Saturday, March 19, 2016

Happy Spring and Easter!

Didn't it seem like Spring and Easter  just snuck up on us this year?

Maybe it's just me because we've been so busy doing all the projects on the "get the house ready to sell list, but Winter just flew by this year. 

It's always fun to look at photos from years past to get inspiration for decorating, even if it's at the last minute.

In 2012, we spent Easter at friend's house and she had this cute centerpiece on the table.



That same year, Mr. DIY made my favorite carrot cake. Don't hate me, but he used to be a pastry chef many years ago. You can see more of that yummy cake HERE, with a link to the recipe.

My friend made a beautiful strawberry cake. Doesn't it look good?


Every Spring and Easter, my two favorite bunnies show up either on the breakfast table or in a vignette in the Foyer. I haven't decided where they'll show up this year.


Our breakfast room looks wonderful when it's all dressed for Spring.




Our wedding china (Artois Green by Bernardaud) is perfect for an Easter table.



Happy Spring tomorrow!

Pam

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Waiting For Spring

Spring is coming up pretty quick. It seems like this Winter was so short!

Soon everything outside will be blooming and turning green.
Can you tell Spring is my favorite season of the year here in the Carolinas?

My apologies if you have allergies.



Soon we'll be sprucing up the porch and planting some Spring flowers in containers. 
And oh, the ferns.
I love me some ferns.
Sorry for the informal vernacular, it's just how much I love them!





It's currently near 80 degrees here and I'm hoping it cools off a bit for at least a few weeks until we get the mulch put down.
Winter is so hard on the yard and it's a mess until the mulch gets spread.

Our backyard is going to look like this in a few weeks. We'll be ordering 350 bags of mulch from the big blue box store because it's on sale and bags are easy to spread.







 This year we'll be putting down some cypress chips. We only put a fresh load down once every three years because they last that long.


Oh, how I love it when the trees are all leafed out!







 There won't be beautiful heads of lettuce growing this year as we took out all of our raised beds because we'll be putting our house up for sale in May. 




 Oh, how I'll miss this view...


...and this one too. 

Hope the weather is beautiful where you are.
Would love to know what your favorite season is.

Pam

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Master Bath Shower

How did your week go?

You know the phrase, "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry? 

Well, our week went kind of like that, only without the mice.

Mr. DIY took the week off to work on reno-ing the shower and guess what happened?
On Saturday night, he said that he felt like he was coming down with the flu.
And he was right... 
Mr. DIY is rarely ever sick, but he stayed in bed all day on Sunday.

Let's back up a bit. Our lovely brass framed shower had to be replaced before we could put our house up for sale. It was looking pretty bad. Some of the brass had worn off  the frame and some of it was corroded. It just looked awful. We didn't really want to redo it and spend $2,000+ on it, but there was no way around it. Many houses in our area have upgraded to a frameless shower and they are pretty expensive. Ours is going to cost close to $1,500 just for the glass part and not including the tile.

One of the difficult parts of the reno was finding a tile that went well with the existing floor tile that we installed 6+ years ago. We search Lowes and found the accent tile , but we really lucked out when we found a tile at Home Depot that went well. Here are the 3 together.
Pretty good, don't you think?


Here's  how the shower looked before:

Ew.


Mr. DIY was able to demo the shower on Saturday before he fell ill.


On Sunday, I gave Mr. DIY some of the herbal supplements that I've been taking to heal from lyme disease and on Monday, he felt well enough to put up some cement board that the tile would be attached to. That's as far as he got on Monday as he was still sick and his energy didn't hold up.

He was able to start tiling on Tuesday. 

He was making slow, but good progress on the tiling for the next few days and the company who will install a frameless shower came to template on Friday. 
Mr. DIY continued to tile around the back of the tub. He would have grouted today (Saturday), but decided to replace a few of the tiles that didn't look good on the end of the horribly unlevel, unstraight knee wall. The tile adhesive has to set for a day, so he'll have to grout during the week sometime.

The toilet area in the Master Bath is already painted Sherwin Williams Silver Strand lightened to 75%. We'll start painting the rest of the bathroom the same color and I can't wait to see how it looks with the accent tile. 

That's how our week went and Mr. DIY is still on the mend. 

Hope your week went well.

Pam