B&A - The Front Pasture!

We have pasture! Of course we don't have our fencing up yet, but we have pasture. So exciting!

This is our "Front Pasture". Hopefully one of two or three pastures that we'll get in eventually. We still have the jacked up fence along the perimeter that came with the house and it's just cross fenced with t-posts and one strand of tape that isn't hot, but the pasture is graded, seeded and growing grass beautifully!

For a little comparison, here is the before picture from when we first bought the house.

We didn't take out too many trees from this particular section, but we did remove lots and lots and lots of brush and blackberry bushes and the big pile of junk that I assume was from when they originally cleared it. There were 3 large piles of debris around the property that they never got to burning apparently. I know I've mentioned the panicked clearing of our property in 2 weekends time with less then a weeks notice before and I promise I'll tell you that story one day.

This is a picture of the pasture while we were clearing. We (and by we, I of course mean the boyfriend because I was pretty much just supervision/support) moved the original pile up, fluffed it and added TONS more to it. It pretty much burned for two weeks straight and we got rid of a lot of stuff. Luckily the boyfriend is an expert on heavy equipment and whipped the property into shape really quickly with just the rented dozer.

If you can focus on the pasture behind my shaggy horse in this picture, you'll see what it looked like after the clearing. We wanted the horses to still have turnout, but it was rocky and uneven and only a few small spots had grass and it just wasn't very pretty at all. There was still about 15 feet of blackberries along the bottom fenceline also so the pasture didn't go all the way down.



Here the boyfriend is on Holly in April cleaning it up, making sure it's all level, getting rid of most of the blackberries and rocks and clearing all the way down to the bottom fenceline. Quality Control (Cheyanne) is watching intently, making sure the job gets done right!

After he finished with all that he seeded it and counted on the spring rains. Well, we got one good drenching, like torrential down pour, where a lot of the seed was just washed away, and then not much else. He reseeded the upper portions where it had washed away and then set up some sprinklers since we weren't getting much more rain. It was hard to complain about no rain after the loooooong winter we had, but it would have been nice for the grass growing operation.

It all worked out though. There is plenty of beautiful, tall grass out there.

Since it's still baby grass the roots aren't strong enough to stay put with the ponies nibbling on it, but the boyfriend said too bad! They need turnout! They have been getting stalked (or is it stocked?) up standing in their little paddocks and bored out of their minds. They need the exercise and freedom. And the grass! Though hay prices have come down to around $11/bale here, from the $17+ it was, it's still nice when they get to graze. I think they were really loving it. We had some very content ponies.



I just love this shot....

It's a dream come true on so many levels: the horses, the pasture "done", owning the property, having a view of the mountain...it's still almost surreal to me. And seriously, how many people do you know that are lucky enough to have that view from their front porch? I could stare at it all day.

B&A - The Office!

Yay! I was finally able to get the after pictures of the office yesterday! WOHOO!

I know you guys have been waiting on the edges of your chairs for this, just biting your nails. Sorry for the wait! The nice weather was calling my name with outdoor projects aplenty. Luckily (for the office project) the weather this past week has been rather crappy and I had time to finish it up.


Unfortunately, when I went looking for before pictures I realized, yet again, that I'm totally fired because I don't really have any good ones. Doh!


This was the room when we first bought the house. It's not the greatest angle, but it's all I've got. The walls actually look white in these pictures, but I assure you they were not. My mom pointed out that they were a nice flesh tone. She pretty much nailed it. I'm sure everyone wants skin colored walls, but I just had to paint over it.

I did a B&A of the closet here. It looks just a tad bit different. The door on the left goes into the master bath. You can walk thru the bathroom to the master bedroom on the other side.

This is that corner now...

I still need to actually pot the palms in their pots instead of just setting their plastic pots in their permanent pots, but you get the idea.

Then you may remember this wall from the closet B&A. Sadly, minus the pile of crap in the middle of the floor that I had pulled out of the closet, that's the way the room looked on any given day. Messy desk, boxes piled along the wall, blobs of blankets...

This is that wall now...

Slight improvement, eh?

Want to see my favorite part of those shelves?

Let's take a look...

