Then and now: Google Satellite pictures

 This picture is from the summer before we moved in, say, July 2007.

The one on the bottom is newly taken this year in June.  

Much better, say I.

Spare time for bits and pieces

So,  I'm up early and have a minute to post some dozen pictures or so:

These are of my new corner pantry.  You can see I've put a clear shoe organizer on the inside of the door, and for right now, it's working great, although, it swings and clanks against the door, so we'll be trying to secure it at the bottom soon to stop that.   Below is a close shot of my old upper cabinet lazy susan that Ty let me install in the new pantry.  It had to go through one of the shelves, but I think I like it even more than before.  It's perfect for keeping spices and the like manageable.  

When the shelves were put in this pantry, I cleared out all the upper cabinets over the stove and around the sink.  When I was done, those items had only filled about four shelves in the pantry.  By the time we're done with this kitchen, storage space in it will have increased exponentially.

Now I have a functional place to put my buckets of flour, oatmeal, beans and sugar!

These are the raspberries.  They've exceeded the bed by about three feet on all sides.  We've got to figure out how to contain them by next year, and how to trellis them so they can be kept more upright. 

Pear tree and pumpkin patch

Garden view from east side of yard

Back fence and new side fence on north

Blueberries and Elderberries and Rhubarb in big pots

Big green leafhopper that was eating leaves on our raspberry bushes

Morning Glory!

Our second set of three, three and under.

Our new Back door and screen door

Just inside the backdoor, Ty added an "L"-shaped wall to make a mud room, or walk in coat closet.  That's one reason that we were able to sacrifice the front hall closet to the kitchen remodel.

Those black things are shoe storage, and there's peg board all over the inside to hang things from.

The shelf above is great and below is a bench, with more shoe buckets underneath.

Before Tag was born, we installed cordless shades in the sunroom.

This is a new curtain I made for the bedroom

Front Garden views:

The iron railing is now black, as it should be, since Ty painted it.

Fall strawberries

My Favorite color of snapdragons

The new side front fence on the north perfectly matches the one on the south, and cost us nothing!  Thank you neighbors!

Connect these three pictures, and you can see the front view of our house.

And at the beginning of August, we replaced the furnace and added an air conditioner, which allowed us to get rid of the swamp cooler.  Next year we'll fix the roof where the shaft stump is now.

Not too bad though, considering what it used to be, right?   Even the grass is greener.

Our new cupboards and "Nevermind Robert"

First, We've been going at this remodel for about three weeks now. It started kind of suddenly. Right after I'd posted "Help me Robert!" at the beginning of September, we actually did find some wonderful second-hand cabinets in our paper's online classifieds. The people who were selling them had just redone their kitchen, and were selling their five year old almost pristine cabinets, countertop, crown moulding and kitchen sink, even. They are medium oak, way better than I could have hoped and will be perfect for us. This miraculous stroke of luck changed the timeline on our new kitchen from about five years, to about five weeks! And they only cost us about $1800!

Here they are in our garage. We brought them home on the 13th of September, and then the next day, started taking out cupboards and tearing off sheet rock. The door for this one is on the floor next to it; they've got to be taken off anyway to put them on the wall.
This is a closeup of the countertop. It's white formica, with a corian edge at the front, and it will be great. I have no desire to ever have granite or stone or tile or meteorite countertops and am perfectly happy with these. We're going to have to puzzle piece one corner near the sink, but it's totally doable.
There are about seventeen units all together and one kitchen desk, which is in our sunroom at present. We're going to have two base cabinets left over, to use in the sewing room, but all the upper cabinets will fit perfectly the way that Ty has it configured. The only bummer is that we won't be able to fit in the crown moulding above them, 'cause raising the ceiling is simply not an option. But I'm sure I can figure out what to do with some extra crown moulding.

You can just see the corner of the new sink here above these words. It is going to be so lovely and easy to keep clean! I'm really looking forward to all of this. Below are some pictures of the floor that need to be patched with new linoleum. Again, I have no love for real stone tile floors in a kitchen. Anything you drop on them automatically shatters and they are really hard on knees and ankles. I love my stone-patterned linoleum, though! It's lovely, and tough, but very easy to clean. Here, you can see the floor in my corner pantry where the front room closet used to be. It shouldn't be too hard to patch and it's going to be out of the way so I don't care if it matches.

These areas are right in the traffic pattern where we are and will be walking everyday, though, so I hope they'll look seamless. Most of the long side will be under the base cabinets, but that short little rectangle will be right out in the open. We are hoping the company that installed it two years ago, will be able to help us, and do it right.

The blue tape on the floor marks where the footprint of the base cabinets will be.

