Grab a cup of joe and join me as we discuss this week’s projects, including a design for a new client, landscaping, garden beds and other happenings.

Exactly how much have I worked on the 2-week mudroom project you ask? Well…zero. The answer is zero.  I suppose that is not true. I did clean up the mess.

This has been an incredibly busy week. So I thought I would give a little update on things.

CLIENT’S HOME LOUNGE PROJECT

I’m still working to complete the finishing touches on my client’s lounge room, before their son’s grad party. Items that were ordered are rolling in and I should be able to complete it in the next week or so.

A NEW CLIENT MASTER BATHROOM REMODEL

I started working with another client on their master bathroom remodel. She came to me in need of help making initial selections and design decisions before her contractor gets started in a few weeks. Super nice family. Cute, outgoing kids. Another set of dogs that love me very much…lol!

The Initial Design

Side note on the dogs: I am always greeted very enthusiastically by my lounge room client’s dogs as well. So much so that it became a thing my client worried about. But those cuties got used to me popping in and out. When I arrived to install the wallpaper (yes, I did that myself), they hardly jumped on me at all. Apparently I was becoming old news. Ha!

The “Styled” Design

Back to the week’s shenanigans.

Oh…and by the way…summer has completely snuck up on me! What in the world?! My kids love when I say that (it’s become somewhat of a joke around here). I keep telling them it’s better than the non-PG rated alternative {insert sly wink}.

FIRST TIME WITH A VEGETABLE GARDEN

So with summer right around the corner I had to actually finish my vegetable garden planting. Didn’t really have time for that right now, but the timing was such that it had to jump up in priority.

I am not a gardener…but I play one on TV.

My dad is the gardener. But he is away on a four-month nationwide joy ride with my mom. So I am somewhat winging it.

This bed has strawberries and tomatoes, so far.

The long story is that I built cedar raised beds LAST YEAR, during lockdown for that thing we will not mention. I was super pumped to have something on the homestead to keep everyone busy when we weren’t able to go anywhere, ya know? But that was such a chaotic time that it just got too warm and I wasn’t sure what I was doing…etc. etc.  So they sat for a year.

I thought I took photos of building the raised beds…including my little helper. But I can’t find any. #2020

The hubs and I decided to do some additional landscaping this year. So when our landscaper came to do that work, he also filled my raised beds with soil. He is the best! I only mentioned it to him…more along the lines of “I still need to do this” and he just did it for me. I mean, come on. This is why we love them and have been using them for many years. Seriously the best. If you’re local to central Ohio, I’m happy to share his name.

So these are the unedited quick photos of the planted garden as of yesterday. I did get out to the nursery and got several more plants for the empty spaces. Those will go in today sometime.

But it’s looking so good. I need to add gravel to the area…all in due time my friends.

MORE LANDSCAPE- PLANNING AND DECISION MAKING

As I mentioned, we added more landscaping to our backyard. By we, I mean we paid for our landscaper to do so.

Like I said…I’m no gardener.

Actually, when I was younger (a la early 30’s), I did the entire landscaping of our old home. But now I am dealing with back issues and my husband has really bad vertigo, so we pay for our super awesome landscaper to do it for us.

More on the landscaping.

Our lot is a corner lot and our house sits catty corner on the lot. It’s a nice pie shaped backyard, that was absolutely bare. No trees whatsoever when we moved in. As the houses next to us went in, we put in tree lines in area where we needed immediate privacy. Those boogers are expensive! So we slowly did what was needed over the years.

2012

Backyard in 2012 when we had absolutely nothing back there.

This year we added more perimeter trees and shrubs. They are so small. Grow, grow, grow! Eventually, they will fill in and give us more division and privacy for our yard. We can’t have a privacy fence (dang HOA), so we have to create a fence with landscaping.

We also added landscaping to the garage facing side of our lot.

A new island bed around the manhole.

And my dream of a tree lined driveway. Ideally it would be a super long curving drive to my secluded estate…HA! But this is good too. I love it!

We opened up the privacy on our patio and moved it out to the perimeter of the lot. And oh my goodness, I love it so much! Here’s a pic of before and after moving the arborvitae.

Finally, we added a huge fire pit area. It looks like nothing much right now. But I’m trying to convince the hubs to run out with me to get some pretties for it today.

I will write another blog post on the details of the backyard updates. But this is what I have been working on this week as well.

HOME REPAIR

Lastly, we had some work done on our patio. It is exposed aggregate and had sunk. So a concrete leveling company came out and raised it all back up. The less glamorous parts of home ownership.

I think that’s about it for this week. Lots of busyness, lots of different hats worn this week (both business and personal), lots of reasons why I couldn’t work on the mudroom.

But it’s all good.

Have a wonderful weekend! And I’ll see you back with hopefully some progress somewhere…I feel like I have a plan and then wrenches go flying all over the place! HA!