State of the Yard

So a few weeks have passed in warm-weathered bliss. The sun has been shining, the garden has been planted, and the grass has been growing! I confess that my trust in the grass seed was minimal at best so I didn't take before and after pictures, thinking they'd be more like before-and-still-before pictures. But seeing the yard now...I wish I'd done it.

I did take a few pictures from mostly the same angles as in the A-door-able post---wherein some of the patchy, sad grass can be seen---in an attempt to show off our re-energized lawn. Let us bask.

Before...

After!

The lattice is preventing Magnus from jumping over the gate. I don't know why he only jumps out there, but we've found if that's blocked off he doesn't try to escape. So we'll probably make a half moon shape with some new slats to add height, just to the gate, and hopefully that will take care of the jail-breaking.
We also started to paint the fence and are loving the white picket look :) Now to get on painting the rest of it...

The grass, though! (happy sighs)

Here's our plum tree corner. Joe was a man-beast and cut all the super thick ivy out of the tree so while it looks sparser now, the tree is much happier now that it's able to breathe. And it will be easier to collect the plums.

Before...

After!

And the grass! (homeowner swoons)

We planted a garden as well. I don't know what my problem is, but I was similarly cynical about this growing as I was about the grass. I guess years of killing every house plant I've ever had has done its work on my plant-related optimism.

Here's a before....

And after. It grew despite all my doubts. 

The big leafy ones in the middle-leftish are my lovely broccoli and brussels sprouts. There are also tomatoes along the far left edge, and onions and potatoes on the far right. The ones in the middle-right that look like weeds are Joe's peppers. He loves him some peppers.

We also have a little strawberry patch and a couple blueberry bushes that aren't in the pictures. They are doing super well and are so adorable to me.

And that's all the before/after fun I've got. But just in case you've got a real "thing" for grass, I included other pictures of our improving yard. It's not perfect yet, but oh, it's so beautiful compared to a few months ago :)

Hammock Corner :

Arbor...still waiting for that to grow in. I think it took some damage from dog chewing last year. Hopefully it soldiers through!

This part of the yard was one of the worst. The area on the right of the picture is next to our patio and it was almost entirely dirt. And there's a ring around that tree-bush that is nothing but newly grown grass. The change is so crazy.

And one for the road. :)

A-door-able Springtime!

Get it?! Because there will be doors in this post. Ha!

Winter was a doldrumy time around the Galloway household. Something about the dull grey skies, the lack of greenery, and having to wear sweaters even when sunshine occasionally exists makes the thought of doing any kind of project really unappealing. But spring's been peeking her pretty little head around the corner, so Joe and I went on a kind of mad dash of projects over the last few weeks. We were building, sanding, measuring fiends!

And now is the time when I show off all we have done.

First, our back door used to not be a door. We had one in our kitchen that closed off the laundry/cat room, but the door that led outside was just a storm door that didn't keep in much warmth or...security. So last summer (fall? ehhn) we found a guy selling cool older doors on KSL, and one of them happened to look almost identical to the one in our kitchen. The only difference was that the window was a little bigger. BUMMER.
Just kidding. That's a totally awesome problem to have. I love light!
So we bought the door and brought it home and got all gung-ho to change it out...and then it sat in our shanty for months and months. And more months. Untiiiillll....

Joe got to know his circular saw! That doorway in incredibly wonky, which is to say none of the corners are square. So he had a great time cutting down the sides and ends of the door, holding it up, realizing it didn't fit, doing it all again with new measurements, finding this side or that was still too long....
I should say he had a great time at first. But after the fourth or fifth time remeasuring and re-slicing-off-a-tiny-sliver-of-door he would have probably been okay with just being done.

The shanty makes a brief but glamorous appearance.

 And while he was doing that, I was doing....this!

