Hello greenery!

Spring is coming! At least in my kitchen it is. This year I’m going to try my hand once again at growing my own plants. I have 72 spots to fill and I’m so ready for all the flower seeds to start coming out.

the only flowers I have so far are sunflowers and black eyed Susan’s. I’m totally surprised at how small the bes start off. For flowers that grow to 3 ft or so tall, they are so tiny and cute! I tried to transplant some once from a neighbors garden, but they died 😦

Here I have black eyed Susan’s, sunflowers, corn, peas, peas, cucumbers, and thyme. Yes thyme! I failed miserably at growing thyme last year. Not even one sprig (if that’s what they’re called). I’m pretty happy about that one! In the separate containers are cabbage and lettuce. I’m hoping I can get them in the ground without them dying.
Today I will be adding carrots, broccoli, parsley, oregano, and basil. Update to come when there’s more to show! Until then, stay sunny!

Treasure hunt.

Another weekend gone, but not wasted! Although I didn’t get the beautiful weather promised for Saturday I did make the best of it. I was able to check out some thrift stores and find some great treasures. Some I was looking for, others were a pleasant surprise.

$4 for the pitchers, $5 for the beautiful tray that my hubby swears is silver. It looked terrible, all tarnished before I cleaned it.

since I knew I wanted these on my porch, I decided to get to work on revamping my porch. I had this bench on there that I took out of the yard. I’ve always wanted two white rocking chairs on my porch but due to some emergency repairs we just had to make (water heater and furnace) we won’t be buying those for a while.

I had gotten a table a year or so back that was supposed to go on the porch but it was a little big for starters and ugly.

so my first pallet project it is!

pallet +table+leftover paint=

my husband is obsessed with it. He wants to leave it in the house now. He can’t believe the pallet wood turned out so good. I sanded, washed and stained it with one coat of oak stain. So pretty! The bench got a makeover too. White, of course. It’s my new favorite color for refreshing. Makes it look so clean (which it was before too) and new. This is what we’ll be walking up to this spring and maybe summer if I don’t get tired of it by then.

I absolutely cannot wait to get it out on the porch. Oh, and we got the kitchen shelf stained and hung up.

Not bad for a days work huh? Until tomorrow… Sweet dreams!

Spring in January?

Ahhhh! It was in the low 60’s yesterday! How super exciting!!! I was able to go outside and get out in the yard. I have been pulling up to my house lately and hating the way it looks. It looks boring and drab (is drab a word?). I just feel so blah every time I look at it. So anyways I got to raking and decided to cut down this hideous bush on one of the side yards.

please ignore all the crap around it. Mu hubby decided to clean out his truck bed and hasn’t put any of it back yet. After I dig up the stump, which I will do today, it’s going to just be bare. I’m trying to decide if I should go with a rustic wheelbarrow or a pallet garden. Any thoughts?

Kitchen work part-2

After I finally rolled out of bed on Saturday….. Day two!!! First thing was to tackle this crazy wire that was coming out of the floor and had been redirected into the wall.

seriously, who does that?!? I just
can’t get over how lazy some people are. The kids thought it was hilarious to be talking to their dad through a hole in the floor. So, it was good that they had some fun with that 🙂

.
That finished we moved on to taping and floating the walls which was my manly man’s job.

And two coats of koala bear paint from Home Depot. Women’s work:/

I love my helpers!

Does anyone else think cabinets are ridiculously and unnecessarily heavy? I was in the Army and consider myself to be pretty strong for a woman, and um, I almost let them fall.

I’m not sure why they need to weigh so much, maybe to justify their outrageous price? I don’t know. But two hours later, which is pretty good for novice cabinet hangers, and they were up! Yay!
A trip to the attic for some wall hangings and such that had been sitting up there for five years waiting for this day and we were done! Now the shelf is still missing, maybe next weekend. And the 5 and some odd inch gap on the left is waiting on a home made wine rack. Then the entire kitchen can be finished off with some DIY flooring and crown moulding and I might actually cook in there on a regular basis! I think it’s time to start thinking up a new excuse as to why I never cook. I can no longer use the excuse that I hate my kitchen because it’s ugly. I’ll take any suggestions! All in all, it was a great project to start off 2013 with. One weekend and $300 later and I no longer want to hide that side of my kitchen with the refrigerator! One more pic in case you forgot what it looked like originally. I know I have! Then it’s off to bed to dream about what we can tackle next!

