April showers bring May... vegetables?

At least, I hope so!  My parents came up from Florida this past weekend so my Mom could attend a bridal shower for my sister (with me, of course).  Since it was my Spring Break, I convinced her to stick around for a few extra days and help me conquer a mini-dream of mine - planting a garden!
My one attempt at vegetable gardening in the past was a complete flop.  The blog post was entitled "The $50 Pepper".  Granted - I never actually wrote the post, but the title alone should give you a hint.  Basically, one lonely little green bell pepper plant in a too-small pot that struggled with bugs, fungus and who knows what else and ultimately I ate one small pepper that was about 2" long.  That was it.
So this year I decided to do it "right" - and do a raised bed.
My husband has always hated the bushes that were under our bedroom windows (to the right in the picture below -- apparently we don't take many pics of the back of our house, since this one is from before we bought it!).

It wasn't hard, then, for me to get permission (or help) pulling them up and putting a small raised bed in their place!  The ground wasn't pure clay, since this was a "flower bed" in a previous life, but some tilling was definitely needed.  We started with a hand tiller, but my neighbor was kind enough to let us borrow their little mechanical one, which did the job much better and faster.

A bit of online digging (pun intended) and Mom and I opted to use cinderblocks to mark off the bed.  Easily adjustable (to expand next year, if this goes well), fairly inexpensive, and no worries about warping, rotting, or leeching chemicals like we'd have with wood.  A few layers of newspaper theoretically serves as a bit of a weed barrier, but also will eventually compost and be good for the soil.

We used half-blocks for the sides (7 on each side) and whole ones for the ends (3 each).  This gives us a planting area of about 4'x8' - just perfect to start out!  We added 5 cubic feet of regular top soil, 4.5 cubic feet of Miracle Grow Organic top soil/fertilizer, and 100 lbs of Black Kow composted cow manure (no, it doesn't stink).  Should make for a nice, rich soil to grow things in!

Now, what to plant?  Several people we talked too said NOT to overplant or it would be counterproductive.  Despite my rough first attempt, peppers were still on the top of my list since I like them, they are in the "dirty dozen" list so I try to eat them organically, and they are pricey.  And everyone I've ever known who gardens grows tomatoes, so that sounded like another good place to start.  And since we had room for a little something else, some green beans.  Next year hopefully I'll start from seeds with everything, but not messing with that this year.  We ended up buying 4 plants - a bush tomato, a cherry tomato, a green pepper, and an orange pepper - and some bush green bean seeds.  Again, per our online exploring, we opted to plant 6 herbs in the "end caps" (oregano, parsley, basil, rosemary, mint and cilantro), and a few flowers in the small spaces in the side blocks to pretty it up a bit.  Here I am with the finished product:

Total cost was probably around $170, (approx $30 for the cinder blocks, $45 for the various soils, $25 for a hand tiller, $5 for a new pair of gardening gloves, $60 for the plants/herbs/flowers/seeds).  Pricier than I had planned, but considering that most of it won't need to be bought again next year, it's not too bad.  Now I'm just praying the rabbits and deer stay away so I can get some real produce!
Of course, how could I leave out a picture of our little champion who cheered us on while we worked?

Working the soil... Soli Deo Gloria.

The Kitchen - part 3

But wait... I thought the kitchen was done?  What is this all about?  Dishwasher details?  Nope, sorry.  But I was right there with you as far as thinking this was done... until my family came to visit for Easter.   Not exactly sure how it happened, but next thing I knew we were back at Lowe's - my parents, sister and her boyfriend included - looking at Formica colors, sinks, faucets, etc.  Somehow we managed to convince my husband that granite is not the only option for a kitchen countertop, and that we could make a wonderful - and much more reasonably priced - change by simply picking new laminate.  We picked a color (from the 4 colors of countertop that they carry in-stock) and thought we could install it ourselves, perhaps with the help of a handyman with a bit of experience.
On their way out of town, Mom called her handyman, who gave her the name of a laminate installer buddy of his.  Within a few days, "Bob the builder" (turns out he lives next door to a co-worker of mine whose young children lovingly gave him this nickname) was over to give us his thoughts.  For various reasons, we couldn't use the in-stock pieces, but his price was very affordable, and his schedule was open enough to get us done before Baby, which was crucial since we were about 4 weeks from due date.  Pro: we got to go back to the sample-board to pick a new color... great since I hadn't actually been 100% sold on the in-stock one we had picked.  Con: we had to go back to the sample-board to pick a new color... this time, without the color-wise eyes of my family members in tow.  We came up with the following options:

Didn't take too long to eliminate the middle option due to the distinct leaf pattern that I wasn't sure we wanted on as big a space as our kitchen counter (it was called "Frosted Leaves" after all).  But then we got stuck.  I wanted the lighter top color as I feared the lower would be too dark.  Isaac wanted the darker color, fearing the other would be too similar to what we have and would show too many spots.  We nagged votes from 2 family members... who were also split down the middle.  Oh man.  Headed out on the morning of my birthday to buy the new sink, faucet, disposal, etc. planning to poll my cousins that afternoon when they came over to celebrate, and hoping they'd break the tie.  We stopped at the sample-board again, and (yeah God!) stumbled across another color we must have missed the first time around:

Though closer to the dark one, it was light enough that I thought it might be okay, and yet dark enough that Isaac felt comfortable.  My cousins' votes, interestingly enough, had one going for either of the 2 lighter colors, and the other for either of the 2 darker!  Thus, the middle ground won :)  Isaac and I both felt good about it, and we had external confirmation that we weren't making a terrible mistake.  By Friday, our buddy Bob was over and ready to get to work.  He took it from this:

to this:

to this:

 to this:

in about 36 hours (no worries, he went home to sleep for part of that time!).  Wow.  What a difference!  I'll be honest, the darker countertop took a bit of getting used to. 

 But the sink, faucet, and filtered water dispenser had me at hello :)

 In all it's completed glory:

FINISHING the kitchen project... Soli Deo Gloria.

The Kitchen - part 2

What I failed to mention at the end of the last post is that, when we decided to not renovate the whole kitchen, my hubby agreed to getting a new dishwasher.  Ours still technically worked, but it was icky-looking on the inside and it gave me the heeby-jeebies to think about washing baby bottles in it.  So at the end of my peaceful sleeping week, we were in Lowe's starting the dishwasher investigation, and Isaac stumbles across some clearance cabinets.  Can't say I ever even knew they sold pre-made cabinets at home improvement stores.  Next thing I knew, these puppies were sitting in our kitchen:

At $4 each, they had our "renovation" plans started back up, and at a whole different level.  Wow.  So much for sleeping well!  Had to bring the "design team" back in, evaluate whether it would look tacky to add new cabinets on top of our existing ones, how we'd get them to match (i.e. whether we felt comfortable painting them or not), and determine whether neighbor/cabinet guy would be interested in the project and at what price.  In addition to the significant savings on cabinetry, another benefit to this option is that we would not be forced to replace the countertop at the same time.  We could split the cost by doing the countertop in a few months/years/decades.  We eventually decided to move forward, and by mid-April, our kitchen looked like this:

We saved so much that we were even able to add fun features like the shelves to the left of the sink, and the roll-out shelves to the right of the fridge!  Now... how to make them look like one unit, rather than a hodge-podge of miscellany?

Mom and I were in a paint store preparing to paint nursery furniture (post forth-coming), and "happened" to overhear a lady ordering paint for her kitchen cabinets.  Always on the ball, my Mom starting asking her questions, and turns out she was an interior designer and had a cabinet painter that she regularly recommended to her clients, who was also getting ready to have him paint her own cabinets!  Wow.  Again.  We snagged his number and called him on the way back home.

His price was very reasonable, and after painting (or assisting with) the nursery furniture, I was ready to never see another paint brush again, so we signed him up.  We had picked a paint color back in phase 1, so that was easy-peasy at this point.  Just a few days later, our kitchen looked like this:

Crazy!  We went out of town for the weekend to avoid the fumes from oil-based paint, and then came back to hang the doors.  By Easter, we had this:

And just in case you forgot where we started:

Beautiful.  Lovely.  Wonderfully spacious and practical.  Fresh and clean.  Not orangey.  Oh, so many ways to describe our "new" kitchen.  (P.S.  Did you note the new dishwasher from picture 3 to 4?  My hubby still let me follow through on that one.  We haven't done a great job of capturing photos of that, but maybe one of these days.)  Essentially, I was in love, content, and not broke.  And there was even time to spare before Baby's arrival!  Life was good.

Going green (really)... Soli Deo Gloria.

The Kitchen - part 1

Get ready... this may be a long post (I mean, it's already long overdue, so why not just make it long as well, right?).  Scratch that - I'm going to write it in phases, pre-dating it so you can see a basic timeline.  Feel free to read it all, or just look at the pretty pictures :)

For Christmas this year, Isaac gave me a card that said we were going to renovate the kitchen.  As that's something we've been talking about since we moved in but never felt like spending the money on, that was awesome and exciting!  If it didn't happen now, one could safely assume it would "never" happen after Baby's arrival, so no time like the present.  This is what we were starting with:

My pet peeves were the orangy tone of the cabinets, and the essentially unusable (and poorly decorated) space above the cabinetry.  My husband's was the white laminate.