Our original living room coffee table was taken for free from our neighbor's curb. Literally, the house next door. You can only understand how shamefully cheap that feels when you do it yourself, hoping all along that they aren't watching you drag their old, crayon-marked beast into your front door.
It was a great table but it had never been properly finished, so every time we "cleaned" it we'd take off the dust and what appeared to be several layers of the paint. It was also much bulkier than I would have liked. So when we found this table on...you guessed it...KSL, we snatched it up and I immediately took it outside for a sanding. The original wood stain was an okay color but it was covered in paint splotches and scratches and just really needed to be refinished.

I sanded it down to the bare wood on the top for staining, but just did a light sanding on the legs as I planned on painting those.

Also I cheated and didn't touch the bottom of the top piece at all. And then painted all over that sucker around the legs. So the bottom is ugly. Just don't look.

And here's the finished table in our living room! It's the same height and 3 inches longer than our last table, but a good 5 inches less wide. I was surprised by how much wimpier it looked when we first made the switch but it's grown on me. 

Huh. Lots of pattern going on in that room, Tara. 

Our next project was to replace the console under our TV with something a little more substantial to fill out the wall. I took pictures of this process....somewhere....

But I don't know where they are. So instead you get the finished product and you can imagine that we just magicked it there like Harry and Ginny would have. Or Ron and Hermione, if you're more in that camp. 

Oh man. I love it. 

And THEN...we built a fence. A REAL ONE! We needed a better garden fence to keep Magnus out, so that we could grow more than peppers and tomatoes this year and hopefully avoid any further chicken casualties. 

It also safely corrals our yard junk.

And then we thought, hey, a yard that looked nice would be lovely. So we built a dog run too, to keep the dogs from tearing any more holes in our once picturesque backyard. Fortunately our yard was a decent enough size that we were able to give them a fairly roomy dog run and still have a lot of backyard left over. And we still let them out daily to get their zoomies out, so they're suffering no loss. Not that they feel that way....

Dear diary. The fence continues to vex me. The authorities persist in taunting me with
their lack of response to my incredibly sad puppy face. This is my 800th attempt
 to reach them by squeezing through the wooden slats, to no avail. I will not give up. 

 I almost cropped out the nasty, nasty looking yard, but I figured it would be a good example of why we made the run. The rest of the yard is worse. But we shall make it beautiful this summer! BEAUTIFUL!

We do not understand this undue cruelty.  We are betrayed.

We are so pleased with how adorable it is, especially in the corner by the plum tree where it meets the garden. So quaint! I can't wait until the leaves all come in and it is fresh and summery. And the fence will be painted white, so that'll be extra domestic. 

Aaaaand the last project, which we completed just last weekend, are these dog doors that lead from the house, into the shanty, and thence to the dog run. This way they can get out whenever they want and it is SO NICE. Dog doors for gigantic dogs (ahem, Magnus) are really expensive, so Joe just built some of his own using 2x4s and plastic sheets that are normally used for the mats under your office chairs. It worked out really well and the dogs picked up on it immediately, so we're very pleased.

From the house into the shanty...

...and from the shanty to the yard!

We put a trim frame on the dog door inside the house, and will paint it and make it look nice. We tried to do a similar thing in the shanty, as you can see from the photo above, but we had a somewhat disastrous experience with the wood glue and then ran out of trim. So that was fun. Now it looks really special but...who cares! It functions.

Next on the list is planting the garden, putting in bushes and flowers in the front and back yards, and painting the office and rehanging all the pictures in a gallery wall above my desk. We'd also like to do something about the carpet in there, but there's a weirdly colorful linoleum or something underneath so it might take some creativity. Other projects in the "maybe soon" list are painting the concrete floor in the laundry room, painting the kitchen cabinets and walls, building a kitchen table, and putting shelves in our shelf-less office closet. So basically we could just keep going forever. But we love doing it and it's always so nice to sit and admire our hard work afterward :)

In some last minute, unrelated news, I am working on a couple of books right now. As in writing them. It is really fun and exciting to finally be working on the thing that I've always wanted to do. I get a little discouraged sometimes, wondering why I took so long to try it and feeling a bit behind, but after seeing what I can accomplish I feel pretty confident that I will only improve and will learn all the tricks to becoming a bonafide author. And I'm telling you because that's what I do to keep myself accountable. If any of my work is someday on bookstore shelves (or e-reader shelves, as the case may be) then you can look back at this as the moment I decided I would make it happen. So you should probably feel pretty special about that ;)

Here's a quote!

"Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort."

Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Pretty Rock Garden Markers

Well, craftiness has not been forthcoming for me lately, but today I finally decided to break down my creator's block and just make something. I have a pin on Pinterest of these really pretty rock garden markers. That seems easy enough, I thought to myself. So, I grabbed the bag of filthy rocks that I had collected from my cousin's yard a few weeks ago (which she kindly allowed me to have without even giving me any weird looks) and washed them off in preparation to make some super cute, cheap, easy garden markers. Turns out those little plastic tags that come with the plants don't have much staying power. Our garden has a nice little pile of identifying tags that have blown away in the wind. Sigh.

So with my freshly cleaned rocks waiting anxiously on my crafting table, I snatched up a newly purchased acrylic paint pen and got to work.

I have no pictures of the rocks before hand. You'll just have to use your super powers of imagination and envision a pile of ordinary rocks.

At first I thought I'd just grab my least favorite rock (yep, I had favorites) and just have a go for practice. It's a good thing I did, too, because my unfamiliarity with the paint pen thing led to a huge blob of white across the whole top of the rock...and down onto my desk. Good news, though! They are right about it being easy to clean up when wet. A damp paper towel got it off my desk and almost off the rock too. Once the initial flood of paint came out of the pen it worked quite easily, so I just practiced some swirly things and dots and got this:

Note the splotch of white from my spill. Bird poo chic, no?

Other than the blob smudge across the top it actually worked! For once my "this will be easy" thought turned out to be true. I went outside and made a list of the plants that actually still have markers and are thus identifiable. Since I am garden-ignorant, I couldn't figure out what the other things were so I only made markers for tomatoes and onions. To be honest, the only other thing we planted were peppers anyway. We're diverse here in the Galloway Garden. And here's the finished product. I love them! (Also, if you look at the pin I linked to you'll see I cheated and used some of her ideas. What can I say, they were lovely!)

This was my favorite rock. So flat and so smooth. Yeah baby!

I think this one ended up being my favorite after all was finished. I just like
all the different little decorations. It's fun and funky fresh. 

Another rock. This one was weirdly black on one side.
Rock mysteries--exciting stuff!

I really like how this one turned out. Sadly, my actual real-life
red onions are not doing as well.

The clan of rocks.

 These couldn't have taken me more than half an hour and they'll look so delightful in my garden. I'm planning on corralling Joe tonight so he can tell me what all his peppers are, and I'll make more for those too. Hooray for pretty things. :)

Annivers---wait, chicken? (or, Anniversary Part I)

This past weekend, Joe and I celebrated our very first wedding anniversary! Yay! Our celebratory plans were grand at first, but then we remembered we're newlyweds (or have we officially passed that description?!?) and have limited funds. The "Plans" were therefore pared down until they became the following:

Saturday (day before anniversary):

Morning: Stay at home. Build a garden fence. Plant a garden for the fence to protect. Hope the fence withstands giant dog and discourages small dog. 

Afternoon: Recover from doing rare physical work. Clean selves and try to look somewhat nice. 

Evening: Off to Park City! Overindulge at Ghidotti's, because it's delicious Italian food and that's what one does. Immediately walk next door to the theater. Commence watching Iron Man 3. Go home. 

Sunday (actual anniversary):

All day: Wing it. 