Kitchen work part-1

The kitchen. Oh my kitchen. I half like it, half hate it. What I would like is to love it! So the half I like is the side that I actually use. It was done over a year ago by us and my dad. It came out good but I only like it because it’s still not done! We still need crown moulding, cabinet trim, and a new floor. These last touches are going to be finished after we get the other half of the kitchen to the same unfinished stage :/.
Here is the side we’ve neglected completely. These awful shelves have become a catch all for every piece of junk we have in the house. Looking at it now…if that’s all the junk we have then we’re doing ok! It holds all my laundry stuff which is expected because that’s where the washer and dryer are. Yes, we got stuck in a house that doesn’t have a laundry room! Never in a million years would you think you would want a room devoted to laundry, until you don’t have one. Next house, laundry room is a MUST! Anyways… The shelves use to all be whole until we got a stacked washer and dryer trying to save room. It was good for a while until they broke and well here we are. A mess left behind is where.

The never been touched side.

So the plan is to rip it out, fix the walls and paint it the same color as the rest of the kitchen. Yup, I have a two toned kitchen:/ the other side is green. And put up three cabinets and a shelf. The shelf is going to serve two purposes. A shelf and a….. You’ll have to wait for the reveal!
My new DIY attitude pushed me to put this plan into action. I ripped the shelves out. There’s no going back now. Taking them out just emphasized how tore up the walls are. I hope I can get my hubby to just fix them rather then gut it. Can I just say that those little bars of wood were a pain in hump to take out! Those things were on there good!

Also Craftsman needs a lady hammer. The hammer I was using was so fricken heavy that my arms were burning after taking out just one. I almost left them for the hubs to take out. It was ridiculous! But they’re off and this is what we’re left with.

A mess!!!! The last bars are left on to help with getting the cabinets up. (Learned that from my dad:-) ) hopefully tonight I can scrape the walls and the hubby can get his tape and float on. To be continued tomorrow.

Boa wreath

Here it is!

Yay! I love Valentine’s day! It’s such a pretty girl holiday. This year I decided to decorate for it ( just little touches). Of course the first thing to make is the wreath for the front door. I looked and looked and found this feather wreath that I thought looked easy enough and would look pretty on our black door. It’s finished in the above picture and came out so cute! I was going to add more decorations to it but decided to keep it simple.
This wreath was so easy to make that it is pretty much self explanatory. A hanger bent in the shape of a heart with some pliers. Or you could leave it round and then embellish it a little more because of the simple shape.
Then wrap with feather boas found at the dollar store. Mine took four. I tied the strings at the ends of the boas and tied them together and just kept winding.
Some ribbon tied around the top with one tail left on for letters. I used those sticky foam letters from the Dollar Tree that we had in our craft box and a foam heart on card stock. Cut those out so there would be a white border around each letter. Hot glued them on the ribbon. Gave the bottom of the ribbon a split cut and voila! A one hour tops project that looks so adorable!!

Add some candles with character and you’re good to go!

The ghastly garage

The front of the ghastly garage.

Ok, first a little history about this darn garage. There it is above in all its ghastliness. We have lived with this in our back yard for five years now. I literally do not look in that direction. I tried to spruce up the front and failed miserably. The side of it as you can see below is even worse.

The side. Eeeeek!

Our plan was to leave this alone until we had the funds to demolish it and completely replace it. I didn’t even want to try and deal with it. Well, our neighbors had different plans. The neighbor story is one for another blog. Long story short, we don’t like each other and they figured our garage was a perfect target for an attack. Now the city is giving us until March to fix it or get fined. Well played neighbors, well played. We cannot demolish the whole thing because in our city, you need a permit for that. Yes, I’m rolling my eyes too. So we agreed with the inspector that we would take down the back portion (which is the part that’s rotted) and spruce up the rest. I love a challenge, hate one that’s forced on me… Grrrr! We’ve put it off for long enough and now we’re down to the wire. No sweat, we work better under pressure!
Bring on the demolition!

