But here is a rainbow to make sure I'm not too bummed about it. Ha
We have been busting our asses off working in the back yard getting it ready for more loads of dirt and grass. The vines that have been covering the trees in the back for years are slowly coming back so we needed to take some serious action... This included buying an axe.
The roots of these things look like ginger on steroids! Once they are cleared out they seem to settle down almost completely. With the amount of trees we have in the back we thankfully are only fighting these on a few of them.
Speaking of fighting we are having some issues with our fence builder... I won't even get into that one but I hope to soon be done with all of that! Oh and you see that giant plant in the background of the photo above... That's sea grapes. They are currently protected by poison ivy that can easily crawl under the fence... Well they are also waaay out of control and waaay too tall so once the fence is finished and we repair the damage caused to their fence we will ask the neighbors nicely to get them under control.... And to stop doing donuts in the lot next door that we are currently in the process of clearing. Like I said we will ask them nicely... Lets see how that goes. Everyone who thinks we will be ignored say aye. AYE.
We spent all of yesterday working on this front bed! Troy's Tropics just down the road is thankfully open on our only day off and they have some great looking plants. We loaded up the truck and headed out to the boonies to try another plant nursery only to find once we were half way there theat they weren't open on Sundays.... Boooo! But we did find a farmers market that had some very sweet chickens!
Silkies!
Shortly after this one of these pecked my fingers. I have no desire to own any of these now. But I did pick up some peppers for the chili I made last night to celebrate the first day of fall!
Yesterday was sweltering! We spent a little time in the sprinkler system at the plant nursery to cool off... But totally not thinking we ended up having to make a second trip back because we forgot the croutons we pulled out and just didn't load up into our plant cart. Oops. All in all I think it turned out pretty nice... Are we going to have to move our magnolia tree? Probably. :( well we are first time landscapers so I think we did pretty good!
With things moving along at a brisk pace I took a moment to stand back from blogging for a day or two. I may have been a touch overwhelmed lets be honest here guys... I'm in my first year of marriage, we are business owners working 6 days a week, and our only time off is spent at the house or talking about the house. We are exhausted.
Cabinets are here!
They arrived at an early 7:30 am when they were supposed to show up at 8:30. These jerks decided to unload in the driveway to begin with because no one was at the house that early lets keep in mind that this has been one of the rainiest summers in a long time so my all wood cabinetry is now sitting in 100% humidity. Great.
Like I have mentioned before we set a record for the amount of cabinets ordered, here you can actually see how much that really was! Thank god we didn't have to help them! Haha
The office and the living room were loaded up with boxes and semi sorted. This would be almost all of the master bathroom cabinets and a few smaller sections of the kitchen cabinets. As they were loading it all in the house we found an order sheet showing that our ACTUAL delivery time was scheduled for 10:00am NOT 7:30!!
I just needed to show how big this box was! Are you kidding me box?! Haha
While I kill you with the suspense of waiting to see what's in all these boxes....
Here are some more boxes!! Say hello to my beautiful washer, dryer, and cook top!
Okay okay...
Opened! Hey fridge can't wait to fill you with yummy things! Nope sorry it doesn't have wifi or a touch screen... Pretty sure The Hubs would find a way to download Call of Duty on it and then I wouldn't ever be able to use it. ((Kidding babe))
Double ovens!!!!!!
All of our pretty cabinets were unpacked and set out, thankfull they were in great shape and we didn't have any damages or missing parts... Well we were missing filler for the master bathroom cabinets but we we're able to actually get Shanadoah & Lowes to come out and take a look at things and they made it right!
Installation was started and was looking to be the start of something stunning!
At this point I lost both my memory card and iPad adapter to my lovely dog Sooks. She was quite upset at us for going out with friends one night and we came back to it laying nicely chewed on her bed. What a jerk. No big deal just half of my honeymoon photos and almost all the photos of the house were on that memory card.
Since the kitchen is where we put most of our heart and soul into I'm going to jump away from it for a minuet so we can talk about other things....
Like our master bathroom tile! Pardon the wonky photo I was leaning over a strand of tape keeping us out of this hallway!
It's dark but you can see that the grout lines here are just a smidge larger than the ones in the main floor! The results of this turned out so much better than I expected! Our tile guys did ask The Hubs if I was gothic since I am all about the dark colors.... But hey I surprised them with my guest bathroom tile!
Here is the start of the cabinets being installed...
Apologizes for not being able to get the whole bathroom in a frame it's just much too large for that. I am going to stop this one here though since they hadn't fully cleaned up after installing the handles and drawers, we will be going back there tonight and I'll grab some fresh pictures!
Moving on to the other bathrooms...
