MORE WORK!!

Ok, so I kinda lied about doing things around the house. Only now, they're going to be of an external nature, for the most part. The last of the inside stuff, for now, was painting my office, which is now a medium gray. I also have recently purchased a new chair for my room, which is in the first picture. Wednesday, when I came home, Lauren was out in the front yard and told me to come see what she'd done. When I rounded the corner of the house, I saw that she'd hacked up the bushes in the front of the house. All that was left were the trunks and the roots. So, I came home a little early from work yesterday and took out the remaining parts of three bushes, and then took out the last bush Saturday and also took out one of the large shrubs on the side of the house. Meanwhile, Lauren laid some plastic retaining wall and then planted some flowers, with topsoil put around them.

And then, because it would have looked odd to have a coiled up white cord in the flowerbed, we got a pot to put Connor's tether in the front yard. It is a "faux-distressed glaze" black pot (Lauren's words).

Our next project is going to be putting the other flowerbed in (the bushes are gone from there too) and putting some stepping stones down so we can put our trash can on the side of the house instead of behind it.

New House Pics

As promised, I'm posting pictures of the improvements to the house since the last pictures were posted. But first, I'm going to post better pictures of previous improvements. First, we painted the living room beige, with red accent walls opposite the window seat and inside of the window. We'll be adding crown moulding and some moulding around the accent wall to create sharper edge.

The guest room is a light green that is very soothing and looks much better in person than in pictures. We're using the closet doors as a headboard for the bed. Lauren also painted the inside of the closet a darker shade of green and we made some shelves to go in there to display her dolls from around the world.

I painted the master bedroom a light blue (not quite Carolina blue, but close). We're going to put some fabric behind the bed as a space-definer at some point.

I also painted the master bathroom the same beige as the living room and scraped all the junk off the tiles in the shower and on the floor. The room is so much better now that Lauren actually uses it!For several months (since before we moved) Lauren has had her eye on a certain counter-height table and chairs at Garden Ridge (a discount home decor superstore). I've been fighting it until recently because I didn't feel we needed a new table. We finally decided to get one last Friday that we'd seen at Ikea on our previous trip. We got it home and realized that it was too brown for the room (the accents are all black). We returned it on Saturday and went to Garden Ridge, where we found out the other table was on sale for almost 50% off! Lauren was so excited, she actually let me get a new glider/recliner/swivel chair and ottoman for my office/guy room. Even including that, we ended up saving over $200 by buying at Garden Ridge. The table looks great in the room, although we've only used it once or twice since we bought it.

My latest project was to touchup the black outside doors and then paint the door frames white, rather than the ugly brown/maroon color that they used to be. The all look much better, but the front door looks especially good. We're eventually going to get storm doors for all of the doors except that one, so I took particular care in redoing that one. This will probably be the last time for a while that home improvement pictures get posted, as I will be starting a new project on Monday, which is slated to last between a month and two months. The company intends to have a permanent, constant presence in Charlotte, which will hopefully mean I'll be consistently employed. That would mean a much slower home improvement process, but given where we are, we can afford to stop or slow down for a bit.