Completing More Project

Can I just say how much fun I have been having! Some days have been crappy! But others have been totally great!

I have been working on some kind of project every single day! Whether it has been reclaiming projects, cleaning out crap to get rid of that belong to my princes and princesses, going to yard sales to get more things for projects or my recent totally super fun insane project. After this project was finished, the next day I didn't think I would ever be able to move again.

I had my dad bring me his small tiller. I dug up all of my flowers, had a bag of nutri-mulch, tilled it all into the ground and replanted all of my flowers. Let me explain this insanity reasoning to you.
Every year I have Mr. Hubs till up the whole flower bed and every year I plant flowers right along the edge and nothing ever goes in the rest of the bed. So the dirt where I plant every year, is good and my plants do great, but the rest of the bed is just like clay. I planted my plants just like the say to be planted and in the type of light area they say they need, and they just start drying up and dying.
After I got the stuff all tilled in, I started digging holes to start replanting the plants, going down the depth of the shovel, it was still just like I had never tilled anything into it. I mean, the first 3-4 inches of dirt was awesome! But anything deeper than that was crap! So each hole I dug with the shovel, I put about an inch of nutri-mulch in the hole and then "tilled" it in with the shovel. Because this flower bed was pretty much starting brand new, I ended up spending close to $1500 on just flowers! So I wanted them to survive. Finally, most of them are doing very good! I will try and post pictures as they bloom and fill in.
My only problem is keeping the cats out!!! The smaller flower bed I used chicken wire and that has worked really well at keeping them out. But where this one is so much bigger and has so many more plants, I decided chicken wire might be too hard to work with.

I have been to LOTS a few yard sales the past couple of months and I have been having so much fun!! This little guy I picked up for 5 bucks!!! Isn't he just darling?

 We have this junk pile out in the yard I am trying to get cleaned up. I found this little treasure in it a couple of weeks ago. I told Mr. Hubs, do not throw this away! He asked me what I was going to do with it and I told him it's going to be a planter to put somewhere. I didn't know what I was going to do with it for sure, until I found the bike!
I bought some yellow & green spray paint, cleaned up the step-stool and painted it.

The paint job wasn't very good, but that is what I was going for. I haven't put a clear coat on her yet because I want the weather to help with the rusting of the paint and adding character.

After she got her paint job, I planted her and put her in her new home!

There they are!!! I love it!

Hope you all have a great day!

Til We Meet Again! Pam

First Summer Project

I have lived in this house for 12 years; which means there are 12 years of pictures on my computer. And guess what? I do not have 1 "before" picture of my yard!! Guess that tells you something about my yard. I was not very proud, excited, about my yard. But that is all changing! I am getting so excited about my yard!
Mr. Hubs was not very excited when I told him what I was going to start doing. He never is very excited when I start telling him about changes I am going to start making around the house, he's not real big on change, especially when it comes to the family home. But now that he has been seeing the changes and the things I have been doing, he is getting excited about it.

*These are my Iris. When the snow was finally all melted, I went to the ex-Mr. Hubs house and dug up a bunch of his mom's Iris, brought them home. They sat in the box that I brought them home in for 2-3 days and then Mr. Hubs and I planted them. Again, he was not very excited about the project. I was sooo shocked when he came in a couple of weeks ago and asked me if I had seen our Iris. I told him no, so he drug me right out there to look at them. I was shocked!

I have Iris that I transplanted from my mom's about 5 years ago and this is only the second year that they have bloomed. So, I was defiantly surprised that these were blooming when they had only been transplanted for a couple of months.

*This is a spot by my porch. One of the not so good things about our yard, well, it's good for the house, not so much for the flower gardens; Trees! We have tons & tons of trees, which means lots of shade! Which also means, so hard to find flowers locally that do well in full shade. But, I have slowly been finding them and getting them in.

 The old wagon wheel, has always been here. The washboard, rusty bucket, watering can and other bucket (on the right) I picked up at yard sales.