As you can see we’ve left up the wall that faces the neighbors yard as a shield from their nosy eyes. We will get as much of this crap gone on trash day as we can and then take down the rest next weekend. Then the real fun starts!!! Until then, be nice to your neighbors!!

Inspired

Hey all! I’ve been inspired to revamp the blog. Last night I spent all night tossing and turning with tons of ideas running through my head. We have so many things we want to do that we constantly talk about that we NEVER do! I though maybe if I blogged about it we might have more of a push o follow through. We’ll see.
I mean this is not just home improvement stuff. It’s life improvements too. Going back to school, volunteering more, trying new places, moving up at work, whatever life throws at us. I kinda got to thinking that life is like one big DIY project. If you hate something but don’t act to fix it, it just deteriorates and you keep hating it. You could hire someone else to fix it, but you don’t appreciate it as much. So yo have to tackle every aspect of your life like its a project. One you’re going to do yourself and work hard at to get what you want. I recently read somewhere that doers get what they want and everyone else gets what they get. Lets see what comes out of this DIY attitude!

When do you call it quits with “friends”?

Do you ever think to yourself and wonder why it seems like you have no friends?  True, be there for you no matter what friends?  I can think of three, maybe four people who are not family members that I can consider my actual friends. By looking at my Facebook page and the 250+ friends, You would think differently.  Of course Facebook is for networking so a large percentage of those friends are former co workers and Army buddies. Then another big percentage are family members. Then you have acquaintances . You know those people that you meet at children’s activities and school, play dates, the park and places like that. Then of course you have the four or so actual friends, the most important people on there. Who’s left?  School mates. There’s the people that you met in passing, had a class with, played a sport with, sat next to in detention. Then there’s school friends. That group of people that you spent the better part of your school years building a relationship with. Those are the “friends” I’m referring to. The “we’ll be friends forever ” group of friends. When do you call it quits with them? When are you no longer obligated to have them on your Facebook?

I’ll tell you when. When you are levels above them on the ladder of life. When you have done something, and been somewhere and they are still in the same place. When you have gotten married and they haven’t. When you have are raising children and they merely have them. When there are things more important to you then “friends” and to them that’s all there is. When you try to give advice and they call you jealous because they have freedom (to do what I don’t know) and you don’t. Most of all though, when they no longer want to get to where you are. It’s time to let go and move on. You’ll know when that happens when you are no longer able to talk about things you see that they can change to better themselves and come up with you. When you are referred to as jealous, or hating or something of that nature. That’s when it’s time to cut ties to your school friends and look forward to bigger and better things. Make new friends who have something to offer you in one way or another. You are who you hang out with and if you ever want to rise up, you have to let go of those people that are by their actions are choosing to stay where they are.

So if you’re still on my Facebook to read this, you were in one of the first couple of categories. If you’re reading it some other way, you just might be one of those people that I had to let go of.

The reviews are in!

Caught up on some movies recently and here are the verdicts for the ones we saw!!

Captain America– Silly. Expected more of a comic remake after X-men, Spiderman, Hulk, even Thor was way better then this one.  Actor looked like superhero and played the part well, but the story was just kind of…silly. Hayley Atwell was good, really the only female actress and she owned her part. Hated his costume. So corny.  I guess you have to be into comic books to full appreciate this movie. I give it 2.5 stars.

Conan the Barbarian–  Husband loves the old one, for  reasons that I do not understand.  I mainly got it for him but also for me to see if it was better updated.  YES, YES, YES!  Jason Momoa as Conan, thumbs up! He was so good and I don’t know if he always looks that ripped, but he looked better then the original guy. The actress stealing the spotlight was of course, Rose McGowan as Marique.  She made evil so incredibly sexy. But I love Rose so I’m biased.  The sex scene between Conan and Tamara… made the movie!  Yum, yum, HOTT!  Action was awesome and didn’t look at all cheesy. They even threw in some humor with a thief that got introduced at the beginning and he was pretty damn funny.  This movie  4.0 stars.

