New Furniture!!!

We knew we had family coming to visit in the upcoming months and decided it was finally time to get rid of the dreaded couch I had in many college apartments.  I honestly don't want to know what was all in the fabric of that couch.  It was extremely dirty no matter how many times I tried to wash the cushions!   

Living Room Before-   Nasty couch on left and mismatched pillows :-)

 Don't get me wrong, I love microfiber couches, BUT they don't seem to stay clean without a lot of work.  Maybe it's just my crazy dog that makes it that way!  Anyways, when we went to look for new furniture we started by doing the butt test.  We literally sat on everything probably three times.  Once we had it narrowed down to two couches I think I took about two more hours to decide.  We ended up picking a couch that was dark brown and had brown/red pillows.  I hated the color so we paid a little extra to choose custom fabric and pillows.  Yayy! Dream furniture :-) We now have the perfect loveseat and couch for our living room!  Sometime we will have to replace the recliner, but the pup loves it a bit to much for us to remove it from the room.  

Brady seems to make it into every photo. 

The living room still has many projects left to do!  
1) DIY curtains and curtain rod 
2) DIY end table and possibly a coffee table
3) DIY new lamps
4) Wall hanging for near the couch
5) DIY entertainment/media center to hide our movies better! 


Stop back to see all of these (hopefully soon)!

Flower Garden Vision

I really have been trying to add color and curb appeal to our new beautiful home, but I have been struggling. I bought beautiful plants (that cost a lot!) and basically they all seemed to die. Once I added a little miracle grow to the mix they seem to be recovering, but I still have a lot of work to do.  I think part of it is where the gardens are located. The two gardens in the front yard only get sun part of the day. 

Anyways, I actually created my own flower bed that I wanted to share with you! The soil near our house is extremely rocky. It makes it impossible to dig and create flower beds so we created a raised one. We began by collecting many limestone rocks from across the street where they are digging to build houses. This saved us tons of money since it was free. :-) We then created a pattern of stacking the rocks that was in sync with the slope of our yard. 

Now here's where we screwed up. We bought mortar and began to put the rocks securely together. I should have realized this right away, but oh well.  The mortar was grey and the rocks a yellowish. As a result, it looks a little funny. I later researched and found out we could have changed the color. I guess we know for next time!   Anyways here is the garden with some lovely plants that Zach's mom gave us from her garden (that I've already killed)!

 

Here you can see how different the mortar color is from the stone.

View from the front step

The pictures above are from early July.  The pictures below are from early August.  It seems the rocks have settled a bit.  

I planted some bulbs awhile ago and suddenly one day they all came up.  Hopefully they flower!

The apple tree we planted.  Hopefully someone nearby plants one so we can have fruit!