Painting Update

When I'm not doing yard work, I'm back inside armed with my trusty paint brushes.  I finally finished the hall ceiling and once again swore off ceiling painting for a while.

After that wrapped up I decided that my laundry room needed a little color. 

I was planning to paint this room a grass green color, something fun and bright, but I had so much paint left over from my kitchen that I decided it was more economical to use that color.  It will work perfect since my laundry room is visable from the kitchen when I leave the door open.

Hopefully once painted I will keep the area a little neater than it is in the photo above.  You can actually see some of my green paint chips I was considering, stuck above my hooks.  I am still going to use a little green possibly as a stripe or stencil but I will only need to buy a small sample amount for that.  For now I'm just focusing on getting my aqua on the walls.

This room will also need the trim painted white and after close consideration...the ceiling needs help too.  Rats.  I think I will paint it blue though, since I am out of white ceiling paint and promised myself I wouldn't buy any for a while. 

Attack of the Squigglies

Just when I survived the great spring leaf dump of 2012....

...the seeds and the squigglies started dropping.

Keep in mind it is Tuesday and I swept this whole area on Sunday.  It's out of control.  My backyard is covered, my roof is covered.  Every morning I have to unbury my car from these things.  Don't even get me started on how many I've tracked in the house.  Even my poor giant name-unknown plant is covered.

Good thing I just restocked my supply of giant lawn bags.  Looks like I'll have my work cut out for me.  The entire yard is buried as well and will probably need some leaf blower attention.

On a positive note, I did spy this little spark of life coming up from the blanket of squigglies.

Looks like my grass seeds are starting to sprout!  Hopefully they don't get smothered to death by the squigglies before I get a chance to clean them up.

May the Gardening Begin!

Thanks to a beautiful weekend, I finally got my garden finished and planted.  I added a 40lb bag of some sort of Humus/manure organic compost concoction to give myself a little more depth.  I picked up six 4' wood slats at Home Depot.  Unfortunately I really needed them to be an inch or two longer each so that they would lay atop my garden bed.

My slats perfectly layed inside my bed.  Not good.  Luckily I was able to nail them from the side, hovering slightly above the dirt level.

This configuration should work just as well.  I bought 12 plants and 4 seed packets to make up my garden and layed them out based on how much room I thought they would need (but I could be totally wrong since this is my first stab at growing veggies). 

The majority of my plants came in little biodegradable pots that went right into the ground (minus the plastic wrappers).  I'm a little concerned about how I planted the seeds and if I planted too many but I guess when they start growing I can thin them out?  No idea.  I'm going to play that one by ear.  My tomatoes are along the back and I bought support stakes for them.  I may need to swap these out for more of a trellis structure.  Not sure about that either. 

It looks great so far!  Here's a chart of what I planted. 

My ornamental Thai Hot Peppers are supposedly edible and not just ornamental.  And I've already used some of my Apple Mint in my tea this morning!  I should start seeing some harvestable fruits by mid May, lasting throughout the summer.  I'm sure I will keep you well informed on the progess as I'm quite obsessed with this little project.  I'm hoping the critters leave my garden alone.  I'm looking at you sneaky squirrel.

In the meantime I'll just be kicking back, trying to learn more about my new hobby.

It's a Dirty Job

My vegetable garden is making progress thanks to several bags of heavy stuff I bought last weekend.  I bought a couple of more bags of rocks and finished off the trim around the garden.

My Square Foot Gardening book calls for a very specific dirt mixture with equal parts peat moss, vermiculite and compost.  It also notes you should mix various bags of store bought compost so as to get a mix from various industries.  Well after 3 garden centers I could not find vermiculite and instead went with Perlite.  And then I only used 2 types of compost.  I'm hoping to get a little more compost this weekend.  My favorite had to be the Moo-nure I bought.  As you can see, they are #1 in the #2 business.

I dumped what I had so far on a tarp and mixed them using a shovel.

After transferring it all into my garden bed I can up a little bit short.  I only bought about 6 cubic feet of dirts and I really need 8.  This should be fixed once I get additional compost and a little more peat moss.

I hope to start planting some veggies in here this coming weekend!  I can't wait to have my own salad fixins growing in my backyard.