Our Plans actually worked out pretty well. We slept in gloriously late, and then got to work on the fence. About a month ago the greenhouse across the street, which has been neglected since before we moved in, got some new management and they started cleaning up the place. And then...then!...they started throwing out pallets. SO many pallets. So we sauntered over and asked the clean up guys if we could have some. We could (for $1 a piece, which I'm pretty sure they just made up on the spot so they could buy some cigarettes. That's not judgey, they told us they wanted some.) $10 and a trip across the street later, we had a stack of pallets in our backyard. 

Fast forward to this weekend. The pallet plot came into play! We saw this video on how to make reasonably cute picket fencing from pallets without having to pry them all apart. Then we realized we have no power saws and that would take forever, so we decided to just throw that whole plan out and use the entire pallet. Then we planted our little garden. It's no masterpiece, but we're mighty proud of our morning's work.

Quaint, isn't it?

It's definitely not the most beautiful fence,
but it has a certain..."rustic" charm. 

Our little garden! It's mostly peppers. Joe likes peppers. 

We also spent a lovely chunk of time lounging on our new hammock, enjoying the view of the fence/garden and watching our ridiculous dogs.

The Hammock, and Joe.Also featuring bright sunlight.

Here they are. 

Want to see what silly dogs do with a spraying hose? Ok! 

Magnus is my favorite, so slow and methodical. Especially pawing at it at the end. Also, forgive us our weird laughter. :)

One more view of our lovely garden. 

The crooked piece is our temporary door. We don't know what to do about a gate so we just keep that piece loose and prop it back against the fence to keep out the dogs. So far it works. 

Speaking of dogs and fences, here's a story. We went out yesterday to check on the garden and admire our handiwork. I was looking at my (sad, wilty) tomato plants when I spied a chicken by that purpley tree! I suppose I should explain that this wasn't really that surprising, as the mechanic behind us keeps chickens on his lot and we hear/see them all the time back there. I don't know how that chicken got into our yard but for a brief moment I saw that chicken and was just delighted to have him visiting our yard. And then I remembered we have dogs. 

Magnus and Sawyer didn't immediately notice the chicken, but when they did they were extremely excited. They'd been staring through the fence slits for weeks at their feathered "friends," in a way that seemed friendly but I now believe it was decidedly more ominous in nature. The two pups charged at the fence, but stopped when they couldn't get in (it works!). Then Sawyer realized that, wait a minute, he could get in, and the chicken FREAKED OUT. Chickens can be really squawky, guys. Not that I blame him. 160 pounds of puppy were chasing him down after all. Then the not-so-bright bird fled the relative safety of the garden. Sigh.

Our dogs took off in earnest after that poor, dim animal. They were going to EAT that chicken! In seconds they had trapped him against a fallen branch as I watched, hopeless and horrified and certain we were about to witness fowl murder. Miraculously the chicken escaped, unscathed except for a few lost feathers (one of which hung from Magnus's mouth as a nice, horrifying touch). That's about when Joe and I realized our backyard was going to become a crime scene if we didn't do something. So I caught Sawyer (50 lbs) while Joe literally tackled Magnus (110 lbs) and had to lie on top of him to keep him from lunging after the chicken. We muscled the beasties inside...and the chicken disappeared. It was a bit mysterious, really. I was relieved that he was out of our dogs' reach, and not a little disappointed that our pups turned out to be violent, chasey, chicken-craving carnivores. Darn.

A few hours later I was placing my most recent project in our kitchen window (post to come!) when Joe said "the chicken! the chicken!" Sure enough, there he was, sauntering around our frontish/side yard. We ran outside and for a good thirty minutes we chased that ridiculous animal through our yard, our neighbor's yard, in and out of bushes, and finally he sneakily "hid" himself in a small flowery plant. He was plainly visible, but obviously thought he had been very clever and would never be found, because he didn't budge when I stood over him and picked him up. Silly chicken. We released him back over the fence to his home.

And that was our adventure with the chicken. 

Well, this is much longer than I expected. I think I'll post about our actual anniversary celebrations another time so you don't have to read too many words all at once. How exhausting that would be! Til next time :)