My hard back Twilight series, along with the Host (also by Stephenie Meyer) were the first things to go on the shelves, top left. In case you're new to FFLK, I'm a Twihard. I have OCD, Obsessive Cullen Disorder. I'm a Twilight addict. Luckily, I've been able to keep my obsession under control for a while now, but it does come back to visit every once in a while. Next to the books is a trophy from one of the most fun drill rides I've had. It was the first time riding our Jungle Girls quad of the year, we had only practiced our new drill a couple times, but went in, hauled booty and totally rocked it! I rememer running out of that arena with HUGE smiles on all of our faces. It was a blast! That's the kind of drilling I like to do! Next to that is my favorite frame that I found to decorate with. It's squares of shiny, iridescenty shell. Very pretty! And above that are some pretty green hurricane candle holder thingy majigers. I love them! Not sure what to put in them, but I love them.

Ok, back to B&A...

Next we have my craft table. It's a beautiful wood pub height table that I totally scored on at Macy's scratch and dent furniture store that I happened to end up at on a day that they had all their tables 50% off with an additional 15% off if you used your card. $100. SCORE! I love my craft table!

This is when I first got it. I had just tried out this little shelf and pictures on it. It was better then nothing!

Eventually I filled up all that empty space underneath it with boxes. Lots of boxes! Most of those boxes were unpacked to the super, duper organized closet or put on the book shelves. Yay!


Here is my craft table now...



I know, I know...still with the boxes underneath. But those are packed up, ready to go up to the barn loft for storage. They just haven't made it yet. Honest!


Now on the shelf is pictures of family and friends, a zen water fountain thingy, a lamp and a bromeliad plant. There is also a Citrus Cilantro reed diffuser that I found at Pier 1. Have you smelled the Citrus Cilantro reed diffuser from Pier 1?!? Oh. My. Goodness! It smells like limes and cilantro and makes me want a margarita, guacamole and pico de gallo all at the same time. On the beach. Not sure how exactly it manages all of that, but it smells positively delightful and I had to have it for my office.


I also found these throw pillows at Pier 1 and I think they very appropriately perked up the black recliner. Oh, they were on clearance too. I love clearance!






There is also this computer desk in the corner to the left of the door...




And I have a whole little project planned out for the wall between the door and the desk that involves some little shelves and lots of picture frames. But that'll have to wait for another day.



So this is my office. I am totally in love with it!





It's definately got a nice tropical, airy feel to it. The color on the walls is Teal Ice, the ceiling is Waterfall Mist and the closet is Tropical Dream. The tie breakers on all those colors was their names. The walls really are a lot more teal then they look in the pictures too.

It turned out beautifully! I still have some little things to get, like floor pillows (I still like being able to stretch out on the floor for scrapbooking) and some larger investments, like an area rug, but those things will just have to wait. I love the way it came together! I couldn't be happier with it!

B&A - Garage Flower Bed

That is B & A, as in Before and After, not BA, as in Bare Ass. We don't do BA's around here so get your head out of the gutter!

On to the B&A...

I think, maybe, just possibly, the little area in front of the garage is finally officially finished now! YAYYYYY!!!!

1 down, 3,796,241 to go!

I mentioned it a little in this post last fall. It was the third project that I finished last weekend, officially classifying me as a total rock star for how productive I was. The other two projects were The Great Clipper Encounter 2009 and getting the closet in my office/craft room painted and organized.

Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of the real before, how it was when we bought the house. I'm discovering that I do that a lot. It's annoying.

When I got started on it it had a huge and very dead rose bush with massive, evil thorns. It was huge. And evil. It took a lot of very careful pruning to extract. Then I pulled out the huge, mostly dead juniper shrubby thing. It had completely over grown the area and over hung the little fence border by a good foot or more. It was ugly. This picture was taken after pulling all that stuff out. There was plastic covering the whole area and the little fence in the back was the border around the whole edge.

I worked on it a little last fall, got it "done" but then decided that I really wasn't satisfied with the way it looked. I wanted to add dirt to it, bring it up level to the concrete and re-do the rock border.

I talked the boyfriend into pulling out the juniper root finally a little while ago and he turned up the dirt a bit while he was there. Last weekend I pulled the rock border out and got him to bring a couple scoops of the good horse poo dirt out for me to add in and got to work re-doing the rock border.

This was what I ended up with. Much better!

I still wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to plant in there so I decided to think on it for a while and see what ended up inspiring me. I'm a big fan of low maintenance when yard work is involved so that was a big consideration. There are big, pretty green leafy bushes that seem to grow and spread pretty fast and don't need watering in front of the house so I decided to pull up some of the shoots and transplant them over there. They should fill in pretty quickly and then we can just snip it back to keep behaving itself in it's little area.

