Time Flies When You're In A Garden

Let me tell you about my Bad Ass Garden!

Be prepared this summer to enjoy tomatoes, corn, zucchini, cucumbers, pickling cucumbers (yes I make homemade, knock your socks off, jalapeno pickles), spaghetti squash, rhubarb (it is sad to note that rhubarb doesn't produce much in the first year, but wait until next year for some rhubarb pie!), blueberries, raspberries (thanks to our neighbor Diane who loves to give me starts), giant pumpkins, oregano, chives, onions, basil and a large pot of rosemary. I also decided to grow some peppermint along with three types of lavender.

It's all been planted in raised beds that were tilled up with steer manure and peat moss. I checked the soil pH, the drainage is fantastic and I gave each start a little jump with some fish fertilizer. Let me just tell you that fish fertilizer made my hydrangeas rally after little care for the last 2 years.

I used a Jiffy greenhouse to plant marigold and snapdragon seeds. The starts look great and I've planted a few of the marigolds in the vegetable bed as I read that they are a pest deterrent.

Another fun and ultra simple thing to plant are sweet peas. I planted them just outside the downstairs patio door so that when you open the door in the summer, they will smell just great. I got a wild multi colored set of seeds which are doing really well. In the last photo below you can see how I made a trellis from stakes, nails and twine to hold them up as they start to get longer and want to travel.

I still have 3 rhododendrons that died on the side of the house to dig up. I purchased a pink hydrangea and a purple rhody to take their places.

I also want to find a purple lilac tree and a pink dogwood. Both are blooming right now and they look awesome!

One last thing that I did was transplant a begonia from a plastic pot from the store to a lovely green ceramic pot which sits right outside our door.

So now the rain has come and the forecast states it will rain for the rest of this week. I'm super stoked that I got the garden planted! I will post more when things start to really take off!!!

Hope you enjoyed this post! If you have some gardening techniques to share or starts you want to get rid of let me know!

I'm planning to get some horseradish and green beans in soon along with some multicolored poppies and nasturtiums.

Almost There

We reached a major milestone this weekend: we ordered our new wood floors!

FINALLY.

We decided on a style called "Cappuccino Maple" by Simple Floors. We really liked their selection and the quality of their products couldn't be beat in the price range we were looking in.

From the get-go we wanted a dark wood. We also wanted the hand-scraped look, not a super-smooth finish, and wide planks. Oh, and it had to be real wood, not laminate. The flooring we chose is what's called an engineered hardwood. What that means is the flooring is real wood, but the planks are not a solid 1/2" thick piece of Maple, Oak, or whathaveyou like with traditional wood flooring. Instead, with engineered wood flooring, each plank has a 3/8" thick plywood base and on top of that is a 1/8" thick layer of the flooring quality wood (in our case, Maple). 1/8" of wood doesn't seem like much, but wood flooring really doesn't wear out or anything, and unlike laminate flooring, it can be refinished.

The bad news about ordering the new flooring is that they just planted the trees the floors will be made from about a week ago, so it will be another 10 years or so before we can get our flooring delivered. Okay, it's not quite that bad, but we do have to wait 4-5 weeks before it can be delivered. Sad face for us.

So in the meantime, here's a few example pictures of the flooring we chose:

Iron Chef: Renton

Kitchen remodels are expensive. REALLY expensive. So, we won't be doing that for at least a couple years. However, that doesn't mean we can't give the kitchen a makeover!

After starting on the front yard a couple weeks ago, "winter" finally hit us and it's been raining buckets for about two weeks now. Since working in the yard in the wind and rain is pretty miserable, I decided to turn my attention to the kitchen for a couple weekends. If you recall, our kitchen was pretty darn ugly. Usable and in good condition, but outdated and ugly nonetheless. At least the dishwasher, refigerator, oven/stove and microwave are new though, so we didn't have to worry about those.

Here we have the kitchen in its "before" glory:
To get the party started, I removed all the doors and drawers from the cabinets and cleaned everything really well with Simple Green cleaner. I then gave them a light sanding and re-cleaned them with the Simple Green. Once they were dried out I gave everything a coat of primer.

Looking better already:

Once the primer was cured it was time to add some color. We decided on a color called "Vessel Gray" which is steel gray color. It's a nice neutral color that adds a bit of modern look to the kitchen.

Finding a place to lay out all the doors and drawers to dry was a bit of challenge.
Once I was done with the cabinets, I turned my attention to the counter top. It's just a plain-jane laminate counter top, but it had yellowed/discolored a bit over the years and had a lame pattern printed on it. It was in good condition otherwise, though. I found a new paint made by Rustoleum that is designed specifically for painting old laminate counter tops. It's a Xylene-based paint and is supposed to cure to an epoxy-like finish and also wear as well as a regular laminate counter top. With that said, I was pretty excited to try it out.

For anyone reading who has seen this stuff and has been wanting to try this with their old counter tops: DON'T. This stuff sucks. First of all, the stuff smells REALLY bad. The whole house smelled like a chemical plant for three days after I applied it. Just being in the house for more than 10 minutes gave me a headache. Also, the stuff is really difficult to work with. It dried quick and gets tacky really fast and it drips easily too when you're painting verticle parts of the counter. It's supposed to "self-level" to even out any imperfections in the paint... it doesn't. Once cured it's supposed to resist staining and chipping... it doesn't. Hell, even putting something heavy on the counter for an hour or so results in a divot forming in it.

Long story short, the counter looks better than it did before, but I'm far from impressed with the stuff. It looks good from afar, but far from good I guess you could say. Sarah says she likes it though, so maybe I'm just being too much of a perfectionist.

Me high as a kite from the Xylene fumes while painting this crap on.
Once the counter top fiasco was completed, I finished off the kitchen by putting all the cabinet doors back on with new hardware, adding a new sink and a new faucet. I also ran a water line to the refrigerator so the ice machine works and I also added a garbage disposal while I was installing the new sink.

Before I show the "after" pictures, one last look at the "before":
And now the moment we've all been waiting for...


The "after":Looks like a whole new kitchen, huh? Once I can tear out the ugly linoleum that's in there now and install the new hardwood floors (hopefully next month), it will really bring it all together.

Oh yeah, I also added some under-cabinet lighting to brighten things up a bit and give a nice ambiance to the kitchen when it's not in use.
Not bad for $400, huh?

Overall, I'm really happy with the transformation. It will definitely do for the next year or two until we can do a proper remodel on it.