This & That

I've been meaning to type this post up for a few days now but my body and my mind haven't been on the same team due to some medicine changes for my migraines.

And let me just tell you how unhappy I am with Gmail right now, I swear it must have taken about 15 minutes to download all of these photos I'm about to show you. Let's start with my new wall art in our guest bathroom.

It's a sepia toned printed canvas of poppy blossoms. I believe it was about $24 from Target. Not bad. One of our new favorites is to browse the art section at Target. Mind you, we'd been on a rather long Target hiatus and then we picked this up and went back about 2 weeks later and they didn't have anything new. Seeing this lovely ditty up on our walls (with a color that almost matches the painting) makes me want to buy so much more art but it's so expensive and I haven't found those MUST have pieces just yet.

Now onto the jungle. First off, disclaimer: I took pictures with my camera phone as that's what I had available, I couldn't stop my dad and say "wait let me go get my camera upstairs and stop you and take pictures for the blog." And secondly I thought I had more pictures than this but I don't think I mailed them to myself and after fighting with Gmail once already tonight I'm not even going to see what else I have.

This is the base of the hibiscus that we thought was dead. My dad clipped the dead branches back and we spotted fresh, new, live branches coming out of the ground.

This makes me happy since it's one of the two plants that I actually like in our yard. I just love the flowers when they bloom. Next up we have a view of the side of our yard. This before picture would have been nice to have but imagine it coming out about 6 feet and overgrown about 3-4 feet high. No joke. You can see where the wood is where the grass is all dead from where plants were overgrown on top of the grass.

We discovered a cement pad at the base of the door there which we covered with pebbles and then those two patio blocks were somewhere in the mess. Those bricks were also in there and we've just thrown them back down to have around if we need them. We found a rose bush on a trellis. We found 3 ceramic potted plants and each pot was probably about 2-3 gallons. It was mostly all overgrown with mint and oregano so when they cut it all down it smelled pretty nice. Then towards the back of the photo beyond the chimney are our 3 fig trees, my other favorites. One of them got completely cut back and my dad trimmed up the other two. That bed is all overgrown with mostly wild strawberries and weeds. There's also some big pieces of wood hiding in there that my dad left, he took one home but not all of them.

But this is one of my favorite transformations and again, no before. We had this super ugly, dying, evergreen shrub that died during the blizzards. All of the snow sort of just sunk into the middle and killed it. It got this awful brown spot and then in the spring daffodils sprouted up thru it. It took my dad about two minutes to dig it up and cut it up into pieces. And then we planted our $2.50 azalea from Lowes.

I know it doesn't look centered in the photo but that's just the bad angle of the photo. I love the mulch, I did it by myself, not like it's hard but I like to mulch. I really wish all of my flower beds and gardens could look this neat and clean.

Speaking of neat and clean garden beds, my dad called an old neighbor of ours and asked for some help with our jungles. He has a landscaping company and stopped by the house yesterday while no one was around to walk around and check out our gardens. He's going to email my dad some price quotes and some landscaping plans and see what we can do. At the least I want them to spray and weed. Ideally I'd also like them to thin out some of the gardens that are severely over grown even after they've been weeded. He had suggested digging up and tearing out a few gardens and turning them over to grass and that's fine but I need to keep the costs to as affordable as possible. And there's no rush, we can always do more next year. This year I'd like to control it, then maybe next year we give it a makeover and then maintain it.

So I'm thinking the next entry in the blog will be a fun aerial view of the house with a diagram of all of the jungles. It's scary. I looked out the window upstairs in our bathroom that overlooks the bathroom and it's a mess. There's a garden that pretty much divides our property with the neighbors and it's a mess. Then there's a garden that goes from my little pathway in the front yard next to the driveway, well that guy stretches all the way around the side of the house to the back yard and stop at the deck.

Enough jungle talk. Let's talk gutters. The gutter above the garage has always hung a bit odd. During the blizzards I thought it was going down. It didn't. It just about came down in the rain we've been having during this week. I dug up the receipts from the previous owners and sure enough as I remembered there was one for gutters. More specifically there was one dated 5/12/08 for a gutter replaced above the garage. I called the company today and left a message. I'll give you an update. If I don't get a call back tomorrow, 24 hours later, I'm calling again.