Then I hit Home Depot for paint and supplies for the office and found these cute little flowers that are also supposed to be low maintenance, spread out to form a mat and bloom all spring. Plus, they were on sale and I do loooove sales! I think I would have gotten them even if they weren't on sale though. They were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Only cuter!

Aren't they cute? I think they are adorable little flowers!

So after adding the bushes and the little flowers to the area, this is the finished product...

Everything should fill in and grow together eventually. The leafy bush should grow quite tall, the one in front of the house is going on 5 feet tall. They also get cute little white flowers on them late spring. I really like the way it turned out!

So YAY finished yard project #1! Not sure what's next outside, but hoping to get after pics of the office by next weekend! Finger's crossed.

Before and After - Office Closet

I just couldn't wait. I was way too excited and motivated to get going on the office closet project so I finished it up last night. I grabbed a coffee after work, hit Target and Michaels, my two very favorite stores for decorating/organizing and headed home to get started.

This was the very naked closet after I stripped it all down. Of course I was excited to start tearing into it and forgot, once again, to take before pictures. You'll just have to trust me when I tell you that it wasn't pretty. It had one shelf, supported by boards nailed into the wall (where you now see the line in there). There was also a clothing rod that was seriously stuck in there with one rod hanger/shelf support in the middle, held up by another board (where the pink square is in the middle)(and yes, this closet apparently used to be Pepto Bismol pink). I had to have the boyfriend help me with some muscle to get it all out.

When all was said and done I counted 42 nails and screws holding 3 small boards and a rod in. 42 nails and screws! And the best part...see the nail that is top right? The one that looks like a screw? It's a nail, a ribbed nail for extra grab. There were a few of them. They weren't planning on that stuff going anywhere at all when they put it all in. Totally ridiculous!

This was the office while I was painting the closet and getting the shelving set up. The circled stuff in the middle is all of the crap that I took OUT of the closet. It was just piled haphazardly on the floor because I just had the one shelf. I'm really not joking, everything in that circle was piled in there.

Also in the picture at the top middle is a desk that we've had in there that will be headed some where else in the house. I'm not sure where yet.

Under that desk are some boxes that are hiding.

Next to the desk is a rather large and sloppy pile of blankets.

In front of the blankets leaning against my pub height craft table are the bookshelves. They are in boxes until I finish painting and can assemble them. They will be against the wall that the small desk is currently holding up.

I have to thank The Wife for recommending Picnik for free photo editing in her Sunday Stills post last week. I've been having fun playing with it!

This is what it looks like underneath my craft table. There are lots of boxes hiding under there. They are mostly waiting for the bookshelves to be assembled, but I did get 2 or 3 of them unpacked into the cool new super-organized closet last night.

This is the closet now. The green on the walls doesn't stand out as much in the picture, but I promise it's green! Actually, the color is called Tropical Dream. The name was the tie breaker. It just seemed fitting. And I was happy to see green was a trendy color when I went to Target to get all of the tubs (which were also on sale, SCORE!) They have nice lime green accents on them, pretty much the color I want to accent the room with. I got this nice black wire shelving unit at Target also a month or so ago. I have the shorter 3 shelf version in the kitchen and love it.

Currently contained in this closet are the large pile of blankets, neatly stacked in the space not taken up by the shelving unit. All of the crap that I pulled out of the closet originally, neatly organized into tubs. The board games that originally resided on the one shelf of the closet. And most of my stamping and scrapbooking stuff which already takes up most of the upper 3 shelves. I was surprised by how much stuff I had once I got it all in one general area and I think there is more floating around in some of the other boxes. Yikes!

I had so much fun organizing all of that last night! I'm a total nerd. I think I'm going to put the closet doors back on, atleast for now, and see how they work out. I may still go with the curtain idea, but for now I think the doors will serve me better while I'm painting.

Oh, and you see the wall to the right of the closet? The one that changes color half way up? The top peach-ish looking color is the current color of the room. Ick. The bottom color is my test strip for the teal I am going with. It's called Teal Ice. I can't wait to get the room painted!

The kitchen - B&A

Well, one out of a million ain't bad! ha!

