Oh heavens…I have no real excuses.  This blog has been a sad sad testament to the busy-ness of the past month.  Abandoned and lonely, yet still attracting visitors daily, for which I am insanely humbled.  It seems that summer was good to this here blog, but since the academic year started, things went gone down hill.  And even though I suppose that is an excuse, it really isn’t.

The truth is, many other things have replaced this blog in terms of priorities.  And I’m okay with that.  I’ve been able to spend time with friends, start a small group Bible study in our home, and start a business!  I canned tomatoes for the first time, harvested fresh homegrown sweet peppers, and picked up our local beef from the meat processor.  I’ve enjoyed some beautiful fall weather, but fallen off the running bandwagon – though fear not! I got back on this morning.   I also photographed and helped lead a seminar at a student conference, and we managed to pick out a roof color and have our roof replaced!  Finally.

I’m hoping to update with pictures soon, including our house with its spiffy new roof  I have a “break” coming up next week, and we’ll see what I can accomplish during that time.  My main goal is to prime and paint the red room.  If I could finish that next week, I would be SO happy.

And yes, I did say I started a business.  And I am SO SO excited about it.  If you’re curious to know more, leave me a comment and I’ll fill you in…

Like I said a few posts back, we’re in the process of changing the exterior of our house.  The top priority is our roof.  Back in April, we had a pretty severe hail storm that damaged our roof and some of our gutters.  Thanks to good homeowners insurance, we’re pretty well covered to have a full roof replacement.  At the same time, we also have a few lingering exterior issues that have been on the to-do list – most important being fixing some of the soffits (that’s the underside of the roof overhang) that a few birds have taken a liking too.  We’re also going to be fixing some gutters and hopefully solving some water/ice issues we’ve had in the past.

We’ve also known for a while that our house needs a new paint job.  Don’t get us wrong, we’re not trying to go overboard – we know this is a lot to take on at once!  And we knew it would need to happen within a few years of when we bought our house in 2009, so we’ve been mentally prepared  and having conversations about it for a while.  But, that doesn’t mean we have a CLUE what our house will look like on the other side of all of this!  Ha!

We’ve taken many walks around town looking at similar Victorian homes, googled endlessly, and considered paying for a professional color consult!  I’ve even spent some time fiddling around with virtual painting on various websites.  And yet, we still are more confused than ever about what colors to choose.  Since we’re hoping it will last a long time, we want it to be JUST RIGHT, and that’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself.

Call us color confused if you want, but we’re truly at a loss.  I’d love to enlist your help!  Here’s a recent photo of the front of our house.

Our house currently has 2 siding colors (the top scalloped gable is a bit lighter than the main siding) and 4 trim colors (white, plum, a darker grey blue that you can see best on the front steps, and a lighter shade that’s on the soffits that is close to the main siding color).  And then, of course, we have the red roof

At some point, we may get rid of the enclosed porch and have pillars and a railing, which would be more period appropriate, but for now it stays.  One big constraint we have is our windows.  Some genius thought it would be perfect to replace all the beautiful functional wood windows with cheap vinyl ones.  Thus, we cannot paint the sashes of our windows except for the fixed pain windows on the third floor, and even then, it’s only the smaller rectangular ones.  Because of this, and because new windows are not in our new future (even though we’d LOVE to do it) the window sashes will have to stay white.  This bums me out since Victorian homes look BEAUTIFUL with painted sashes.  *sigh*

Other constraints we have in terms of color scheme: we don’t want all white since two of our neighbor’s homes are white.  And if we go more neutral/tan, we’d like to jazz it up with some fun trim.  Other than that, we’re pretty open to ideas!

We’re also quite happy to ditch the red roof, even though it is helpful when giving directions to friends.

If you have ideas, please let me know!  For now, here’s a few fun inspirational pictures we’ve found that have some color schemes we like.  In general, I think we’re gravitating towards greens, blues, and grayish colors for the main color.

Porch is for the house below.

Another angle of the same house…

At last, at last!  I can reveal to you the compost bin!   It’s been finished for a couple of weeks, but I finally got my lazy butt out there and snapped a few photos the other day and uploaded them.  Sometimes I wish this could all happen magically, don’t you?  :-)
Here it is!

It took my wonderful husband a few days to finish it.  The directions we found online weren’t 100% followable, so we had to improvise a bit as we went.  We also had to dig up some dirt and some old pavers so that the bin had room to “breathe”.

It’s made of cedar, which is rot resistant.   The wood is a little pricey, but we know it will last, so it was worth the investment.  The sides are made of some type of metal chicken wire fencing we got at the local hardware store.  We’re still deciding if we want a lid for the bin yet.

We’ve already started loading it up with some leaves from last fall, and kitchen scraps.

The heat from the sun, and moisture from hot humid Iowa weather, will lead to natural composting of the materials, hopefully resulting in a nutritious compost we can use in our gardening next year.

We situated the double compost bin on the back side of our garage along the alley and next to our strawberry patch.  That way it’s out of site and also get’s a good amount of sun.

