Spring Projects

I do say that it is great to have a spouse who gets into the "spring" as much as I do. Maybe it's because we're both a couple of farm kids transplanted into the city, but we have learned to love doing lots of spring projects over the years. We spent three years adding trees, shrubs, and flowers around our house in Washington and leaving all of that was the hardest part about selling our house. Well to feel "normal" this spring we decided to tackle a few things around our new house. In our back garden was a mis-shapened patio with missing pavers and it looked hideous and depressing. Somehow Kevin discovered a little walkway behind our garage that lead to a 10ft x 10ft empty space full of dead plants and yuck, but he found the 5 missing pavers needed to finish our patio. Now that we found the pavers, we had to find out how to get them laid. Kevin instantly got frustrated because to "do it right" he would have tilled up the dirt, laid rock then a 2 inch layer of sand to set the pavers right. Well we didn't have any of the tools to do that and I didn't want to spend that much time on it. So a frustrated Kevin dug up the old pavers and cut away the sod. I sent him off to B&Q (England's Home Depot) to get some sand, because he needed to leave me to get the dirt leveled out and to let himself cool off. By the time he got back I had done my best to make it look pretty. We used three bags of sand to get all the pavers set and leveled out, he even thought to buy some extra rock to put up against the house. It took us 3 hours from start to finish and for the limited resources we were pretty happy with the results. Actually so excited about the results that we have caught ourselves looking outside at it for the past week and just smiling. Here is a picture of what it looked like before...I had to go all the way back to pictures from our house hunting trips to find one.
Now here is Addison showing you how much fun it is to play on her new patio.

I also had the bug to get some new containers to plant flowers and a few plants in to add a little color and character to our home and garden. I had a great time planning things out and shopping for plants at the various garden centers around. I especially loved getting to use my new gardening gloves to plant everything. I felt so in my element again and have been on cloud 9 ever since. It's so fun to look outside and see our new "pretties". I love spring!!!! Here's the front of our house with our new planters out front.