Home Improvement

I had this post almost finished, and then my screen froze, so I'm a little bitter about having to re-write. Therefore, this may be quite a bit shorter than originally intended.

Last weeked, it was BEAUTIFUL outside, so I got inspired to do a little home improvement. First on the list was picking up a new mirror I found on Craig's List in Matthews, which is about half an hour south of us. Of course, we got lost. "But Sarah, surely the GPS led you to your location!," you say? Ha! Little do you know--we prefer to use our GPS as a decorative accessory on our kitchen counter. We also had decided that a phone number of the person we were meeting was not necessary, which made it really interesting to try to find her house. In the end, it was worth it though, because the mirror looks great in our downstairs bathroom.

...Before

...After

Then, I decided that we needed to take the mulch out of the mulched area adjacent to our patio/concrete slab by the back door. We use the area for our fire pit, so I wanted the area to be an extension of our patio, rather than just a weed garden, which it was acting as. I had my eye on some nice stone pavers, so off to Lowe's we went. While in the paver section of Lowe's, we learned two important things. 1) Pavers are very expensive. 2) Pavers take patience and time to lay correctly. Well, we would like to be able to pay our water bill next month and we would also like to refrain from filing for divorce due to patio-related irreconcilable differences, so we went with the obvious alternative--river pebbles. "River pebbles," I have determined, is a nice way to say "river rock for trailer parks and the like." They are a smaller, cheaper version of river rick, but it actually ended up looking pretty good. I bought a couple patio chairs at Harris Teeter last week (Tom loves when I go to the grocery store and come home with furniture) and they look great out there.

...Before

...After

We also solved a mystery this week. For months now, Bauer has been going outside and returning to us covered in mud. We were amazed that he was always able to find a way to get muddy, no matter what the weather, but our yard stays pretty wet all the time, so we didn't look into it too much. I was noticing that he was more muddy than usual lately and was frustrated, but ignored it. Well, while I was sitting on our ghetto patio the other day, I head a splashing noise from behind me, down by the swingset in the back of the yard. I walked down to investigate and found this...


I guess thats where the mud is coming from? Bauer had been digging that hole in the corner. He was really not happy when Tom dug a ditch to drain it and covered it with dirt.

This weekend, we head off to Virginia to see everyone there, so we're looking forward to a fun weekend!