Snow Flower and the secret Fan–  Ok.  Would have been so much better if so much of it wasn’t in Mandarin. Loved the history aspect of it about the binding of Chinese women’s feet. Good actors, good story,  a little emotional.  It was an interesting perspective on status reversals in society. One started poor and ended up being the wealthy one while the one that started wealthy ended up being poor < that was not a spoiler>.  I give it 3 stars.

Good Neighbors–  Kind of gave away the ending from the very beginning. The acting sucked. The story sucked. the ending sucked. You know what, they movie just sucked. It would have been a good if it was done differently. They had the right concept, just the wrong execution.  I give it 1 star.

Trespass (2011)– A list actors Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage did not disappoint! Started off really good and kind of had you guessing about what was going on.  But then when you find out what was going on it was not at all what you had guessed which sucked because what you were guessing would have been better then what actually happened. Ben Mendelsohn (Elias) was really good as a bad guy (one of the robbers) and it would have ended better if he had stayed as such and not turned into a crazy towards the end. I give it 3.5 stars because had the main actors not been Academy award winners the movie would have been pretty bad.  The two of them made the movie.  PS- no sex scene.  BOO!

Super 8–  Not bad.  The majority of the actors were children and they were all really good.  The special effects were well done and had a really good story line. Not sure about what the “mysterious creature” ended up being at the end.  It was a little much and kind of ruined it for me.  At least it was at the end though so you watch most of the movie before you end up going “really?”.  Overall not a bad film, definitely worth the dollar. I think Older kids, like preteens would get a kick out of it and parents could watch with them without getting bored.  I give it 3.5 stars because it was a Steven Spielberg film

  The Smurfs– Don’t like them, so I didn’t watch it but since it did not hold Amayah’s attention at all, I give it 2 stars.  I hate movies with animated characters in the real world.  It’s either an animated movie or a regular film. Don’t mix them, it’s annoying.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2–   LOVED IT!! They really followed the story line and all the Actors are so great! They have been great since the beginning but have really evolved into even greater Actors. Daniel Radcliffe, I have no idea how old you are now but you’re a little hottie 🙂  Again I’m biased because I’ve read all the books and loved them.  You’re either a Potter fan or you’re not.   Chances are if you didn’t read the books then you won’t like or understand the movies.  I give it 5 stars.

The Undying–  Started off with a really good plot and some jumpy moments. It got you interested even though the acting was mediocre at best.  It quickly lost that though as it went from the ghost story to more of a creepy love story.  The actors were not very convincing at all…  which made you lose interest when the story started getting a little more complicated.  I say see it if you have nothing else you want to see or just to check it out… but it wasn’t worth the $1. I give it 1.5 stars

Fright Night (2011)–  Again  started off really good and then just lost it and got kind of cheesy.  Colin Farrell which is the vampire, looked awesome and has always been a good actor. This movie did not do anything to showcase his talent.  All the girls in the movie were hott, hott, hott!  Especially the French one. So guys if you see for anything I can give it that. “McLovin” was hilarious as usual!  We laughed when we say him before he even said his first line, but when he did… he delivered.  Anton Yelchin who was Charley was pretty good. I can’t remember seeing him in anything else but he’s a cute little actor.   I guess the story line or the directing is what made this movie kinda… suck.  The action scenes were not really action and the special effects were lame.  Ending could have been better.  Kind of made a mockery of such good actors towards the end. Glad it was only $1 and I give it 2.5 stars only because it would be offensive to give any lower for such talented actors.

Kung Fu Panda 2– Amayah liked it. I actually was able to watch some of it. Not a fan of Jack Black though, so hearing the panda talk is already a deal breaker for me. Based on the movie itself, annoying voice aside… it was pretty good. Amayah liked it and it had some good kiddie action.  I give it 4 stars.

Next review will include.. The Help, 11/11/11, Water for Elephants, and Change up.