Home improvements

I haven't posted in a bit because we've been busy doing a lot of household improvement / organization projects.

We finally finished up our bathroom downstairs, although I STILL don't have a completed photo because I haven't hung the photos yet, so until that happens, no photo.  But I digress.

We FINALLY HAVE A DECK!!!

Here was our deck under construction

It's beautiful, isn't it? 

 And those 2 little boxes to the lower-right of the photo are my new garden boxes that Joacim built me for Mother's Day.  I LOVE having a garden, and it was something I sorely missed last year.  I had seen a bunch of ideas on Pinterest, and this is the culmination of a few pins on there.

We didn't want to set them on top of the grass, so we cut out the sod where they would sit and ripped it up.  We re-used it in the front of our yard where we had some dead spots.

The front section is for herbs, the middle for onions, lettuces and whatever else I can think of, and the back end is for tomatoes.  The trellis will be used to help the plants climb up instead of out.  Sooooo excited!  Now I just need to get some dirt and some plants :)

And this is our first storage shelf downstairs.  Joacim and I started this project last week, but it was so nice that we quit and enjoyed the weather.  Since it was rather crappy today, and his friend Annika is here (who actually enjoys things like this) they went to town and finished them up.  The look GREAT!

I'm thrilled with the way everything's turning out.  We can finally enjoy our backyard and clean up our basement!!!

Furniture "re-purposing"

Soooo...we've been talking about getting new furniture again. Sadly, we just got the leather set only a year and a half ago, but it's just not what we expected. Sure, it's great from a cleaning perspective, but it's not furniture that you can "sink" into and snuggle in. Luckily, we kept the red sofa we had previously, so we moved it back out into the living room for a trial run:



It's working out pretty nicely now. I don't think Joacim and I have sat on the same sofa at the same time in over a year! Sad, I know. I think Izzy and Murphy like it too! He seems to have settled in quite nicely, and she's made herself at home on the chaise lounge. She's actually hogging it up quite nicely! We'lll see how this goes, but for now, I'm REALLY REALLY happy we didn't get rid of the red sofa!