Early Blooms and Sun Hat Birdhouse

One advantage to living in a climate where we hit 80 degrees in February, is that our spring blooms always arrive way ahead of schedule.

Since it gets way to warm out here to grow peonies, which are one of my favorite flowers, I have found a wonderful substitute with ranunculus.

As the blooms start emerging, the influx of birds begins. I have terrible luck with birdhouses being hurled out of trees and smashing, so I decided it was time to apply some ingenuity and  give the birds a home that cost nothing to build and bring a little creativity in the yard. I had old floppy sunhats laying around the house, that my husband has forbidden me to wear (at least in public). They had seen better days, and had become more dress up hats for my daughter than any kind of functional head wear.  I used scissors to cut a hole, and attached some scrap wood to the back.  Seems to be holding up well so far!

Even the fruit trees are being forced into early bloom. 

Garden Patio - an outdoor living space on a budget

With our fire pit transformed, we decided that our next project should be a new designated seating area. Always mindful of a budget, since we end up rearranging and moving things so often, and compounded with the fact that we were essentially putting the cart before the horse (building a yard before we built our house), we knew that we didn't want to set anything in concrete  - literally. We knew we didn't want to use more pea gravel, since our patio chairs would sink right in, so we began exploring options. We settled on simple 12" x 12" pavers from Home Depot. At about $1 a piece, they would give us the coverage we needed and the flexibility to simply move them or remove them completely if we didn't like how they turned out. 

As luck would have it, we were helping out some friends with their own landscaping project when we noticed a discarded, broken metal gazebo frame that they had deemed ready for the dump. They saw a hunk of trash taking up valuable yard space, and I saw the perfect addition to my envisioned, make-shift patio. We rescued the frame, and while there was no canopy, the metal itself was in great condition. We staked the legs into the ground, and used it as a template for our patio space.  With about $100 worth of pavers, a $14 flat of dichondra to grow between them, 4 discounted vines that we scored from Lowes, our old metal patio set, one afternoon, and (once again) one hard working and incredibly loving husband, we had taken one more little chunk out of the flat, hard, ugly, brown dirt that we were surrounded with. 

This became on of my favorite spots to sit and enjoy the amazing view

From Fire Pit Hell to Wishing Well

As our first summer on the property approached, we found ourselves longing for even more outdoor "living" space. When we were residing in suburbia, we often enjoyed neighborhood bonfires in the middle of the street; so we started brainstorming for a wide open-space alternative. We shopped around for the little run-of-the-mill fire pits, but even the bulkiest offerings at our local home improvement stores would seem dwarfed in our landscape. Not to mention that the bigger the fire-pit, the more inflated the price. Once again, we resorted to doing what we do best - improvising.

We foraged some more big rocks and bought a few bags of mortar - if the whole thing went terribly wrong, we would only be out $20 and some sweat equity...it was worth a shot. 

We had such a great experience with the pea gravel that we used for the pond, we decided to use another scoop for our "seating area" around the pit itself. We weren't worried about our beautiful brown dirt catching fire, we just wanted to define the space a little more. The gravel ran another $50, but we were confident that even if we ended up scrapping the whole project, we could definitely find another use for it.

One of the things that I have learned about my husband in my 18 years with him, is that he doesn't do anything half-way. He takes the Tim Taylor approach to anything he does - more power, bigger, louder... combine his love of the excess and his love of fire, and I should not have been surprised at the behemoth creation that resulted.

I mentioned before that some of our projects are successes, and others are "lessons" learned in what not to do. I adored the fire pit, and our friends and family had many night of enjoyment sitting around its warmth. That being said, here is where we went wrong: A fire pit of that size requires a significant sized fire to be made in it. A few logs didn't even get the flames over the top of the rocks. So to fuel such a huge fire, the flames were burning at such intensity that we required at least 3 foot wooden dowels to roast marshmallows, lest we melted our faces off. Not to mention that the flames spit embers several feet in the air. While the rocks obviously didn't catch fire - the wooden chairs, my favorite jacket, and my hair - all suffered damage from the small portal to Hell that we had created.

In addition to what we found to be obvious safety hazards (and the concern that someone in the distance might report a wild fire), the rocks themselves just couldn't withstand the intense heat. By the end of summer, we began to notice significant cracks and crumbling in most of them.

