Home Improvement

If you know Tim and I very well, you know we're always doing something to our house. Some little tweak or other. Well my favorite tweak I've done lately is something I wish I'd done months ago. When we moved into our house, the space between the stove and the vent hood was just ugly drywall. Drywall with nasty glue on it as well as pencil marks. I think the previous owners had planned to put tiles up, but just run out of steam. Honestly, I didn't even notice it when we first toured the house, but once we moved in, it bugged me everytime I entered the kitchen. We want to eventually put tiles there, but don't have the time or money for it right now, so I'd been trying different things to camoflage the ugliness: mirrors leaning against the wall (wouldn't work because the top of the stove is too narrow), hanging mirrors (too difficult to get even), and then I hit upon the idea of using some of the gobs of paint we have left over from painting our house and painting it. So I did that in about 20 minutes week before last while Stella was napping. It looks great! I added a couple of Starburst plates on top of it and voila!

An extra bonus, it cost nothing AND it adds a splash of the color that I want to be our accent color in the kitchen: aqua blue. It's inspired by our Starburst mugs and the Fiestaware pitcher Tim's Grandmother sent us. I'm on the prowl for a canister set and breadbox in that color. I also want to sew seat cushions for our breakfast nook chairs (the seats are ripped up very badly) and hopefully I can find some fabric in that color. That will be my next project, if I can get my sewing machine back from Tim's Mom (and make myself get out in the heat to hit the fabric stores)!

We did this a while ago, but I was waiting for everything to really get established before taking pictures. This is the landscaping we did out front:

We're going to add vines to the groovy trellises, but we didn't find what we wanted before it got too hot. So that will be a project for later. Our grass is a wee too long right now, so ignore that, as well as our poor brown monkey grass, which we want to rip out anyway. Droughts suck. Also, non-native plants suck. I really think the landscaping in our backyard is beautiful, but I wish that so many non-native species hadn't been planted. We have a bunch of ground cover that would be a bitch to rip out, but it is brown and wilted right now because of the heat. Ground cover is supposed to be low maintenance!

Front beds, used to be home to only monkey grass:

I also need to take pictures at night of our really cool new porch light (okay we've had it a couple of months.)

Can you tell I'm in a do-nothing mood today? Yeah:)