Yet another ongoing job

On Saturday I decided (after a few minutes of feeling guilty in the hammock) that I would start to tackle a job we had been discussing for a while. Stripping!!!!! (not as naked as it sounds) The former owners left us with two exterior screen doors, for the front and kitchen doors. Both of which were covered with chipping,flaking dirty looking paint. We don't have much of a budget this year to fix up the outside so we want to get the most bang for our buck when it comes to the exterior. The plan is to sand and fix the two aging doors, staining them a nice dark colour which will add some punch to the outside. This will then be followed by a nice new house number and a less rust-bucket of a mailbox. (funny the things I am now most looking forward to in life!)





For once I am happy about the gross sandbox that got left behind because I got to use it as a table for my sanding. As it usually seems to happen when we try to fix things here we soon ran into trouble. The paint on the door had been applied over a layer of varnish and stain so it was taking forever to get down to the wood. That palm sander had my hand feeling numb for the rest of the day! With such little progress and minimal sense of accomplishment i was feeling frustrated. I then took a trip up to Lowes and got some paint stripper, a scraper and a face mask. By the time I got back it was getting too late to tackle further so this shall be a long weekend project. Nothing says I love Canada like scraping paint off a door right? At least I will feel productive as G and his Dad finish building the shed!

Briefly a scene this weekend....

Until I felt WAY to guilty watching G work. Although I thought the picture was pretty funny :

Sometimes small changes are good too

Yesterday I didn't have a lot of time but was feeling like crossing something off the to-do list. I decided to tackle pretty much our only closet (the downside of a century home: they must have had less stuff than we did and therefore less need for storage) I emptied the closet and threw out some of the random stuff that shouldn't have made it in the move. Then I reorganized the remainder into three snazzy matching baskets- and voila:





I probably should have taken a before picture to fully illustrate the difference. I was very proud of myself and showed G to minimal fanfare. Direct quote "oh did you clean the cupboard?" I think from now on I will always take before pics so I can force an "ooooh...ahhh" moment!

Reason #943 why I crazy love Garret

Here we are hanging out in our brand new hammock. Technically I should say "my new hammock" since G surprised me with it as an early birthday present (hence # 943 on the list of why i love him) I sense a lot of hangout time in that bad boy so hurray for our new hammock! The back yard is slowly but surely coming together...I will let G post about the shed part 2. Our next task is digging the horseshoe pit along the new fence (I haven't mentioned yet but the neighbours are building a fence which is awesome) More pics to come soon

Lil Marleen

Last week in memory of my father, Garret decided to forgo the normal route for "buy the lady some flowers" and he bought me a rose bush!  Its actually not much of a bush at the moment, but we have been assured if we take care of it it will become more bush like.

[caption id="attachment_79" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Patiently waiting on our porch for us to plant her"][/caption]

And for those of you who are questioning who "Lil Marleen" is....I should first explain that I have a bit of an obsession with naming things....this usually extends to naming things that we don't currently have, like dogs and children. But G and I (probably more so myself) take great joy in giving names to inanimate objects and this plant didn't escape that fate either.

The name was simple: She actually came with a name tag:

 

[caption id="attachment_80" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="we shortened it a bit....but it has a nice ring to it!"][/caption]