Now these pictures are of the sheet rock that Ty put up last night. They were the panels that need no holes for electrical boxes.
This shows some of the new electrical wiring that Ty's mom did for us over last weekend. She is amazing!! Thank you so much, Mom! The wiring in this house was truly frightening in some places and she has helped us clean it up and make it safe, as well as move switches and plugs and install new lights! She also has saved us hundreds of dollars and probably prevented our home from burning down around us.
The rest of the sheet rock will be done by Friday. We're hoping to see the flooring guy today or tomorrow, and then we'll stop tripping over the turned up linoleum. The curtain over the new door to the kitchen is just waiting there while the window it should cover is still in the construction zone. Those are the colors I'd like to use in the kitchen, light red, yellow and sage green. Yeah, "light red" is a euphemism for "pink." You caught me.

So, What do you think?

Out of Doors

This is a short and un-expert video of our Family starting the hole for the trampoline at the beginning of spring.

The earliest beginnings of my garden this year. These were pumpkins. Sorry it's blurry.

Enjoying a bike-riding day, perfect for picture taking.

The front view of our house, Lilacs, tulips, daffy-down-dillies, Iris and strawberries have all come a long way!
More lilacs, some blue phlox, and bleeding hearts. See the new gutters?


This is from the north front corner, looking across the yard, past the front door.
The north side of our yard, where we planted some grapes, hoping that the heat caught by the neighbor's garage would be just what they needed to flourish.
These trees were planted just after Tag was born. Four here, at the north of our lot, and six in a row at the east side of the garden area. I cut them all off about fifteen inches above the ground. All but one peach put up with it admirably. I want short, wide, manageable trees, and lots of them with manageable yields of fruit.
Here's our completed trampoline installation. The hole extends about two and a half feet deep in the center, but is only one foot deep at the edges. The legs have been shortened to stand the top about 18 inches off the ground. It took about two weeks of infrequent digging, because of rain, to finish, but was completely worth it! We love not having to worry so much when the kids are playing on it, and feel it is so much safer.

Below, you can see the trees near the garden better.
Pears, peaches, apricots, plums, and apples. Also, raspberries. Which went crazy this year.

Before much was planted, just onions, spinach and lettuce there, and the raspberries coming back.
The arbor Ty made is simply gorgeous, even when completely bereft of greenery. Next to it on either side, he built planters for me to try the desirable type of morning glory this year. Next year, we'll try sweet peas. The benches, are perfect to stand on and wave hello to the neighbors and hold garden tools and harvested bounty really well. We don't spend a lot of time sitting on them though.

These are the peas that I started growing in early March, here on the south side of our garage, thinking they would be warmer there, in the cold months. They covered most of the wall and gave us pounds and pounds of peas in the pod that were delicious. They were done by July, so, before I thought of taking another picture of their bounteous glory, I pulled them off the trellis. The trellis is there, you can see it just against the dark earth at the bottom, and in the window reflection. It's uv-treated plastic mesh about 7 inches square, and is fastened about six feet high all along the wall with masonry screws and a wire woven thru it.

Tiny little corn peeking up here.
Iris. Love it!
I love pink lilacs!
Our first strawberries!
Great ground cover, but tricky to pick later without stepping into the bed.
We had a lot of visitors to the garden this year. A covey of quail frequent our yard. Here's one of them standing on just one leg. Below is a bird that nearly brained itself flying into one of the sun room's closed windows. Ally brought it in to recover, and the kids had fun holding and petting it for a half-hour.

Simply delighted by this little bird. You should have heard the squeals of laughter!

Thank you, Vanna! Smile, Brynne!
It was really fun for the kids, and they were glad to help it get better. We let it go that night also, and it was able to fly to the hedge next to our garden, just fine.

Things have started getting abundant in mid July. The horizontal slats you see through the arbor is a bench glider that is perfect to sit on once the shade hits it at about four pm.
We'd never seen a red praying mantis before.

There are the Morning Glories!
The peas are gone by this point, and these are spaghetti squash, cantaloupes and tomatoes.
I just love it!

The rest of these pictures are more recent. This is a long shot of our back fence and the future garden bed I'm trying to put in there. It will have flowers, and herbs and shrubs and maybe a new peach or nectarine tree. And I have some legally purchased Sego Lily seeds to grow there as well.

My whimsical wavy garden edge is not all I hoped it would be, but there's plenty of time to work with it. You can just see the raspberries far off in the distance.
Here are the grapes, which almost cover the side of the garage now. Also the trees near the sandbox did great this year. We got about three pounds of grapes from our vines this year, and hope for some tree fruit next year, maybe.

This is what the front garden looks like now: Autumn Glory Sedum in back, petunias, snapdragons and an orange daisy-ish flower that self-sows like crazy!