A New Garden and Molding

We got a bunch done this weekend, including finishing our flower garden edge, buying some crown molding, and even getting it up in the powder room as I had hoped! I’ll show some pictures for a quick update:

For those who don’t remember, our backyard started like this, with an unsightly jungle gym:

My dad and Nik ripped that down in a single afternoon (although somehow my mom ended up in the rewarding “after” shot…probably because she was helping clear a lot of brush from the yard when this was taken):

Last spring we built a small raised bed garden:

And now we’ve extended that garden around the deck to create a bordered flower garden:

This garden greatly diminished the old pile of jungle gym lumber under the deck, but you can see we still have some more to get rid of. Baby steps…

We bought a few bags of dirt to get this area started, but I’m not spending a ton more on new dirt. We’ll probably just put a light topping to make it look nicer, add some mulch, and any flowers we plant we’ll dig out a hole and add better dirt just around the plant.

Now on to crown molding: we bought a contractor’s pack of molding (8 pack of 12′ pieces!), which caused some drama since it had to stick out of Nik’s trunk on the car ride home. We were ill-prepared for this, and I had forgotten bungee cords, so we tied the trunk down with rope, went very slowly, and tried not to annoy too many other drivers on the 2 mile drive home from Lowe’s. It was a success, overall.

To do the bathroom, we needed 2 32″ pieces, and 2 71″ pieces, all cut with inside corners. This is evidently the only “before” shot I took of the bathroom ceiling:

We messed with the miter saw a bit, and figured out there are two ways to cut the angle properly: one that makes the angle easier to figure out, but is harder to hold the trim, and one that takes some time to think about the angle, but handling the trim during the cut is way easier. But inside angles are figured out, nonetheless. When we were sure the pieces fit decently, I gave them a quick coat of our semi-gloss white trim paint. Then it was time for nailing.

Getting the pieces in place was trickier than it looked – I forget nothing is perfectly straight/plumb in our lovely house, including the ceiling, which apparently is curved in the bathroom. We had to settle on an arrangement that left some gaps, knowing that caulking and filling would hopefully cover things up. So here’s the semi-finished room:

Looks nice from afar, but up close here are some of the gap issues I’m referring to that will have to be dealt with:

Also, the gleaming white trim made it glaringly obvious that we forgot to paint the ceiling in this particular room. It looks downright dirty compared to the new trim (most obvious 2 pictures up)…so we’ll have to buy a small can of ceiling paint and get to that asap.

This week there’s not too much on the to-do list. Friday night is the 6 year anniversary of when I finally agreed to be in a relationship with Nik (this was a lengthy decision for me, starting with Nik asking me out on a date on Valentine’s Day…little did Nik know that this was just the start of all the indecisiveness he’d have to deal with in a future involving me!). So we’re going out to celebrate Friday. Then my parents might come up to visit Saturday and Sunday since October was their last visit. We are hoping to install a front storm door, and maybe get some more crown molding done, but there’s not many other pressing chores so it should be a nice weekend.

TGIF

Not too much house work has gone on in the last week, but we have some plans for this weekend. Hopefully the weather stays warm, since we heavily thatched our yard last week, then fertilized and seeded the lawn (right before a nice rainy day!). So much thatch came up out of the yard – you can see unthatched on the left, and thatched on the right:

We found some interesting creatures this week as well – one was a really large jumping spider who hopped right through our back door and was walking around the kitchen. Nik got him in a cup to relocate outside, and he was watching us quite intently during this process:

I also worked from home yesterday, and noticed this little creature running along our neighbor’s house when I glanced out the window. I watched him for a bit, then went outside to see if I could catch him since he definitely looked like an escaped pet and not a natural outdoor mouse. The catching was unsuccessful although I was able to get within a couple feet of him before he scurried further, but I left him some triscuits and bedding material to keep him warm – and some of the triscuits definitely got munched. I wonder if we’ll see him around again.

Last weekend we also planted a lot of our vegetable garden seeds (tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers) and some flowers (zinnias, canterbury bells, vincas, and marigolds). They’re incubating in our sunny guest room window at the moment, but maybe we can move them outside for a few hours over the weekend to get some natural sun.

We also finally harvested our beet crop, to start getting the garden ready for new plants, and they were disappointing to say the least…although we didn’t pay them much attention since planting seeds; I’m not sure we really ever watered them once during the fall/winter. Maybe next year will be better…but we still sauteed up the little nubs and ate them!

For other yard news, I mentioned we’re working on building a flower bed in our backyard using the left over jungle gym wood. We have the plans laid out, and last weekend we bought all the metal linkers and deck screws that we’ll use to give the wood edges some support. So I’d like to get this all situated this weekend so we can add some dirt and eventually get some flowers relocated to this bed. Here’s some pictures of the progress, and the plans:

Next on the list is we obtained some side tables for our guest bedroom that are perfect for the space – and the pair was $30 on craigslist! But they have numerous coats of thick paint on them, so I’m curious to see what wood we’ll find when we strip it off. We’ll probably repaint the body of the side tables, and depending on how the tops look, either paint or stain those. I forgot to snap a picture of them…but once we start working on them, I’ll show some. We also have a large console-type piece of furniture that we are redoing for a friend, so perhaps some stripping of that piece will happen this weekend as well.

I also want to start thinking about the crown molding on our downstairs ceilings – I added up dimensions this week, and figured we need about 130 feet of molding to do the living room, foyer/stair column, dining room, and powder room. A contractor’s pack of molding is $78/96′, so this project will be much less expensive than I had thought…for some reason I had priced this DIY project at $1800 when we first bought the home, and I have no idea where that number came from…even if we eventually do the rooms upstairs, it won’t be nearly that much. Crown molding isn’t easy though (painting, cutting properly, installing up over your head with the nail gun, filling holes, caulking, and touch up paint), so it will feel like $1800 of labor! Maybe we’ll start small with the powder room this weekend, to see what we’re getting ourselves into.

It’s so much fun writing about all the things we’re surely going to accomplish in one weekend – we’ll see by Monday how much we really get done!