Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Ups and Downs

Last weekend was very eventful.  Our son, Andrew, turned 18 on Sunday!  To celebrate, we went to the beach.  Luckily for us, we live relatively close to a great Canadian beach on Lake Erie.  And although the day started out a little cloudy, it turned out to be beautiful and sunny.  I ended up a little sunburn - even though I spent most of the day under our canopy!  But, we had a great time relaxing (I poured myself into my latest read - a Barry Manilow biography which I received for Mother's Day.  Sand + water + Manilow = happiness).

Anyway, going to the beach wasn't the only fun we had.  Nope.  We also put up our new volleyball net!


Our kids love playing volleyball, so we finally bought a net for the yard.  It's been great having the neighborhood kids over for a few games.  I know it's going to get a lot of use!

So if the net went up, went came down?  A tree in the front yard.


The tree on the right just didn't make it.  We really liked the tree - it provided some privacy to our side yard (and driveway) as well as some shade.  But, unfortunately, it had problems.  A couple of years ago, all of the leaves started shriveling up and falling off.  We had hoped that it would come back, but it never did.  We finally just put it out of its misery.  Craig chopped it down.  :-(


It was a lot of work but it had to be done.  On the bright side, I can now redesign this little corner of the bed - 


None of the bushes in this area are in great shape and I've never really liked the layout.  It's a great excuse to do some rearranging.  (If you look in the picture above, you can see some of the brown leaves at the edge of the bed.  They are from the tree that came down.  The whole area would become covered in leaves - more on the ground than on the tree - within weeks.)  I'm trying to come up with a plan so we can spruce up this corner soon.

Inside the house, we started working on our living room.  Well, sort of.

Our living room was one of the first rooms that I tackled.  I painted it before we even moved in.  It was one of the only rooms that wasn't wallpapered so the task was pretty easy.  :-)  But I never really did much else to make the room look finished.  It became the room where furniture went to die.  


It's a very boring, rectangular room.  And I've never been particularly inspired to do anything with it. Until now.  I have a few ideas to fix it up.  But first I need to make a couple of changes.

I'll explain my plan tomorrow - and show you what we've been working on.  


I'd also like to take a moment to thank a couple of people for featuring my projects lately.  My Orb Chandelier was featured on HGTV.ca's blog!  I was really surprised (and excited) to see my project there!  



And my Homemade Dance Floor was featured on Design Dazzle!!  



Thanks ladies!!  I really appreciate the features!

Now I'm off to nurse this sunburn!  Ouch!