Camping!

We are going camping this weekend! I love camping! I love being outside and sitting around a fire and swimming and hiking and making food outside. I love how cold it is in the tent at night and how you have to get out of it early because it gets too hot. I love making s'mores, I always try to make the perfect golden marshmallow, my Dad taught me how. I like building fires and setting up tents. I like riding my bike around the campground. I love washing dishes in such a nontraditional way (actually it's probably MORE traditional considering it's a little more old-fashioned than the sink way of washing). I love getting out all our great camping gear. If I drank coffee I am sure I would love campfire coffee. I love how everything smells like campfire when you get home. I love using our awesome roasting sticks with our names on them. I love how it smells, how it feels, and all the memories that it brings back and all the memories that it makes. I sure hope Dietrich loves it too :)

Cleaning the Fridge

You know how your just going along and all of sudden you reach in the fridge for a cuppa milk and notice that, ew, the fridge needs cleaned? Usually the collection of dog hairs is how I know it's time, (did I just admit that there were dog hairs in my fridge? GA-ROSS). Anyway, my Grandma is coming to visit this weekend and although she has been to my house once before she has never stayed with me and I am so excited for her to stay! So clearly the fridge must be cleaned because I'm sure my 87 year old grandma is going to be judging me by the cleanliness of my fridge. In fact, I doubt she will even get in my fridge the whole time she is here. But IF she does, it will be dog hair free and ready to impress! You know what makes a clean fridge even better? Filling it full of groceries! I despise grocery shopping, thankfully Dietrich loves it. If he's in a bad mood I load him up and we go grocery shopping. He loves the people the "ights" I'm pretty sure he loves anything but staring at me all dang day.

But I hate it, I hate spending money, I hate taking the time, I hate seeing really heavy people buy disgusting food (I realize that was kind of mean, but seriously, it bothers me a lot), I hate trying to remember if I should buy this one item for that one meal I like to make or if I still have it at home, and I HATE spending the money, did I mention that? I always have to remind myself, and Bryce, that although ALL our money seems to go toward food that is the one thing we literally cannot live without. We can ditch the cable, internet (what!? GASP!), even a car, but we cannot live without the food. Why oh why does the food have to cost so much money!?

So in summary, this week we are focused on the fridge, which is happily cleaned, inside and out, and full of food (that will disappear by next week, blah).

New front steps

The front steps to our house are dangerous. Bryce has broken the front off of two of them. The handrail is too low to hold onto and it wobbles dangerously. The grandma's who visit HATE these stairs...so it was time to replace them. Here is the before picture, Bryce is getting ready to tear them apart:

Almost gone:
I really wanted to order a pizza and then sit in the house and see what the pizza guy would do. I never tried it, but I did have friends come by and they were able to knock on the bottom of the door...I let them in through the garage so they didn't have to climb the ladder.
Starting the new steps!
We went with a wide step at the bottom that turns to make the stairs more inviting and the front of the house a little more interesting. It's also a good place to put plants and stuff! Look, Dietrich is a good helper!

Here they are all done and painted!

Bryce still plans to add a handrail to the inside of the stairs so that there is a rail on both sides. The stairs feel safe and are much prettier than before too!

Flowers and Plants and a Garden too!

This year our BIG projects for the summer are going to be the yard and the front steps. After last year where I apparently spent the entire summer indoors with my sweet new baby, I have been spending a lot of time outside! Remember this? The lovely lava rock that lined our driveway when we moved in:

Well now it looks like this! (Oh my gosh, how much better does our lawn look!!?)
This is the corner, I have slowly been making plans for it. So far it has this cute plum tree that we planted on Dietrich's 1st Birthday and the day lily that my in-laws gave me for mother's day.
And this spot that just looks like dirt (oh, wait, because it is) is where I just planted a whole bunch of seeds for some pretty flowers. Hopefully in the next month or so I will have pictures of actual flowers here!
And now I will show you a picture of every single flower that I have planted this year:


Look a tomato plant, with tomatoes on it!


And now...da da da DAAA, my GARDEN! This is where the dog kennel was when we moved in, there was no grass here so we decided it was a good place to start a garden.
We have some lettuce, peppers and onions, carrots, and strawberries. At the back you can see my little raspberry bushes, and apparently my clothes on the line too, NICE.
This is the best our yard has looked since we moved in, the lawn is green and filling in and the flowers are adding some nice color. We really enjoy looking outside and seeing all the fun changes this year!

Where have I been?

I cannot believe that I haven't posted anything in MONTHS!!! I haven't done that since I started this blog and we bought this house. I blame it on an extremely long and depressing winter/spring and the fact that this kiddo has become so much fun that I just want to spend all my time playing with him, teaching him new things, and you know, sleeping!

So I am going to do my best over the next few days to share pictures and news of our new front steps, garden, and many flowers and plants that we have been planting to add to the landscape around this place. I am sitting in the backyard enjoying the SUN SUN SUN and finally feeling ready to blog again. Sorry it's been so long and I hope you enjoy the work we have been doing on Our House!

Stairs

As with most projects in our house we have big plans for these stairs someday, plans that include nice wood flooring and a totally different railing. But, who knows when we will get around to (I mean afford) such a project. So after seeing how nice the fireplace looked brown I decided the railing needed painted too!

So much better! Now they just sort of blend in. This was a difficult and long process as Dietrich now crawls all over including up and down theses stairs repeatedly which resulted in my learning how to remove paint from baby clothes as well as a few instances of cleaning a painted baby hand.

Please don't Look in my living room

I actually had a few requests for this post and I finally got around to it! When we bought this house I was in love with how bright it is. There are lots of windows and the living room and kitchen open up into each other sharing lots of light. I guess after years in a tiny dark apartments it felt really great to have all this light. And being from the country where people can't see in your windows anyway, I wasn't too worried about having blinds or curtains. We have them in our room and the guest rooms, there were some in the bathroom until the remodel when Bryce threw them away because he thought they were gross. So we finally decided it was time to buy some blinds for our large living room windows. Here they are open so you can see how big the windows are, how much light comes in, and how much of us the neighbors can see at night...

Now we can close them and nobody sees us! I can also close them so that I can ignore the fact that it is snowing again, in March...
They are top-down, bottom-up blinds, so they go both ways, like this!
I had to have that feature, because I still want to let in lots of light but might not want people to see me. We also bought a blind for the bathroom so now there is no chance that the neighbors are watching us get in the shower anymore...