All Decked Out

I can't be sure about this, but I think that most people, when they want to do a project around the house, tallly what it will cost then go buy materials and begin the project. 

That's not the way it works in our household; we usually wait till the materials . . . . . materialize, then we make plans to use the materials for this or that. 

When someone gave Bill some wonderful hefty 2x10's last summer, we decided to use those boards to build a deck. Stakes for the new deck were soon in place, and the project was underway. 

The plan was to eventually put a door of some sort that would lead from the new deck into the dining room. So while the deck went up I put the word out that we were looking for a sliding glass door. The planning stage is always my favorite part of any project, so I had fun checking the prices of new doors and thinking about how I could avoid having to buy a new door. 

The deck was soon in place, and I did find a door - but that's another story for another day. 

And of course we'd need to add a tree to the landscape, too, eventually, for shade. I love the way one project feeds into another one. 

I love the whole process.

Oh, oh! I also began to formulate plans for incorporating the new deck into its environs......

Plants! We'd need more plants! A happy problem! Something to look forward to as the colder weather started to set in.

The new deck was in by the end of summer, 2011. 

Now it was time to start planning for that new door!

To be continued....

We eventually installed a sliding glass door - cut through the stone to add a door where the big window is in the photos above. To see more about the new door, please click this link:

Sliding glass door

Good Morning, Glory

After Bill moved some mulch - at our last home, on Church Street - morning glories started to grow where he dumped that mulch. So I decided to move some of those new plants to various parts of the yard. I even put some wires on the utility pole out by the curb so the morning glory vines could climb it. We had morning-glory-filled trellises everywhere, too. 

Of course we had other flowers in our yard, too.....

But the morning glories were the show-stopper. Total strangers would round the corner in their car, stop and comment about our yard.

That's no stranger: That's Mike admiring the flowers with my husband Bill.in our side yard on Church Street.

And there are some more flowers - my parents, Bed and Etty, er, I mean Ed and Betty.

Yes, we were a bit crazed when it came to the whole morning glory thing. We had fun with it. 

And we're not the only ones who got into it: I mentioned, earlier in this post, that people would stop and comment about our yard. People would also ask me where I got those morning glory seeds, and I would assure them that they were normal, garden-variety (!) seeds. We even had one guy stop mid-corner to ask if he could have some of the seeds; so we gave him some. 

But here's the thing: It didn't occur to me to tell people that I put wires on the utility pole. In fact, it wasn't till some years after we moved from that Church Street home that I realized I should have told those people that - told them that those plants had help climbing that pole. Picture it: That poor man who got seeds from us goes home and plants those seeds . . . .  and they don't climb for him like they did for us. 

And one more story: The first year we had morning glories everywhere in that yard, I feared the electric company would have a problem with us growing vines up their pole. Well, I needn't have worried: The electric workers stopped by and complimented us on our garden, then asked if they could help us get the vines off the poles! God is good . . . . .

Tiled Table

This is one of those projects that I love to revisit, and not just because it was a fun project that turned out just as I envisioned it would. The thing is, before our town could rebuild the schools in the area, they had to get rid of the old stuff in those schools. So they had auctions. These auctions spanned two summers; that was about, oh, ten years ago.

I got the table for just $2.00 - a solid oak table that was perfect for my purpose. It even had a trim board around the edge that would eventually be moved higher so as to keep the grout from oozing over the edge . . . .

I broke the tiles into smaller pieces - tiles we picked up off the ground at a tile plant. 

Once the tiles were broken, I could arrange them in a pattern.

After the tiles were glued to the table top, this project languished in the basement for days and days. My husband finally carried the table out onto the front porch and poured glops of grout onto the top of my beautiful design, thus forcing me to finish it. And I'm glad I did finish it; it remains one of my favorite pieces.