Edging the Garden: A Necessary Evil

Edging the Garden: A necessary evil?  Uh, no... Let me rephrase this... completely unnecessary.  But evil, for sure!  However, it's definitely beautiful if you have the time & energy to tackle this kind of project.

For the last couple years, I've been eyeing my next door neighbor's edging. It's something I notice and admire every single time I'm outside.  Is that weird?  Yes... I think so, too.  (I know many of my neighbors have beautiful edging... I'm just forced to look at theirs, next door, all the time.)

Turns out, this was a very good example of why I love blogging.  2 days into this project or about 5 hours, I was really beginning to wonder why I was doing this and if it was worth it.  Seriously.  Am I wasting my time?  This can't be making that big of a difference!  

Free BonFire Starters

I shared this photo collage below on Monday and I really want to focus in on the top left pic for a moment, here.  Okay, now that you're done drooling, look past the s'more and check out that nice fire burning.  It's not built in our fire pit because we are dealing with some terrible fungus in our yard and apparently the best way to remove it is to burn it out.  Sounds like a great opportunity to have a little campfire and make some goodies!

Stepping Stones & Garden Update

I painted a few stepping stones for the vegetable garden so I could actually reach the tomatoes. 

Tree Stump Tic-Tac-Toe

If you can remember back to this post where we built the swing set and club house, you'll remember that we left a big tree stump coming up through the center of the fort floor.

Friday Find: Water Features

Every once in a while, I get this super strong urge to do a project and nothing can stop me.  The bug is hitting again and I've been drooling over these super cool fountains.

Lowes

HomeTalk

SunSet

I don't know... Maybe I will be able to convince the husband that we need one.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend.  Any fun projects on your to-do list?

Janice

Who's Eating Broccoli?

I'm amazed that in just 7 weeks our vegetable garden goes from looking like this to that!

Before this garden, I never understood what sorts of joys come with planting and growing a garden. I never found any enjoyment trying to figure out what was a weed and what was a desirable plant.

Swing Set Lumber List

So I have mentioned in a couple of posts now that we've been spending some time working on building a play set... We originally found inspiration from Carmel who writes a great little blog called OurFifthHouse.  Well, we sill have the stairs to build and an additional swing to purchase, but here's the play set!

If you're interested in building your own, here is what we ended up purchasing for all of our lumber:

The Swing Set Continues

Things got real once we started putting giant timbers into the ground to start getting our swing set planned out further.

The two large posts on the left side of this picture are 6x6's.  They're a whopping 10 feet long and nearly 3 feet are buried below ground.  

Since the ground is clearly not level where we chose to have the swing set, we placed the 4x6 board across the top to check for level and adjusted the depth of the holes accordingly.  This was a painful process since we had to lift the 12 foot long 4x6 on top of the 6x6 posts several times as we adjusted the holes and the amount of gravel that we placed in the bottom of the holes to help with drainage.   Once we were happy with the results, we were able to set the posts in quikrete.  It was important to constantly check the level of the post while poking the concrete into the post holes. We took our time with this process because the main posts would determine whether or not the rest of the set would be level down the road.

Swing Set Surprise

It has been unacceptably long since I have last updated!  So much has happened recently that I was just too preoccupied to hop on the old blog.  For shame!

First of all, the hubby is home from a 37 day "adventure".... Ah yes, now I remember why I haven't been blogging. Bryan enjoys taking up all of my spare time; and I truly enjoy filling that role.  Well, in our spare time we have definitely had the projects rolling.

I rarely let my husband rest.  We also cut down another tree.

Front Porch Eye Candy

I've been looking for flower pots for our front porch for a couple years now.  The thing about getting these flower pots, was I didn't want to spend a fortune.  It seemed like anywhere I looked, the size I needed was at least $100, sometimes more!  Yeah, I don't think so!  Well, I was in Jo-Ann's looking for some durable fabric for another project and I saw the perfect flower pots!  Regularly $59.99 but they had them 50% off.  I still didn't bring them to the register because I just really wanted a better deal.  (I'm sounding so cheap right now)... Well, I asked the wonderful woman at the register when they'd be sending out coupons for discounts off of an entire purchase to include sale and clearance.  She, of course, didn't know, but she told me to text 56266 (Joann) and type in CREATE for the message.  Immediately that sent me a coupon for 20% off my entire purchase!  She then typed in the special code and I was able to save a little extra!  If you plan to do this, be sure you're making a trip to Jo-Ann's soon because the code expired after just a couple days.

Lumber Jack Party

Oh, this weekend was a long one.  My husband and four of his buddies took down ten of our trees that became infected by the Emerald Ash Borer and died.