Operation Garden Beds: Almost complete.

The days are growing longer, there aren't as many dark, depressing clouds hanging over; its like emerging from Gollum's cave. I love the Northwest, but I'm finished with it getting dark at 4pm.

We've been busy fixing up the house and now its time to spend some time outside. Our roommate is a carpenter and built us these amazing cedar gardening beds. We have two built right now for vegetables and herbs and he's working on building two smaller ones for berries. My husband has his heart set on raspberries and marionberries.

So we started by digging out all of the grass where the garden beds were going, since grass is a weed and we don't want it to grow up thru the beds. Also the ground here is very clay rich and we want to make sure there is proper drainage. Our roommate made the beds and we just placed them in the holes. We still have two holes in the backyard, for the berry beds, but it looks like we're digging graves right now. Our neighbors already think we're weirdos, so  what the heck. Here are some pics of our progress.

Beds all finished and ready for planting!

Lumber all cut and ready to be assembled. 

Garden bed No. 1

The backyard before we dug it all up.

I never thought I would be so excited about carpet...

So day, is an important day. Today, we're having new carpet installed on the second floor. Ha-za!

The old carpet wasn't the worst I've ever seen, but it was old, had paint and bleach stains and all together yucky. We're going to be putting some kind of bamboo flooring on the first floor, in a few months. It didn't make sense to replace all the flooring, if we were going to rip some of it out soon anyway. The good news is that Lowe's has this carpet in stock, so if we change our minds, we'll just put in carpet anyway. Originally, we were going to go with a carpet liquidators, to replace the carpet, because they could've had it in before we moved in. When we got a quote from Lowe's and saw that it would take longer, but would've saved us over a grand, we decided to wait.

So now the top floor has all new paint and carpet. I can finally set up my bedroom and stop sleeping on a mattress on the floor. I keep waking up to discover that I've rolled off the mattress. Makes for interesting dreams....

So now I can paint the DOWNSTAIRS. My career as a painter is not finished yet, unfortunately. Hopefully I can start creating some new posts on yummy new recipes and the like, but right now things are still crazy. This weekend is Valentine's Day, so I want to make something full of chocolate and sugar. Let me know what you guys are making/doing for fun ideas!

All moved in and no where to put my stuff.....

So its official: my husband and I are now homeowners! Such an exciting time in our lives. So many awesome things happened this year: we went to Costa Rica, I turned the big 3-0, bought a house and oh yeah, got married! My head is still swimming. We also went to California a few times, saw some amazing friends (and family) get hitched and completed our McMenamins Passports. (I'll post about the passport thing later)

So one of the first big projects we've been doing is painting. It looked so easy on all of those HGTV shows and youtube videos. All lies! We've spent so many hours cleaning walls and painting... insane. We've almost gone through 11 gallons of paint and thats just the upstairs! We're trying to finish all of the painting upstairs, before the new carpet goes in next week.

After the carpet is in, we can finally move in furniture from the garage and set up our bedroom. Right now, we're sleeping on a mattress, on the floor. Reminds me of college... Minus the crazy roommates.

We're thinking of doing laminate flooring on the first floor, but that won't be for another few months probably. Have to wait til our tax refunds come in the mail. One of the bonuses of living in Washington, versus California, is that there is no state income tax. I ALWAYS owed in California. I wasn't even making that much. Oh well, doesn't matter anymore.

Anywho... here some before and after pics of what we've painting so far. Enjoy!

Hall bathroom before (the previous owners had 2 small girls)

After: painted it "Sandbar" more mellow. 

Before: Kitchen was just a plain jane white.

After: Painted it "Clay Jar"