We used the same tile in both bathrooms... With some slight changes to each one. Laying the tile in a "horizontal" pattern really helps to visually open the space up.
This bathroom the tile patter was changed... This was done in error but why waste the time and money to rip it all up and change it? With the white grout you don't even notice it anymore.
This bathroom commonly referred to as the "tub bathroom" will hopefully feature more of a vintage botanical feel to it. After the tile incident I took the day off and went shopping. For all my local readers my next picture will cause you to break out into song. ((It will then get stuck in your head. Sorry, not sorry.))
I drove all the way down to Venice and hit up this gem. I was worried that it was going to be filled with cast offs from model homes that would only have the cold feel of being bought in bulk but I was wrong. Although it did have many "Florida style" and model home cast offs it have a huge variety of actual hand painted artwork, table top nick nacks, and beautiful framed mirrors. As usual I was drawn to one of the largest and gaudy-est mirrors in the back room of this place.
I posted this love of mine on my Instagram account and one of my lovely interweb friends said they called this style Palatial-kitsch and I love it and will be stealing it from this day forward. I am still having mixed feelings on if I should paint this black or not. My heart is telling me yes but my love of things sparkly is telling me to silver leaf it.
My color confused Palatial-kitsch mirror will reside over this vanity we picked up at ikea. Unbeknownst to us when we checked and double checked our box numbers we still ended up picking up a white vanity and not a black one, we only found out the other night when I went to put it together. I will place all the blame on myself with a sprinkle on IKEA they had a grouping of fliers sitting with the display for the white version and that's what I happened to pickup before we headed down to search for our boxes. Shame on you Ikea for making me look bad.
As for the other bathroom also known as the "shower bath" the shower floor now has... Well, a floor!
It's hard to really grab all the colors in the stones themselves but as you walk by or stand on it they actually change to blues, greens, purples, and pinks.
Very much like mother of pearl or an opal would look like.
With the white grout it really picks up more of the colors now too! I couldn't be more thrilled!
Since I would still like to keep you on the edge of your seat waiting on my kitchen cabinets... We picked up our rain barrels! I am a hippy at heart and love anything to do with nature so when The Hubs was open to this idea you better believe I jumped!
My strong like bull man was pretty excited about them as well! The ladies at the county office were super nice and helpful and you could tell they were genuinely just as excited for us to be taking them as they were to be selling them! Most counties offer a program where you can pick up the barrels, instructions, and sometimes even the parts needed to make it function just google it! Ours came with cute instructions on how to set up the barrels with all the nozzels and parts, and also build the stands!
Since the only power tools we currently own happen to be a weed wacker and a drill or two we passed it off to our in house mechanic Joe who grumbled through the whole process but loved every second of wood working! I even got him to pose for this picture! ((Oh yea thanks Remmi for helping))
I think I have jumped around enough to show you my cabinets..
Yes cleaning is in order but so is adding the handles and pulls but I could pee my pants I'm so excited!
The glass cabinets up top will be lit from the inside and we will have under cabinet lighting to keep my counter top work space nice and bright as well. Clean lines were our main objective in creating our 19' long wall of workspace. There is a mixture of deep drawers on the bottom as well as standard cabinets and drawers. ((I promise the next set of pictures I'll use my big camera)) We have had quite a battle trying to find 3 island pendant lights to go over our island but we finally found some we loved....
These weird and unusual prism pendants just made us super excited! We placed an order about a week ago from this company only to get an email a few days later letting us know it wouldn't happen. They didn't have all the parts needed to make and send these out. Talk about being bummed. I know that these are not everyone's style but if you know me and know my artwork I'm not like everyone else. Thankfully my parents raised me to see the beauty in the unusual. After a few days of googling lights like this one we still turned up empty, it got so bad that my husband was even spending hours looking at pendant lights to fill the void where we once had these. We settled today on a few also from this company and gave them a call. Normally I would have dropped them completely since the first rep I dealt with on the phone was not so nice but we gave them a second chance since they reached out to me via social media (where I expressed my feelings to them) and wanted to do everything to make it right. I have a high standard of customer service from being in the biz for years and they would get my award. Just for kicks The Hubs asked them if they were able to get this light and lo and behold they said they could. They only had enough to make 3! So we placed our order! We will see in the next few days how it actually turns out! They said it's going to be about 2 weeks before we see them but it's better than waiting a lifetime just to not have them at all. Your lights in your home are like earrings, they can make a statement or change a whole outfit. With the house having such an open floor plan we needed these lights to be perfect and will only settle for perfection.
It's now 5 pm and I have spent a week working on this post ((I had my app crash a few times and lost everything)) but I need to pack up and quite pretending like I've been working! Thank you all for reading, I know it's not always exciting but it's great to have an outlet.
