Where the Redbud Grows

After rousing myself from bed (well after Cliff has fought with his 5AM alarm and gone to Crossfit), I make myself a cup of coffee and breakfast. When I'm lucky (which is often), it's an omelet made of farm fresh eggs, spinach, peppers, and onions... and don't forget the cheese. One teaspoon of honey, a dollop of Hatcher Family Dairy half & half and I take my first sip. Gosh I love mornings.

Within a few minutes, I've made my way from the kitchen to the yard. Yesterday, the front-stoop. Today, the back. I breathe in the morning air as I feed my brain and body and heart all of the fuel it needs to welcome the day. I marvel at the calls I recognize from birds littering the trees above me. I look down at my snowflake covered pajama pants and chuckle at the irony. I look out over the yard we have lovingly and frustratingly tended to for the last year and a half and I smile. The breeze lifts my face towards the sun still not yet mounted above one of two original trees on our property. And then my gaze falls on the fresh, cheery personality of one of our new trees, the Redbud. While I love every Spring, this one... well, it is just different.

Once finished with my last bite (but not my last sip, for I make my one cup a day last as long as possible), I take a quick walk around the yard to check on the health and moisture of the soil around our newest plantings. Today will not be nearly as warm as its predecessors, so all is well.

All, is in fact, very well.

I did some shopping yesterday.

My rosemary I planted the end of last summer.

Cherry laurels, newly planted just a few days ago.

My cascade of lovely - lavender, parsley, basil... and still more to go.

The redbud.

Turning forsythia newly transplanted from a precarious middle-of-the-yard spot to the fenceline.

(A Way Late) Weekend Report: 9/52

IT'S BEEN ONE HECK OF A WEEK.

Nothing crazy.

Nothing too out of the ordinary.

Only, I've been cheating.

With my website.

Building - or rather, re-building - a website is the closest thing I've ever experienced to having a baby. And it's been small deliveries over the course of the week, not even just one big one. You'll even see that if you visit it; it's still not done. But even what it is, right at this very moment, is greater or more extensive than I'd hoped... and than it had previously been.

And it couldn't have come at a more perfect time. In every way. I'm no longer a wedding associate for Gray Photography, I've officially been in business FULL-TIME for a year, and I'm more confident in who I am than I have ever been.

It's just a great time of year to bloom :)

The first forsythia bloom.

Now, to last weekend.

We came off a weekend of trellis building (more on that in a later post), lunch at Puckett's with Cliff's parents, dinner at our place with lovely friends (and my first wedding clients post non-associate-ness), and ran smack into March.

Did you know that in February, Cliff became a Cross-fit-er. And I? I logged 31 hours of working out for #getfitfebruary (yeah, I made my own accountability hashtag for twitter). It was quite the feat for the both of us, but it's given us great momentum into #moveitmarch :)

With that, were off for the weekend. This is what we have to look forward to!

Well that, and this.

The Weekend Report: 7/52

I married a man who has an obsession with projects.

And thankfully, not just starting them, but finishing them as well. That's got to be a great indicator of character, right?

So give him two days of glorious weather, a few reasons to get his hands dirty, and he'll have us working our fannies off to, shall we say, git 'er done.

On the docket this weekend? Desk building (and prepping the yard for Spring).

Desk Building

Oh the chronicles of what is henceforth referred to as "The Desk." As you could gather from any post written pretty much from November to December, we have been in the process of turning our bonus space - a once garage, now three rooms - Utility, Laundry/Pantry, and Den - into legitimate spaces. From the land of mauve and purple and paneling, bad carpet and linoleum, and bad, bad lighting... we've revived it. Literally brought it back from the dead. From the day we closed, we've repainted, put up molding, patched ceilings, put in new lighting (and lighting in general, in one of the rooms), and tiled. A couple of weeks ago we took a road trip to IKEA and have recently finished outfitting the most wonderful displays of particle-board shelving and cabinetry known to man.

above the washer & dryer

where once stood metal brackets w/ open wood shelves

don't even get me started on this... it's my lifelong dream

and so beautiful, even, at night w/ the lighting we installed

So enter, The Desk. For months and months we've been planning this from start to finish and all along was the character known as Bedford.

Oh Bedford, you rascal.

I have a love affair with Pottery Barn, and had been saving and scheming forever to have this desk. I'd done the measuring, working, etc. to have it and after spending 30 minutes in the store one day, walked out and it was all mine. I brought it home in boxes, took one last measurement before unpacking, and subsequently sat on the floor near the point of tears because IT WOULDN'T FIT. How had this happened?

In walks our little moment of DIY ingenuity. What if we bought similar cabinet pieces (which we found both pretty and less expensive options at JCPenney) and built our own desktop. Our own BEAUTIFUL desktop that we'd stain the color of the floors we'd just had refinished. Du-nu-nu-nuuuuuh (phonetically, I think that's how a trumpet sound is spelled).

So this is what Saturday looked like:

Supplies.

Refreshments.

Plywood layer.

Oak board layer.

STAIN!!

And Sunday:

The Desk.

This was the part where we had let it sit and become prettier with time, another coat of stain, two coats of polyurethane (the first of which it had last night). So out came the lawnmower, giant trash bags, pruning shears, and shovels and we had ourselves a grand ol' time cutting and bagging the Water Oak tree leaves which fell in January, chopping back our dwarf crape myrtles, ridding other bushes and trees of their "suckers".

