House Projects

Knowing that we are just a few short weeks away from Luke's Baptism and LOTS of family coming into town, Matt and I have been working around the house to get some projects finished up. Luckily for us, Luke has been starting to take some longer naps so we have been able to get more accomplished in those precious hours.

This is a picture of the hill on the side of our house - covered with some type of weed, I'm not a plant expert, in fact, I'm pretty much plant-retarded, but bottom line - I knew it was ugly and did not belong on the hill, so it had to go. The hill is fairly steep and is the length of our property so the task was a bit daunting at first, to say the least. But we were determined to get it done now before the weather starts getting ultra hot. Pulling up weeds on a steep hill in 100 degree weather did not sound like something either of us wanted to do... 70 degrees, now that's a different story and something we can tolerate much better.

This is the "Before" picture

- only of half the hill since I thought about taking the picture

after we'd already cleared the other half.

It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Our yard waste barrel - overflowing.

This is after one load was picked up by the truck and jumping

up and down in the barrel to cram as much as possible in it!

sheesh.

Our finished project... at least for now.

The plan is to plant some kind of ground cover

- we're thinking Ice Plant but need to learn about

how to plant it, how much it spreads, maintenance, etc.

The next major project we tackled was painting the rest of Luke's room. For those of you who have been following our blog for awhile you might remember that back when I was pregnant we began to paint the nursery. Not knowing if we were having a girl or a boy we decided to paint a portion of the walls a shade of orange - planning to paint the remainder either blue or pink, depending of if we had a boy or a girl. Well, now that Luke is here and is obviously a boy, we were able to finish the job we started months ago and paint the rest of the room a shade of blue. And yes, orange and blue are the Broncos colors, which I suppose was the inspiration for the whole thing, but I do like the way it turned out.

This is the 'Before' picture - including the furniture before we re-finished it.
And After!

We still have to hang some shelves and I'm planning to make some curtains too. Although now that I'm heading back to work (ugh) in a week I might have to enlist the Grandma Jan's (both of Luke's Grandmas are named Jan) to help out with that when they are in town.... :)

Since I am posting pictures of home improvements, I remembered that I had meant to post some pictures of Matt and my Dad doing some projects back in April, before Luke was born. I, obviously, never got around to it... I was a bit preoccupied with having a baby I guess.

Matt and Dad installed lights on either side of our garage door.

The finished product!

Putting the gate back up.


Installing a ceiling fan.

The finished product.

It is MUCH cooler up in the loft now with that ceiling fan - nice work men!

We still have a list of things that we want to get done around the house but I'd say we're off to a pretty good start.

I just realized that this post doesn't have any pictures of Luke - sorry Grandparents! The next post will have plenty, I promise. :)