This is the other side of the porch. I put chicken wire down to keep the cats from turning it back into their litter box. And it has helped so much. I have tried all kinds of things to keep the cats out of my flower beds and nothing has worked, but the chicken wire has. Then I took a couple of wood stumps that I found out & about and put them in. The metal bucket, is an old ice cream freezer that I put some flowers in. The curvy tree stump, (actual tree, not stump) is our Trumpet Vine. It is the coolest thing. During the winter, it looks like just an old dead tree and in the spring, it starts coming back to life. Mr. Hubs said it is probably close to 60 years old!

The red planter, is a terracotta planter and I spray painted it with cherry bomb, glitter paint. I will have to do more pictures where you can see the glitter better.

So, there are some updates on my first projects. I will continue to post updates on the flower beds as they begin to bloom & grow more.

Hope you all have had a great day and come back soon!
Until we meet again! Pam

Life Just Keeps Me Busy

Life has been very hectic, again. So much has been going on.

*On Monday, it seemed like anything that could go wrong did go wrong.
It started about 4:00 in the morning.
That is what time Princess Shaney woke me up complaining about right abdominal pain, again. I have no idea how many times I have had her into her doctor or ER in the last 8 months for lower abdominal pain. The first time, her doctor sent her for an ultra sound and labs checking for appendix. But everything was normal. About a month later, we went back and decided that it was female stuff and put her on the pill. She would never take them and I couldn't figure out why, but I decided it all went back to wanting to have the physical pain. A couple of weeks ago, we went to the ER and they did another ultrasound and found free flowing fluid around her right ovary and thought that it might have been a small cyst rupture. The ER doctor told her to start taking her birth control pills. So, on Monday, we went back to the ER, this time I thought it was her appendix. This time with the abdominal pain, she was throwing up. So they did labs again and did a cat scan this time. He labs showed a slightly elevated white count and she was running a slight fever. But the cat scan was normal. So they sent us home and told us to see an OB/GYN. So, the next day we went and seen one. She said let's give the pills a couple of months to start working; find a different counselor to get into (because neither one of us liked the one we had been seeing). She also said she was a candidate for these injections they have started and if she isn't feeling better in a couple of weeks, we could try those. But she doesn't think it is ovarian pain because the pain isn't in the right spot for that.
*Also on Monday, my nephew was in the ER, they thought that he had had another stroke. Luckily, it wasn't. They decided it was just vertigo. Because of all the problems he had last year, they kept him over night to make sure all was good with him.
*My sister & her husband go with bikers from all over the country every May, they ride back to Washington D.C. and they are back there in time for Memorial Day. They meet up with their group in Arizona and there are about 300 bikers in their group. They left Utah on the 14 of this month. They changed their route this year because of all the storms in Texas & Oklahoma. So they went north and then headed east. On Monday,(same one) they were in an accident in Kansas City, Kansas. Luckily, they weren't hurt very bad. My sister broke her left hand & her right ankle. Her husband only had scrapes and bruises. She flew home on Tuesday and he rode the bike home and got here on Thursday. She will see an Orthopedic here on Wednesday (the 29) to see if things have changed. If bones in foot are shifting, she will probably need surgery.
*The one good thing out of that terrible Monday. Prince Kenard graduated from high school!!!! When he started kindergarten, I wasn't thinking about future things. I didn't let him start school til he was 6-1/2 (he turned 7 the following February). Then when he was in the fourth grade, he had struggled so much that when we moved in with Mr. Hubs, I held him back and had him do the fourth grade over. Which made him 20 when he graduated! But he stuck it out and got done!

He wasn't very happy about walking with his class, I told him that he needed to do it. He had worked so hard to get this, that he shouldn't have any regrets.

But then, maybe that is just a girl thing. I didn't walk with my class and I have regretted it ever since.

I had all my excitement for the whole week in one day!

*Friday will be the last day of school for our district and we are done until the middle of August now.

Until we meet again! Pam