We had two contractors come to give us estimates, and essentially we discovered that our "budgets" were quite different... oopsies :)  Lesson #1... at least minimally discuss budget with spouse BEFORE starting to get estimates.  Then we found a neighbor who goes to our church who does custom cabinetry.  Turns out, his price was in the same ballpark as the other folks, though of course it required us to track down our own countertop installer.  And thus came our tour of granite shops.  As it would be, we have expensive taste in granite.  Who knew? 

The whole thing snowballed into chaos - in an effort to find some clarity, we had several design-savvy friends (including my sister-in-law) and a realtor friend come to give us ideas.  Of course, that just led to more confusion, as they all had wonderful - but very different - suggestions.

In the midst of all this, and with Isaac spending 3-4 nights out of town with work for several weeks in a row, our fridge broke.  Appliances were never part of the original plan, so that threw us for a loop.  Praise the Lord, we found a 1-yr-old but unused fridge on Craigslist for essentially half-price.  My "blog-friend" Kim had recently purchased a new fridge, and thus had done all the hard work for me, and the fridge on Craigslist met all the requirements.  Wow.  Total God thing.  So with the help of some cousin-muscle, we brought this puppy home one Saturday in February:

Tax refund unexpectedly put to wonderful use :)  We continued to mull, plan and investigate, all the while realizing that most projects would take 6-10 weeks (order or build cabinets, install, cut granite, install, etc) and that we were running out of time if we didn't want a half-completed kitchen when we headed off to the hospital for delivery.  Add in some potential job changes which essentially served to remind us that we have no idea exactly how long we'll be in this house, and we finally came to the conclusion that the project was not meant to be at this time.  We could have our dream kitchen for way too much money, or we could have a half-baked partial upgrade for more than we wanted to spend for something only half-baked.  The Lord gave us peace, and I slept beautifully for a whole week!

Putting projects on hold... Soli Deo Gloria.

Splurge

I don't spend money often.  However, Kohl's had some good sales this weekend (for Father's Day, I guess), and with a 20% off coupon that they emailed me, I decided to go see what I could find.  Since I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I found plenty of things :)  So I splurged a bit and bought some fun little decorations for the house.  Want to see?  I knew you would!  Here you go:

A new shirt

A little decoration and reminder for the entryway

A new decorative pillow for the guest bedroom:

Life takes us to unexpected places, love brings us home.

A reversible (and clean!) rug for the guest bathroom

A frame: Live, Laugh, Love... the most important things in life aren't things

Now I just have to replace the beautiful models in the photos with my own beautiful family and friends!

I'm not the best at decorating - I truly don't mind blank walls - but I have to say that in the 24 hours or so that these things have been around, I'm enjoying them so far :)  I guess a splurge from time to time is okay, right?

Soli Deo Gloria

Look what the mailman dragged in

I've always upheld that getting mail is fun.  Granted, bills a little less so.  And junk mail not so much either, but I don't get tons of either of those items... so getting mail is still fun.  Especially on days like today.

• $10 off ANY purchase @ Kohl's
• new black ink for my printer
• a reusable grocery bag from Earthbound Farm
• Earthbound Farm organic produce coupons
• an aluminum Sigg water bottle 
• Avatar

I paid for the ink (though not much, since I used Staples Rewards "money" that I got from recycling old ink cartridges).  And technically I paid for Avatar, since we pay $10/month for Netflix.  But everything else was free!  The water bottle I won from a giveaway @ MummyDeals, the grocery bag and coupons I signed up for online during Earth week in April, and the Kohl's coupon was a straight-up surprise!  I see $10 worth of free clothes off the clearance rack coming my way in the next few weeks!

Don't believe me?  See here:

Soli Deo Gloria

Happy Birthday to me!

