Adding a wee bit more storage

I mentioned yesterday that Jeff the Builder and the guys have been over here recently.  The main reason for their presence is that they’ve been working on our garden shed, which has evolved into a slightly larger structure that will also hold our bikes and other sports equipment.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about in this post.  Instead, I wanted to show you this:

This is the corner of the craft room that wraps around the stairs.  When we were planning the house, Pete hit upon the idea of squaring-off the opening and creating a little alcove for future shelves, which were built this week.  Even though the girls have a book nook outside their bedrooms, we’ve already more than filled the shelves and found ourselves with a bit of an overflow problem.  Book Nook 2.0 gives us more space, which I’m hoping we won’t fill too quickly.

The front yard.

Why hello there.  Did you think we had forgotten about this blog?  We just didn’t have anything to report to report for a while, but now we do!

Let’s take a look at the front of the house, shall we?

Does anything look different to you?

Here, I’ll zoom in a bit:

Now do you see it?  We finally had the glass in the garage doors tinted last week.  I love how it looks — light still comes in, but you can’t see inside.

On the landscaping front, we’re making slow progress.  To the left of the driveway, here’s what it looks like right now:

The plan here is to have a hillside filled with shrubs, so we (mostly I) are covering the grass with landscaping paper and a thick layer of mulch so that HE won’t have to mow while the bushes are filling in.  This project is taking longer than I had hoped because I utterly hate laying down landscaping paper, then hauling over 5-7 loads of mulch from the pile and then dumping it out.  If the yard were flat, it would be much easier, but then again, if the yard were flat, we wouldn’t be trying to fill it in with bushes.  Luckily, I have only one more row to do to reach the porch stairs and then the worst part will be over.

On the other side of the driveway, it looks like this:

Okay, so this isn’t a very good photo, I know.  What I’ve done over here is plant two rows of butterfly bushes — hot pink on the far right of the mulched area and then dark purple to the left of it.  The buttefly bushes are still pretty small, but getting a little bigger every day. I think they’ll be a good size by the end of the summer.

All the green splotches in the mulch are phlox in mixed colors (lavender, pale blue, light pink, hot pink, and white), which will eventually fill in and create a lush green groundcover for most of the year, but in the spring — WOW.

And you might have noticed that big yellow tool box in the photo.  Jeff the Builder and crew have been here working on a couple of  projects and I’ll post photos soon.