We were faced with a dilemma, Mike wanted to knock the whole thing down with the John Deere, but what the fire pit lacked in functionality, I felt it made up for in appearance. Quite simply, I loved the look of the stone, and was agonized at the thought of all those hours of loading and unloading boulders, of stacking and mortaring, to be demolished in a matter of seconds.

I have admittedly always been one to look for the whimsy and magic in life. My girls and I love fairy tails and Harry Potter, pixies and dreams come true. The more I looked at our "failure", the less I saw an unusable fire pit, and the more I saw the beginning of a wishing well. What could bring more magic and whimsy to a still very barren yard than our very own wishing well? As if the fates themselves were speaking to me, within a week of hatching my brilliant idea, we happened to drive past a trailer on the side of the road. A trailer full of broken up decking and other miscellaneous pieces of wood, fatefully adorned with a "FREE" sign. 

With a huge pile of free scrap wood, and a husband with apparently unlimited patience for my hair brained ideas, we set out to transform our danger zone into a wishing well. We had no electricity run to this area of the yard for a pump, and I had no patience to attempt to properly seal the stones and mortar, so my husband filled it with dirt, and I filled it with plants! While I would still love to have it functional as a water feature at some point in the not too distant feature, I love the look that it gives as a raised planting area as well. 

                                            

DIY Backyard Pond and Simple Kitchen Makeover

We decided to create this blog as a means to chronicle the exciting new journey that we have embarked upon. Having lived in apartments, in a rental home, and in our own cookie-cutter tract home, we have always felt that we were missing something. My husband and I have always loved projects (in the span of the 7 years that we lived in our last home, we re-did the floor 3 times, re-did the cabinets twice, repainted the walls countless different colors, and maxed out every inch of our postage stamp, cul-de-sac yard). When the opportunity to build a custom home on 3 acres of land presented itself to us, we jumped at it with enthusiasm. We thought there would be no better outlet for of love of DIY than to start from scratch on 3 acres of barren dirt! 

My parents live in an adjoining property, and we have been staying in their guest home for the past years, while we prepared and saved to start our own build. While the guest home was fine (although a tad small for the 6 of us), I couldn't bear the thought of such a long stay without any redecorating. Here are some photos of where we started out two years ago:

As you can see, functional - but ugly...and brown.

After a few coats of paint, some hardware and cabinet door removal, and a little glued-on bead board paneling for the cabinetry...

We had made our living space more comfortable, but we were still left with acres of brown dirt staring at us everyday. We loved the small, pre-formed pond that we had put in our previous tiny backyard, and always yearned for something more substantial.  We researched for weeks on the best method to use to tackle putting in a pond. It seemed that all of the answers we found were both costly and time consuming. We decided that we would do things like we always do, OUR way. We improvise, we talk each other into what seem like ridiculously impossible ideas, and sometimes they fail miserably - but sometimes....sometimes they work. 

Since I wasn't willing to shell out $10,000 for the materials and labor to build a concrete pond or for a seemingly indestructible pond liner, filter system, etc... I looked in the plastic sheeting department at Home Depot. It was here that I came across what I hypothesized might be the perfect solution.

100 feet by 20 feet and under $100!! For that price, I thought it was worth a shot. We laid out a general idea for the shape we wanted, and then my husband hopped on the tractor and started digging! Once we had reached the size and depth that we wanted, we sent the kids into the hole to toss out any sharp rocks or other possible sharp hazards that might damage the plastic. In hindsight, I probably should have used some kind of underlayment, but I was impatient and cheap. 

After all of the potential dangers were removed, we started rolling out the plastic. We decided to double it, since 6 mil wasn't terribly thick, and since we didn't have any kind of sand or other barrier between the liner and the dirt, we thought we would be better off laying it down a little thicker.

  

It took quite a while to fill, and we estimate it holds about 4,000 gallons. We ordered a scoop of pea gravel to cover the outer of the edges of the pond, and added a few larger rocks that we scavenged up ourselves.

It was my 15th Wedding Anniversary present and I couldn't love it more! We are two years out now, from its installation, and it has held up beautifully! No tears, leaks or visible deterioration of the liner at all.

These are some photos of last spring - just to illustrate how much "life" grows around any kind of water.

The lilies must love our so cal heat, because they flourish!