Home Improvement

We spent all weekend working on the new house.  My dad came over and started putting up the fence for the dogs, my mom and mother in law started painting the nursery, and I worked on some random projects (not allowed to paint or get up on ladders because my husband doesn't want anything to hurt the baby) here and there.  We all worked hard and were very sore for a couple of days as a result.  I'm thinking we should probably not take it to such an extreme again!  Maybe pace ourselves a little more?

But the best thing that happened is that the Sago palms are gone!  I actually spent about an hour and a half pruning the one in front of the front door.  It looked pretty cool when I was done, but we still wanted them removed.  I posted the picture on facebook and got a call from my sister very quickly after, asking if we had destroyed the palms yet.  I said no, and she said to leave them alone, that her husband wanted them.  So Rob came over and dug/pulled them out for us!  And this is how he did it:

It was very exciting!  The one being pulled in the picture ended up being about 8 of them growing together, so he cut them apart and put all of them on the back of his truck, plus all the bulbs we found and all the seeds that were scattered on the ground.  He's going to plant them in their front yard.  And we get a lovely house that you can actually see now:

I'm working on a landscape plan for the flower bed in front of the porch.  I want some color there since the house is very vanilla.  I'm so excited to have the toxic palms gone!  We've also raked tons of leaves.  I think we're up to about 14 or so bags of them.  You can only put out a certain number at a time, so we are having to go over there and put them out when we know it's time for pickup.  Hopefully once we get the six months of leaves out of the back yard, we can keep it at bay a little easier by raking each weekend or something.

I was anxious to get this particular project done and was very excited that we managed to finish it on Sunday.  We bought the paint during the week and got started on Saturday.  Jon finished up on Sunday and it looks awesome.  Ladies and Gentlemen... Sir Nathan's Castle:

We still need to paint the office (same color) but it's all taped up and ready to go, so that will be Saturday morning's task.  Hopefully we can get that room done this weekend.  

There are lots of other projects to do, some of them can wait until we move and some need to be done before we move, so we're making lists and crossing things off and prioritizing.  I think we have a pretty good system.  The fence is the most important thing.  And the painting.  Once those are completely done, there's no stopping us from moving in and actually spending our first night there!  I'm so excited for that moment!