I feel like I really have about a million projects that I need to do around the house and property. I've decided that my flower bed area by the garage isn't finished after all. And I didn't get very far on the other flower bed area by the gate. I did, however, finish my kitchen. I think. I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, but in order to get there I need to spend money on decorative things, new hardware and new lighting fixtures that I just don't want to spend on right now. So, for all intensive purposes, I'm going to consider the kitchen "finished".

My goal was to paint/finish the kitchen and my master bath before I host Turkey day for my family. I thought it was a very reasonable goal since, at the time I decided on it, I had over a month to do it. I was not anticipating my current addiction that has sucked the last week and a half from my life. Not that I mind too much, I have totally enjoyed the ride. But I'm a little disappointed in myself that it's not looking so promising to actually reach my goal. I don't like not accomplishing goals. Especially when they are so reasonable! I know I still have a week and a half which should be plenty of time to paint a bathroom, but there are several reasons that I don't see this happening. 1. I still haven't finished the whole series. I have about 400 pages left in the last book, which comes out to probably the next two evenings being mostly committed to reading. 2. The bathroom requires a lot of prep work. I'll post the before pictures when I've got it finished, but this bathroom was, umm...cluttered. To say the least. 3. I still haven't even picked what color I want to paint in there! I'm having a really hard time with that because the counter is burgundy. The bathroom used to be Pepto Bismol pink. No joke. They changed it to a decent off-white/beige color, that I actually kind of like, but it is a little dark and dingy and after everything was taken off the walls, I just need to paint. There is no two ways about it. I'm also having a hard time with choosing a color because we want to change basically everything in there. Soon. The counter, sinks, mirrors, hardware, fixtures, flooring...everything. It's all got to go! But it can't right now. 4. I'm kinda sick of painting. There is just as much edging and crap to work around in this bathroom as there was in the kitchen and I just don't wanna!

So that's my story of the bathroom thus far. Now, back to the kitchen. The kitchen is nice. A little quirky, but totally do-able. The appliances were all fairly new and matched. Wohoo! I wasn't exactly thrilled with the brown and mauve color scheme, but it wasn't awful. The floor definately needs to go, but that's a big, expensive project for another day. The cabinets are real wood, but had these weird top cabinets that served absolutely no purpose since they were wedged into the ceiling and didn't really open and close. I planned to paint, had picked out my colors and was thinking about my plan of attack for prepping one day. I was wondering about the top cabinets because they were wedged against the ceiling and thinking about just taking them off to paint, since that would probably be easiest. Then it occured to me. I could take them off and...LEAVE them off. *gasp* As soon as the thought occured to me, I knew it was fabulous. I hadn't ever really had an issue with them, but they were kinda weird and didn't serve any purpose whatsoever. Plus, that would give me some room to decorate above the cabinets. Granted it is only about 10 inches, but it's enough room to give the kitchen some character. That night a girlfriend came over for our weekly date night and helped me tear my kitchen apart. We could not believe the difference just taking those top cabinets off made! It was huge! Even with the mauve paint still there, it totally opened the kitchen up, made it so much lighter and brighter! We were all grins looking at our handy work!

In the picture to the left you can see the color the kitchen was. They didn't paint behind the top cabinets. There is also the little phone shelf, which was kinda handy, but once it was down for painting, I couldn't bring myself to put it back up. You can also see the yellow stand mixer that inspired the color.

Over the weekend I got it painted with the help of my mom for most of it and then the boyfriend on the second day. It was a lot of work, but we got it finished. It took me a couple more days to get all of the touching up done and pull the edging tape off and then a few more days after that to properly clean and scrub everything and get it all put back together. And then, as is the nature of a kitchen, it got dirty and it's taken me a while to get it really cleaned up nice again so I could get the "after" pics.

We painted it "Candlelight Ivory". It's basically white, but with a touch of yellow. I have a KitchenAid Stand mixer that is a beautiful light yellow color, so that was the inspiration for that. Pretty much everything I have for my kitchen is yellow or blue. I also wanted something that was clean and bright looking and would maybe reflect a bit nicer tone in the cabinets. They looked kind of yellow and weird with the mauve. I think I accomplished those missions. I like it! Though now it seems a little blah to me. I would like to find a cutesy theme for it, something to brighten it up and have some points of interest, instead of just the white walls. I am having trouble finding things that go with yellow and blue, and brown, and black, and allows me to keep the wire rooster that I love and is currently the only thing on the wall though. It's a lot to coordinate! But I'm still considering it finished, since all the "hard labor" is done. Now it's just details left.

