The Great Outdoors

T.J. and I have been working so hard on the inside of our house we nearly forgot about the outside. On T.J.'s days off this week we (mostly T.J.) finally took some time to pay attention.

Garage Door Before & After

After:

Before:

See all the lines on the door? No more!

Mailbox Revamp! See the mailbox progress here.

You can sort of see the old mailbox on the right side of this photo. It had a bit of lean to it.

And now:

T.J.'s creative solution to covering the entrance to our crawl space. We decided this was necessary after Lexi got her leg caught in the old cover right after we moved in. He made this "garden box" from a wood crate left here by the previous owners.

He also painted it white:

While we had the white out painting the garage door, the garden box, and the mailbox post, we painted this swing:

And while I was taking these pictures, Lexi was being adorable:

 

And T.J. put up our picket fence a week or so back. The dogs and I thank him profusely. 

Check out more pictures of the fence process here. 

Yet to come: Painting the front door & a rebuild of the arch. Check out the arch before it was attacked by a riding lawn mower and torn down:

And here is a pretty bush/tree that is blooming around the side of our house. This summer has been full of surprises as far as plants go. The previous owners did a good job picking plants that bloom at different times throughout the season.

Morning Sunlight & a Picket Fence

First Anniversary Celebration

To mark T.J. and my one year of being married we... bought a house! I was very clear to my lender than we had to be in before the weekend of the 17th because I refused to celebrate in our stinky old temporary apartment, and I got my wish!
So because we were buying a house we decided to just put in some good ol' elbow grease rather than buy each other anything. T.J. put in a fence for me, and I painted the living room/kitchen "for him" (or more for me, can I have two gifts and T.J. have none?).
Luckily our families came down to help. I don't know if you have put in a fence or painted 11.5' ceilings lately, but it sure is a lot of work! Here is the yard and the living room walls before:

This privacy fence was right outside our back door around the patio. It was nice for privacy but because we have no backyard or side yard neighbors to the right, privacy was not really what we were going for. We wanted some beautiful views of the field behind our house. So the privacy fence had to go. T.J.s dad helped him demo it.

 Notice the crazy half painted walls and the molding between the off-white and gold? And when I say gold, I mean GOLD. It is hard to tell in the pictures but when it's about mid-day, this room was obnoxious. Because one of our favorite things about the house is the skylights in the living room, we wanted to enhance all the light they bring in. So T.J. and I decided to paint it a nice warm and inviting Morning Sunlight color from Behr (360A-2).

P.S. I just realized that my bathroom gray is Morning Fog and living room yellow is Morning Sunlight... must have been meant to be!

So here are some shots of us hard at work on our respective projects. 

First T.J. ripped out the molding and had to putty the walls. Apparently the molding had been put up while the paint was still wet causing big chunks of paint to come off with the molding. 

This is the scaffolding we had to climb to do the very top. Painting this room was a team effort, T.J. edged and my mom and I rolled.

 

Here T.J. is busting his butt digging post holes in 90+ degree weather. He looks good doing it though. :-)

T.J. even made his own gate.

And this is my view now:

And here are my fittingly named Morning Sunlight walls. 

 

I found this fabric that actually goes with my walls and my couch (which was harder than you'd think) at Joann's in the red tag clearance section. I think I ended up paying $5 a yard for them and bought 6 yards so, $30 curtains. 

 

  See how off-white the walls look here? The yellow takes on many different shades during the day. It almost always looks yellow in the kitchen, above my green walls. 

 

And here is how we looked as we finished our work day exactly 1 year after we were married:

 

Then we got cleaned up and went to dinner:

And they lived happily ever after in their cute little yellow house. :-)