I've had a hankering for a chest freezer for quite some time now... like 2 years.  I kept suggesting it to Isaac, and his constant response was "what do 2 people need an extra freezer for?"  And, on one hand, he was right.  It definitely wasn't a need, but it most certainly was a want.  I love the idea of "once a month cooking" and pulling stuff out of the freezer 24 hours before eating it with little to no work involved after coming home from a long day at school.  I love the idea of buying items in bulk at Costco (or just when there's a good sale) and having them easily on hand when needed without having to pay full price.  And lately, I love the idea of buying a whole, grass-fed cow (with some friends, of course!).  Since Denise did such a good job of explaining why, I won't bother repeating it.  EatWild goes into a bit more detail and provides information on local farmers, too.  Anyway, point being that I can only do so much OAMC and bulk buying with my one, small freezer... and buying a portion of a cow was completely out of the question!
However, after something akin to pestering for about a year, I finally got into a grocery-shopping rhythm and decided that we could technically survive without one, so I let it go verbally and tucked it away as a future dream.  Thus, you can imagine my awe when he brought me to the Sears Outlet store on South Boulevard while we were out running errands one Saturday, and told me he wanted to get me a freezer for my birthday (which was, at the time, 2 months away).  They didn't have much selection, and I had a basic idea of sizing and pricing, so we left there empty-handed, but determined to keep our eyes and ears open.  We even contact a buddy of ours who works for Electrolux... he ALMOST got us a really good deal on a test dummy or something, but some other employee claimed it first.
Fast-forward to a week ago when Isaac said he wanted to extend our office bookshelves.  I immediately jumped on Ebay to grab some 10% off coupons at Lowes to save moolah on the large-ish purchase.  They arrived on Thursday, and you can bet that Friday evening he was antsy to go get the stair treads and flower pots needed to complete the project.  Off to Lowe's we went.  I figured we could check out the freezers while there, since we ended up with 5 coupons (for $3.25), and somehow we ended up in the clearance aisle.  In God's amazing providence, we found this baby chilling there... without a box.  Apparently, a box is worth 20% - who knew?  After the coupon, we ended up paying $187 for the freezer that was originally sold for $279.  That's a 33% discount - and it was delivered today for free :)  Yes, there is a little dent in the lid (I don't care), and no, it's not Energy Star compliant (bummed, but for the $3/yr in electric savings, it wasn't worth the extra $100+ upfront).

Now, who wants to go in on a cow with me?

Soli Deo Gloria.

"New" Curtains

My parents just sold their house here in CLT, after having it on the marker for 8 months or so, as they're in the process of moving to Orlando, FL.  They got a contract 2 or 3 weeks ago, and they’ll be closing in mid-May.  The whole family spent a 3-day weekend in ORL over Easter, so we got to see some of the houses they were looking at (I think they put an offer on one this week, so we’ll see what happens) and overall just got to scope out their new stomping grounds.  

One of the added benefits of them selling the house is that I got some "new" (i.e. repurposed) curtains from my room at their house.  Conveniently enough, they match in my bedroom here, so now that the house is sold, Isaac and I got them and hung them this week.

Master bedroom

Extra room

Guest room

The guest curtains were hanging already, but had been hung too high up, so while we had out the tools to hang curtain rods, Isaac went ahead and lowered these so they look better :)

Hanging curtains... Soli Deo Gloria.

Handyman

One of the most frugal things I have ever done, whether I realized it or not, is to marry my sweet husband.  While I love my Daddy dearly, he is seriously lacking in some handyman skills, which means he gets stuck hiring out a bunch of stuff that I don't have to pay for, because my husband can do it!  In the last year, he installed ceiling fans/lights in both of our extra bedrooms.  Granted, my Dad maybe could have done that, but he could never have figured out how to run the wires such that the switch (which originally operated a randomly-placed outlet) actually works the new fixture!  Yahoo!  Here are a few pics of the most recent installation - in the guest bedroom.

Hubby did the hard stuff.

My job was to attach the fan blades to the arms.

Finish product in action!

Installing ceiling fans... Soli Deo Gloria.

Windowed surprise

I had a GREAT time at the church women's retreat this weekend.  It's the second time I've gone, and I'm already looking forward to next year!  I truly enjoy the opportunity to meet women from church and to get to know others better.  We don't have a huge church, but since my husband and I work with the Hispanic church plant, there are plenty of gals that I don't get the opportunity to meet on a normal Sunday.  There were about 40 women at the retreat, and together we enjoyed some great worship time, a few testimonies, some Bible study, free time (which for me included a walk around the beautiful Bonclarken grounds, tea and chocolate cake with some great conversation, a brief nap and some reading time), lots of chatting and games - which is almost the best part, since my hubby is not quite as much a fan as I am, so we don't play many at home.
Anyway, the official topic of this post is the surprise I stumbled upon when I arrived home on Sunday afternoon:

My dear mom did my dining room curtains and my living room curtains (I helped with the latter set) and these kitchen ones were on her To-Do list forEVER!  Since she's moving, she finally gave up and hired someone to actually make them (since we had already picked out and purchased the fabric), and surprised me by installing them while I was gone (technically, she and hubs were still putting on the finishing touches when I showed up, but who cares).  I was totally used to the no-curtain look, since it's been that way for 2.5 years since we moved in, so it's still a bit odd... but I love them!  Aren't the colors perfect?  Don't worry, the chip clip won't stay there forever, haha :)

Soli Deo Gloria