So one down...a million or so to go! :-)

So many projects...

...so little time! It always seems that there just aren't enough hours in the day for everything that I'd like to do. That's become incredibly apparent lately with these gorgeous, sunny, crisp fall days just calling my name, but only having an hour or two after work to enjoy them before it gets dark. It's torture I tell you! It's just not possible to squeeze chores, yard maintenance, yard/property projects and riding ponies into the small window of time that I have outside while it's light out. Something has to give, and lately it's been my pony time.

Generally speaking, giving up pony time is not a good thing. Riding horses is my therapy! Both mental and physical. It keeps me sane, relieves stress and makes up for the 8+ hours a day I spend sitting in a chair slouched over. My back can always tell when I don't ride. It starts screaming at me sooner or later if I'm slacking. It needs the exercise and balance of sitting up straight and working the horses to make up for my awful posture at work and the hour and a half minimum that I spend in my truck every working day. Luckily being on a drill team with weekly practices gets me on my horse for a good, solid two hours one night a week. No matter how much I whine and complain when it's time to leave for practice, I always feel 100% better when it's done. There is just no therapy quite like riding a horse.

The last couple of weeks I've been having tons of fun working on yard and house projects, so I've hardly had time to miss riding. Atleast not too much. I've been suddenly inspired to tackle a few projects outside before the weather turns for the year and it's been a lot of fun. We have 4.3 acres, most of which was wooded when we bought the house. There are some very odd flower beds around the house, garage and gate. The one by the garage had a lovely (at one time I'm sure) huge rose bush that was very, very dead and had the most evil thorns every where on it. That little flower bed area also had a huge, mostly dead shrubby thing. I believe my friend told me it was Juniper? Not sure, I don't know plant names. It was also prickly and evil. I decided to tackle that project one sunny weekend day while the boyfriend was off hunting for Bambi.

Unfortunately, I didn't take "before" pictures of it with the dead stuff still there, but here is what it looked like after I yanked all the crappy old dead stuff out (ok, more like waged a war against their prickly evil-ness), except the big root for the shrubby thing (don't you just love all the technical terms?) that I could not get out of the ground to save my life! The previous owners also put plastic or fabric EVERYWHERE! It has been a huge PITA (pain in the a$$) and doesn't seem to do much of anything in the way of actually keeping weeds down. The little fence was the border with the mostly dead shrub thing growing thru it and just looking gross.

I had planned to do paver blocks every where around the house. Bordering all the flower bed areas and making for a very nice look. I knew that would be some time in the future, like maybe after we win the lottery or something, since paver blocks and a nice yard just aren't at the top of the list of projects to pay for. I kept dreaming about it though, trying to picture what it will look like someday. Then one sunny Sunday I woke up and thought, rocks! I'll use rocks! Duh! We are VERY successful rock farmers since we cleared the property and I need to pick them out of the turn out area and arena anyways. Best of all they are FREE so why not kill like 5 birds with one stone?!

I like the overall look of the rock border, but I do realize that this was my first attempt and it does need some help. I have also decided that I need to fill it with some more dirt, bring it up level with the concrete, and raise the edge of the border a little bit more. I planted a couple tulip bulbs in there, but that's about it for a while. As I've mentioned, flower beds aren't at the top of the projects to pay for list. Any money we spend on things like flowers and plants, is that much less money that we have to spend on things like arena footing, stalls or our tack room. Those are definately priorities for me.

Eventually, I'd like to have some sort of tree or taller, not evil shrub against the building that will take up some of that empty wall space. Then I would like to find some sort of ground cover that is colorful and fun, but also low maintenance. I like things that bloom and I love having lots of color around the house, but I don't like yard work or things that are high maintenance. It takes away from my pony time. The name of the game for me when it comes to gardening and yard work is low maintenance!

So that was the first project that I have tackled and finished. It is very minor considering all that I have to do still, but it's a start! This is my next project. It's a strange little "flower bed" area, minus the flowers I guess, that seems to be centered around the lamp post and over all sorts of interesting, random things that I assume is wiring and stuff for the gate and lights at the entrance or may have been part of the gate at some point. I've already made a lot of progress on it, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to finish it before I run out of nice weather. Fingers crossed!