Happy Anniversary Home Improvements!

Happy Annivesary to CJ & Eric and also us because we closed on our house on May 28 last year! So we are now officially one year closer to actually owning our house. What a year! I can't believe one year ago we were driving up into the mountains late every night after work at Noni  and I was pulling out the worst carpet tack nail boards with a huge pregnant belly in an echoey house that smelt like smoke while Billy tore out pretty much everything else faster than a tornado. We love this house more and more and more every day!

 

In honor of this anniversary (or perhaps because the weather has been so nice) we have been going through a rash of home improvement projects.

 

We have a cupboard in our laundry room where I keep food storage and other such things and you can see it as you walk down the hall to the bathroom so I decided to make a curtain to cover it up. At first I thought it looked equally dorky, but it's grown on me.

We always have bags of food or bottles of puffs or who knows what else hanging around our table or floor because we are so frequently feeding Tru but rather infrequently wanting to take all the food back to the cupboard so I sewed a little pouch that hangs under his chair and now we are even more "Tru bottom feeders!"

We had these pretty nasty walkways leading up to our stairs and Billy had some spare pavers from one of his jobs so he built better walkways.

We planted our garden. Hopefully the deer don't want to come all the way up the driveway to snag it!

Since there's no before picture you can't really tell that this is better, but I cleaned out one of our nasty flowerbeds and put some leftover flagstone in it.

Billy found these cool chairs on the side of the road. I was so proud of him for getting something off the side of the road, generally something I usually do but not so much Billy.

We hung some bird feeders and always have tons of hummingbirds and a few other cool weird birds that I've never seen coming to visit.

I cleaned out our nasty wanna-be water feature in the backyard and built a little rock wall around the garage and woodpile.

Again no before picture makes this look still kind of junky but it was way worse; I cleaned out Billy's scap pile and organized it a little. Poor Free Bird:( Definitely a project on the list.

And my favorite, Billy built a new swing for us! The long version of the swing story is Billy wanted to build a swing but I thought I could just reupholster the old one cus it was kind of nasty. But I was daunted by such a project because the only part about being a seamstress that I've got down is the stress part and I recently swore off sewing for a time but the cushions motivated me. So I spent so long reupholstering and sewing and getting buttons and making pillows and blablabla and felt so triumphant when they did turn out and they did look good! But then when I went to reassemble the old swing, alas! The new upholstery lacked the tension and strength of the original, which as it turns out, was what held you while you sat. So Billy saw it as the perfect opportunity to build the swing and he did so literally in a matter of hours.

And my cushions and pillows still get to be put to use!

 

 

We love it!

 

And last but not least, Billy finally, finally got to ride his dirt bike. It's been more than a year and he had a blast. Can't beat leaving from your house to ride some sweet trails! I, of course, was so nervous the whole time he was gone, but they had a good time and I'm glad he got to go.

Truman was very skeptical of him dressed in such strange clothes haha.

 

And now it is the weekend I've been waiting for technically since I ran my first 10k but more specifically for the last 8 months and in two days time I will run 50 miles!!!