House love

Since Barry and I are currently on a running break, we’ve had time to show some love to our badly neglected house.  First, we made some kitchen progress and finally chose and ordered our new cabinets.  After a lot of agonizing, we finally went with this white shaker cabinet with a vertical groove by Elmwood Kitchens.  This is their Dakota door with a 2.5″ border.  We love it!  It almost makes those yellow countertops look nice.  Err…maybe not.  In about 8 weeks time, they’ll be shipped to our kitchen, which will hopefully be ready to receive them.

Also, while I was stretching on my front steps post-run the other day, it occurred to me that our house numbers had seen better days.  This launched me into an online search for the perfect numbers to adorn our doorway.  After spending way more time on this endeavor than I care to admit, I finally paused and asked myself WTF I was doing.  I realized that having all this extra time on my hands is not necessarily a good thing.  Thus, I got myself to Home Depot and purchased these numbers which do the trick.

The only problem, of course, is that we hung the numbers higher than the previous set and therefore I now have to patch the old holes and paint over them.  Plus, it made me realize that we need a new doorbell.  Don’t you just love how completing one project always leads to a new project?

Speaking of projects, our garden is the mother of all of them.  It’s a work in progress and will always be a work in progress because it’s a Herculean effort that we just don’t have the manpower for.  Barry and I were feeling pretty bad about it but then we reminded ourselves that the previous owner was a 90 year old man who lived alone and had nothing better to do than flex his green thumb all the live long day.  We certainly don’t have that luxury so if we can at least prevent it from being a total eyesore, I think we’ll call it a victory.  My Dad spent a good chunk of Saturday assisting Barry with weeding and edging and on Sunday, we decided to mulch.  It took 15 bags to cover the front row of plants and the area around our azaleas.  (Excuse the dead tulips.  They’ll be gone once I research what you do with dead tulips or once the bunnies finish eating the leaves, whichever comes first.)

 

As I’m looking at these pictures, I’m also noticing the length of our grass.  You’d never know that it was just cut very recently.  Isn’t there some expression about “it’s like watching grass grow”?  And isn’t this expression a simile for a painfully slow, boring process?  If so, I think it’s a wildly inaccurate use of the phrase.  Seriously, we have some speedy grass.  We could conceivably get a bowl of popcorn, park ourselves on the patio and see some pretty intense action in just half an hour.

My final weekend semi-accomplishment was the purchase of some tomato plants and a basil plant.  This project was brought to a screeching halt when I tried to pot them and discovered that there were big earth worms in the bag of potting soil.  Given my fear of bugs, I’m currently reconsidering whether I need to grow veggies after all.   The jury is still out but let’s just say that Shaws just earned a new level of appreciation in my book.