In His Steps

 I decided to have a bit of a cleaning day today. We had been painting minis for D&D and after the holidays, the living room became a bit of a mess, as you can see here. So, here is the after shot of me putting everything away!! I admit, it really helped to have the windows open, too. The bright light of day makes a home feel less... enclosed and cramped.

So, Spousal Unit and I had been using his old black bar dining table and chairs, and they had begun to fall apart. They were wobbly and there were only four chairs and with the amount of hosting we do, we had long outgrown it. So, we decided it was time to replace it as a Christmas gift to our home. Here's our new set! It just arrived and I am so pleased with the beautiful wood and six chairs. Now I can properly host as well as comfortably eat at a table, since the bar height of the old set made it less than comfortable for short little me. The same day the dining set arrived, I decided to do some Christmas baking with the excess of apples I have for some reason. Well... as you can see above, it didn't work out. It's funny, but they feel in pretty hard, so I'm going to stick with my Christmas banana bread loaves and fudge instead. They still taste good, but I'm not giving these out to the neighbors.

Spousal Unit and I had to make a difficult decision recently. When we first bought our home, we knew the doors were very poor: rotting wood, seals that were falling off and worn out, and the fixtures on them were just terrible and falling out as well. We couldn't get the heat or cool air to stay inside the house and pests (spiders!) were getting in through the huge cracks around the door. So we decided to invest in the house some more and replace the front and back doors before winter comes and the pests decide to hide inside our house when it gets cold. I don't want to take pictures until we paint them, but the contractor came today and tore out the old doors and jambs to replace it all. Our house is of course a special snowflake house, so there was some lead paint in the front, the doors weren't standard size, and neither were any of the jambs, so we ordered these well over a month ago but there was extra cost and time needed to cut everything to the right specificat...

Inspired by something similar Rosslyn made for her yard, I decided to use a lot of my interesting beads to make dangles for the ornamental plum tree we have in our front yard. Here are the five ones I made to decorate the tree. The large white and teal pearls are from my wedding, actually, so it was nice to put little reminders of my love and my happiness and my history in such a simple thing. All of the beads have been from my life, old pieces of jewelry or bought or obtained from events I have experienced. Here's our tree and this is after I hung them all! And for a bonus, I've included some pictures of the full yard below since it was so pretty that day with a bunch of flowering weeds. We are thinking of filling our yard with wildflowers that don't want to hurt our feet and ankles in honor of it.

Happy 300th Post to my blog!!!! In the past year, Spousal Unit, Douglas, and I have been hard at work to make our yard, especially the side yard, up to our standards. We're... nowhere close--but!--we're getting closer. The front yard with the irises in bloom. We built a rock sifter because our soil is... well, it's clay and rocks. The guys built it and were quite proud. Our next step was to begin removing the diseased trees and leftover stumps from the previous ownership. We wanted to keep this cherry tree, but the roots were rotting completely. It left a huge hole in the yard. You can see the white mold in the hole here that afflicted the cherry tree. We're working to improve drainage and soil quality to prevent this kind of infection. There was an ornamental plum tree here right next to the driveway and it was also clearly diseased and cracking the driveway, so we took it out. The cor...

Our yard has a family of quail with seven chicks and I just can't get enough of them, so I'm sharing some of the photos I got with all of you!

The first day we moved in, the bathtub faucet broke, making showers in the front bathroom impossible. We showered in the back bathroom instead, but it was "like trying to shower in a cardboard box." Spousal Unit decided it was time to fix it, though he had never attempted such a repair before. He did manage to succeed though, replacing the faucet with a new one which serves us quite well!