Sigh DIY

  I havent blogged in a while, but we have been busy! Business on the DIY front is strong.  Hot damn, it's been hot, and the heat has cooked our brains into overload.   The best thing to do is to stay inside, blast yourself with artificial coolant,  busy yourself with your favorite indoor activities, and make plans. Plans to do this, plans to do that...and wait.  BUT! The last two days we have gotten sweet relief from the heat.  While we haven't finished a single project (blame it on the heat, blame it on our shared OCD brain), we have several that are underway, and this weekend's cool front inspired us to make progress where progress was long overdue.  The gravel patio that we started and abandoned weeks ago made some headway yesterday.  We got the border put in, levelled the ground and laid down the paver steps.  While we were working, the wind started blowing and  the temperature dropped a good 10-20 degrees.   As we labored, a few raindrops came down.  The drastic temperature change, coupled with these heavenly drops was recipe for mad abandon of fatigue and a drive to delve into our work with a new sense of inspiration and energy.  We knew it was only a matter of a day or even hours until the sun punishes us with her heady heat again.  We had to act fast!  We got excited.  The dogs got excited. We had to wet the dirt to get the patio border in the ground, so there was mud everywhere, and Bertie and Marybelle appropriately got muddy as hell.  At the end of the day we got this (pictured below), and Bertie and Marybelle got baths.

Major improvement from a few weeks ago.  Where you see dirt, soon there will be gravel, eventually a pergola to cover the slab, which may or may not eventually be stained for a more polished look. 


Here is what else we have been up to lately...

Last weekend we bid farewell to some good friends that I used to work with in a salon.  They sold their home and moved to be closer to family.  We had a nice coffee party and when we left, they gave us an iris from their garden to plant in ours.  Instead of just potting it, we braved one of our hottest days of the summer thus far making a nice new bed in the shade to plant this iris, who had made her home in a pond of water before.  We vowed to baby this girl so she can survive her new digs. I have been watering her at least once if not twice a day, and so far she is doing okay, a little shocked, but Oka-ay...ehr, I have hope.

When we are in moving/shaking frenzy mode (when are we not?), we sometimes like to scour Craigslist to find free treasures to improve our home environment.  This week we came across an ad for free wood at a curb that was in our neighborhood,so we drove over (in two trips) and scored some reclaimed lumber.  Kayla is using some of it to build a badass coffee table (more on that later), but we used these cute wooden frames to start some new raised garden beds in our lawn.  Here they are...

 We are using the lasagna gardening technique.  Instead of digging up the grass or killing it with chemicals, we just laid down the frame, threw several layers of newspaper and put wine bottles on top in order to hold them down until we get around to coming up with some dirt, mulch, and plants to fill in the beds properly.  In the meantime, the grass will die and the newspapers will slowly decompose, eventually becoming compost for our future grub.

I believe a collective prayer has been answered.  It rained early this morning.  Real rain,as in water falling consistenly from the sky, complete with dark gray clouds.  It helped set the paver stones into our patio area and cooled us down to a delightful degree.  More important, it set the tone for a cozy, romantic, deliciously quiet, but productive day. We didn't have to run the AC at all, spent the entire day puttering around the house, sewing pillows, hemming curtains, touching up paint, making things,  etc.  Come dinner time, the magic reigned and we spent a good hour outside having dinner, chocolate and wine, and dreaming of projects to come, not sweating our asses off and not warding off flesh devouring mosquitios.  This phenomenon in the end days of June, early July in Austin Texas is something to Soak. Up.  We did!