Pablo's Picasso

Last night I made my 4th trip to Painting With a Twist.  This time the theme was "Paint Your Pet".  I believe the hardest part of this was actually finding a picture of Pablo 1) awake 2) with his ears up and 3) in focus.  When he's awake, he's a fast little thing.  I finally settled on this picture to paint.

We emailed the photos in early so when we got there last night our stations were all set up with our colors and a rough sketch of our pets.

It is so much harder to paint your pet than to pet a random dog because you are trying to get their personality into the picture.  Of course, Pablo's personality is a mixture of laziness and disdain so that made it even harder.

All in all I was really impressed with how it turned out!  He looks a little creepy but you can definitely tell it is him.

Here is the Picasso version of Pablo with Hank.  They make quite the team.

I think I want to get a totally obnoxious gold baroque frame to put around Pablo and make this little area shrine-like.  I think it's fitting.

Something along the lines of this:

The bigger and the tackier the better.  I'm not positive how Pablo feels about all this attention but I'm pretty sure he's eating it up.

Spring Flowers!

After sorting out all my grass issues on Sunday I moved on to planting flowers, flowers that are hopefully enjoying the 5+ inches of rain they've received in the last 24 hours.  I start out finally planting something in my wonderful birthday present pot I got from Ken.  I went with a red begonia because I have a decent track record with these plants.

It was the perfect pick-me-up for my patio area.  I think I also need some brighter pillows on that loveseat.  Mine are a little drab.

 Last Friday I found the most beautiful hydrangeas at Lowe's.  I have no experience with these but I figured I would give one a whirl.

If I succeed, this could turn into a pretty big bush so I'm starting it out in its own little bed.  I picked up these log edgers at Home Depot for $7 each and in no time, had a new flower bed.

If I can keep these beds going, I hope to sometime join this entire side of the yard into one big flower bed.  I also added some caladiums to Pablo's bed.

 My hosta has started to grow since I put it in last week!  That's a good sign.  I haven't done too much to the front yard yet.  I added a wandering jew into the mulched part of my yard.

It looks a little rough but this whole area will get remulched once my tree stops doing it's thing.  Last but not least I bought 3 asiatic lilies for the sole reason that they were so bright and fun I couldn't resist.  I put them in the front bed along my house.  Hopefully they will get enough sun to survive.

I think I'm going to be able to get the front remulched in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime I'll focus on getting my vegetable garden up and running. 

Green Weekend

While Saturday was all about green beer and my bright green pants, Sunday was all about my green thumb.  The weekend-long rain storms held off and I was able to get tons done on Sunday.  I actually started off on Friday, using Weed-B-Gon with my water hose in an attempt to kill off these massive broadleaf weeds that are taking over my lawn.  I'm not sure what they are but the are gross and grow very fast.  By Sunday you can see they were already shriveling away.

My first chore on Sunday was to mow the front and back yard.  Because my lawn is consumed by weeds, I've been mowing every weekend this spring.  Now, I don't mind mowing but it's a lot more rewarding when you are actually mowing GRASS.  Sigh.  So for now I'm mowing weeds...oh, and leaves.

Once I finished mowing I spread grass seed in the front and back.  I have Dense Shade seeds under the front tree and then used Bermuda seed on the other areas.  I'm hoping to get grass growing on my boulevard since for some reason when I moved in it was only dirt.

My front yard is slowly filling in and hopefully the extra seed will help.  Can I mention how hard it is to properly lay grass seed when the wind of an approaching storm is fighting against you?  Not fun.

Now, this is not the most exciting post but I'm slightly obsessed right now with getting my grass to come in.  I promise to post about my pretty new flowers and the vegetable garden progress in the coming days.  Those will be a lot more exciting than watching grass grow.

Hell Froze Over

I'm at it again, even though I swore I would never paint another ceiling.  I'm starting small with the "hallway" part of my house.

It is a small contained area that I thought I could knock out quickly last night.  Unfortunately I discovered I was out of rollers for my paint brush.  I did all the cutting in at least.  Now once I buy new rollers I'll be able to knock out a couple of coats in no time.

Even this small amount of ceiling painting has reminded me how much I hate it.  I'm thinking I might need to take another few months to recover before attempting my kitchen.  I need just enough time to pass that I forget how awful it is.