For a while we had been collecting kitchen scraps in an old ice cream bucket and stashing it on our back porch until it was full and ready to be taken out to the bin.  But this was both inconvenient and smelly.  After a little research, we bought one of these to make things easier, a bit more stylish, and less smelly

Seriously, it’s the best $35 I’ll ever spend. It’s got a filter to cut back on the smell, and the lid hides any gross old food you don’t want to see. Plus, it looks kinda snazzy, doesn’t it?  I definitely highly recommend it.

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There’s are most recent fun building project.  What have you built lately?

For the past few weeks, we’ve been gathering kitchen scraps in a small pail and depositing them every few days in our “compost bin” – a paper yard waste bag behind our garage.  Our temporary solution is starting to get a bit soggy and is probably going to start composting any day itself, so it was high time we get to work on building a true bin.

After scouring online searching for plans, we found two that seemed doable and adaptable to our space, this one from This Old House

It included very good measurements and instructions, but we needed a two-bin solution, plus the amount of cedar wood to build it was gonna be kinda pricey.

We then found these plans, which use wire mesh for the walls and wood cut down on cost.  We really would have loved to have two bins, but we just don’t have the space for it AND the several perennial herbs we’d like to plant nearby.

After some careful calculations by DH and a trip to the hardware store (and the town brush dump to dispose of our neighbors yard waste so we could borrow his trailer to transport wood) we were on our way to building our compost bin!

Pictures of the finished product to come!  I’m super excited to compost again.  It’ll be a great addition to our a garden next summer, especially since we’re hoping to do raised beds for our vegetables.  I’m hoping by next spring we’ll have enough compost ready to work it into both our vegetable and flower gardens.  Plus, I just love the idea of returning the “green” and “brown” waste to the ground and reusing it to grow more beautiful and yummy treats.  Far better than it ending up in a landfill!

Our yard has turned into a lake. We’ve had such a rainy last week and a half that our entire yard is soggy and wet. I’m pretty sure our vegetable garden is drowning. And a lot of the soil in our flower garden is washed away.

Sun, where are you? Please come back!
Love,
Your friendly DIY gardner

One of the things I love about our house is the patio.  It’s shaded and quite large, making it a great place for grilling and eating.  For the past year, it’s remained mostly empty since we hadn’t found any reasonably priced patio furniture that we liked.  I was seriously considering some Ikea deck furniture like this:

However, the construction was a little rickety and weak, and we weren’t sure it would really last.  Instead, we ended up purchasing a small set from Nebraska Furniture Mart, and we love it!

While it would have been wonderful to get some lounge furniture with couches and cushions, in reality, we want to have meals out here.  So it had to be a dining set.  We went for round since it’s easy to pull lots of chairs up to a round table, unlike a rectangular table.  And we just weren’t fans of oval.

We’ve already had friends over a few times and have enjoyed MANY meals cooked on our Big Green Egg.  And with our garden starting to bloom (YAY!) we’ve got a great view too!

Summer living at it’s best, right?  :-)

These lovely, succulent, delicious strawberries…

are my favorite part of June.

And ya know what?  They came straight from my garden  Don’t ya just love summer?

Look what we started a few weeks ago!

Aren’t they cute?  Here’s a few more:

These are all flowers – larkspur, marigolds, zinnias, salvia, impatiens and a few others.These zinnias came up REALLY first – they were the first ones to germinate and sprout up out of the dirt.

Here we have some of the veggies and herbs: carrots, leeks, tomatoes, peppers (spicy and bell!), spinach, lettuce, cilantro, basil, parsley, dill, and a few other things I’ve forgotten.

I’m really excited to start planting stuff outside in our garden.  Some of the seedlings haven’t fared very well.  I’m fairly certain our bell pepper mix isn’t going to bear any fruit – we still haven’t seed anything sprout yet.  But everything else is looking good!  It’ll be great to have fresh veggies and herbs right in our garden this summer.  Not only will they be fresh, but we know EXACTLY what kind of care has gone into their production.  No chemicals or weird stuff going on here!  Plus, it’s WAY cheaper.  The seeds were under a dollar for one packet, and we have PLENTY to spare.  Just a little TLC and some water is all they need.  Hopefully

It was a beautiful balmy spring day here in Iowa today – we reached 86 degrees!  I’m pretty sure that must be a record for April 1st.  It felt like summer and I actually had to use the AC in my car for a bit.  There were wild fires in a few of the corn fields as I was driving home from a quick trip to northern Iowa – with all of the wind and heat, we’re on fire alert in a few areas of the state.  I’m pretty sure the rain that is expected tomorrow will be more than welcome!

We’ve started our seedlings for our garden – it looked like this last year when everything was planted:

This year, we have a few surprises in store   Not only are we starting everything from seed (which we’ve never done before) but we’re also starting some flowers as well!  And eventually, I’m hoping to plant some hydrangeas, peonies, and some bulbs too.

But first, we have to prune this sucker:

We’re yanking him out, or at the very least, severely limiting his take on the yard.  He’s gigantic.

What will be in his place?  These:

I just have to figure out what kind of hydrangea, order them, and oh yeah, yank out the crazy monster taking over the south side of our house.

How about you, how is spring in your neck of the woods?  What are your garden and yard plans?  Got any tips for flower gardening or hydrangeas?