picture of the yard when the garden beds were all in the ground and the grass began to grow:

Next we had to tackle the fence.  We ended up using pieces from the old fence for the new fence.  We put in all new posts and rails but re-used the fence boards from the old sections.  We had to buy a few new boards because some of the old boards were warped or cracked but it saved us a lot of money overall.  Here you can see  the first few fence posts being cemented into the ground.  (Don't worry, the last few posts are not cemented into place in this picture.....we made sure to level everything first!):

The most difficult part of the job was removing the old fence posts from the ground as they were held in pretty securely with cement.  My dad and brothers helped us out a lot to get it done!

So even though our yard looks a bit of a disaster to us now because of the weeds in the flower beds:

 

And around the garden:

But it is a major improvement from where we started!  We'll publish more pictures soon as we get the yard more under control :o)