I think final count on the load we took to the dump was 13 bags, too many landscaping rocks our previous owners had left that we've been dying to get rid of since, a mess-load of limbs, suckers, and pruning leftovers, and our measly attempt at shoveling the wood chips left from the six stump-grindings that have taken place in our yard since January (we're now hiring someone to take care of that).

Off to the dump.

It feels good to get these sorts of things done, but like Cliff said last night, it makes the weekends go by all-too-fast. 

But honestly, we need these kinds of weekends. Not just for our home, but for our marriage. I love sharing that sense of accomplishment together, though everything in me is screaming to not be caked in the old, cruddy leaf dust flying at me from the back of the lawnmower. I love that through project-weekends like this, we become intimated not just with the precious things we are care-takers of - like our land, and all of its imperfections - but with each other, as well.

I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Plus, there's usually a Sonic drink in the deal, somewhere :)

Holes, Holes, Holes

In the ceiling...

I don't know what the creepy fuzzy animal is in the corner, and neither does my father in law, who found it in the attic.  Let's just say, I hesitated touching it with my bare hands. Wendell is responsible for the perching.

Let's see what was up there before? Yep, I think we made the right decision.

And in the ground...

Yeah, we use gutter ramps and blocks as markers around this place. Notice the layer of ice on top of the hole? This will be home to a Ginkgo tree in about a week.

Look at those roots from the old maple we had cut down. This is the half-dug hole my super-hero husband began in the wee hours of the night and morning a couple of days ago. We've since hired the nursery we purchased the trees from to plant the trees :) This will be home to an Eastern Redbud tree in about a week!

In other news, we've also managed to get the linoleum up out of the laundry room:

I'm telling you, a bright and happy laundry room is the only kind of laundry room for me.

A Lesson in What Matters

Life feels a bit like...
What do we not have going on right now?

But it's not like that, I know.

Had it not been for my brief stint in Vegas, it would have seemed like a normal progression of... things. What things?

Well, of course there's the car.
....and the crawl space.
.......and the yard grading.
...........and the duct work.

And a business that's working to take giant strides instead of babysteps.

But it all comes back to the babysteps.
Even with the car... the crawl space... the yard grading... and the duct work.

So let's recap:

The Car
I hit a deer. I got a rental car. My car was totaled. We got money from the insurance company. We're looking for a new (to us, not to the world) car. We both do mounds of research and go test-driving (just this Saturday). We've got the list down from six potentials to three. And now? The hunt kicks into fourth...

The Crawl Space
When we did the inspection on the house, we ran into a tiny little bit of what we thought "might be mold, could be fungus" in the crawl space. We asked for some money for remediation in the closing and got that. And now it's close to Spring and in his quest to do the manly things around the house, Cliff started looking into our remediation process while I was in Vegas. That processed unearthed a whole can of... well... life, which we're now working to take care of. And so enters...

The Duct Work & The Lawn Grading
Apparently in the visit by the remediation company, it was suggested we look into our duct work which apparently met some of its demise at the hand - er - nibbler of something... as well into how the drainage around our home works because he noticed many of the yards with pooling. And that part, at least, was no news to us. Every single house in our neighborhood has some tiny pond somewhere on the premises after a good hard rain. We jokingly call the one in our backyard the pool. And so then came the HVAC guy... and the landscaping guy... and we have ourselves a whole series of projects which, truth be told, aren't at all exciting to me.

• Re-mediating our entire crawl space with a cleaning and a full moisture-barrier seal.
• Replacing our ductwork and moving our HVAC unit from behind the house to the side.
• Grading our lawn, both front and back, to level it out, prevent pooling, and thus manage drainage.
  
• Installing piping and drainage to move water away from the house (and the foundation).

But I'll tell you what is exciting. Knowing that I can trust my husband to do his research and to get the job done. As much as I hate that spending on these projects means a delay in a few other areas (namely purchasing new furniture, adopting a pet, and getting a wii), the fact that my husband would choose the integrity of the foundation and inner-workings of our home over the appearance of "the good life" is such an amazing lesson for me. And that he would work so hard and lead us so well for us to have the means to make that choice.

Because doggonit, I'd choose the new bedroom suite, the home-office shelving system, the curtains and the kitten (or puppy) over it all if I didn't have someone like him to help me remember some of the most basic and important aspects of not just home-ownership - but plain old L I F E.

It doesn't matter if it looks good.
It matters if it is good.

I'm Excited

To at least be planning to get in bed by 9PM tonight. I was so tired this morning that I realized my first thoughts when waking up were of planning when I could go to bed tonight. Isn't that sad?

As much as I've loved working on projects lately, my sleep life is being deprived at the expense of not neglecting ol' Clifford in our time together in the evenings. So after we've had chat, dinner, and hangout time, I end up hovering over the keyboard reinventing moments while he keeps vigil on the couch - sometimes watching television, watching me work, or watching the back of his eyelids. What he doesn't know, though he can read here of course, is that half of my digital craftiness these last two nights was spent working on one of his Christmas presents. Fortunately for me, he gave up early in the fight last night, and while he lightly snored away, I made most of the final touches on a gift I am uber-excited about.

Speaking of excitement: our Christmas cards came in the mail yesterday! This whole week, as more cards from other people have come in, I've been on pins and needles waiting for ours to arrive so that we can send them out. And not only the time-sensitive nature of it all but the actual card itself, considering I invested a lot of myself in this process. For my first stab at self-portraiture and card design, I am really happy!

And I guess, in keeping with the Christmas theme, we're officially halfway through with gift gathering so I guess that's a little exciting, as well!