Good Golly Moses...

Be still my heart...how is it possible to have kids this beautiful???


Gracie on Father's Day:

Ava in an old-fashioned looking outfit that my mother-in-law bought on consignment for Gracie when she was a baby. It is devastatingly cute on Ava with those blue eyes of hers. :)

In other, home improvement-related news, this is what my husband decided to do at about 5:00 p.m. this past Saturday night. He is a bit motivated when it comes to projects such as these. As it stands now (a couple of hours after this picture was taken), they only have one more row of shingles and have to put the deck rails back on and they are done. My husband, his brother, and our neighbor/friend are all working on it in this picture...we have great friends and family who are willing to help with the manly projects! :)

We did have a metal/canvas canopy thing that we bought three or so years ago to put over the table, which we liked a lot, but for one flaw: We have gone through three of the canvas canopies in the time that we have owned the thing. The first time it ripped, we called the company up and they sent us TWO canvas tops for the cost of shipping only, both of which ripped last year in only mild wind. This year, the warranty is expired and we researched replacing the canopy with our own money, but the canvas alone is close to $100.00. We think that is a bit much for something that we KNOW is not going to last (as evidenced by the THREE prior tops that ripped). We researched a retractable awning to go over the deck, which we discovered is close to $1000.00. Whoa, baby. Then my hubby decided to price out building this roof, which is going to be less than $1000.00 and permanent and oh-so-nice looking. Our neighbors actually built a roof over their deck a couple of years ago (the blue house in the picture there, but not the same neighbor who is helping us build this roof) and the guy said that he priced it out to have it built and they quoted him $5000.00 minimum if there were no problems!! I am SO glad my husband is a handy guy, or we wouldn't be able to afford to do anything! :)

Anyway, just wanted to brag on DH (for those not in the know with internet abbreviations, that stands for Dear/Darling Husband) and show the progress of the lightning-fast addition to the house.

Here's the progress....

Well, here are some "progress" pictures of our work on the house. We plan to eventually put stone edging around the large tree that matches the edging on the smaller tree and, as I said on my last post, we are going to be adding the stone veneer under the two right-hand windows within the next month or so. I think that will make a big difference. :) The flower bed on the left looked better when we first planted/mulched because the phlox was blooming. I didn't know that phlox lost its flowers and only bloomed in the spring, so that kind of stinks, but oh well. I still think it looks better than it did. Obviously, the area around the small tree will look better when the grass grows back in. I didn't get the whole house in because the cars are parked in the driveway and I didn't want to have to blur out our license plates. What do you all think? I think it's much better. :)

Bad Blogger!

Okay, I am officially a bad blogger. It's been two weeks since I have posted a single thing to this darn thing. I am working on a scrappy project that I can't post yet, but will do so in the next couple of weeks. I can't even tell you what it is, in case a certain someone happens to read my blog this coming week (**coughcoughit'sagiftcough**) :)

We have also been doing some projects around the house...don't you love this time of year for that? We (well, DH) cut down two really scraggly pine trees bordering our driveway and planted a Bradford pear tree in the place of one of them. It's kind of amazing how much bigger our front yard looks now. He also dug out most of the plants that were in our front landscaping and relocated them to other spots in the backyard. We then chose new, smaller plants in their place and moved this planter bench thing that we have to the other side of the porch. We bought two pretty teak rocking chairs at Home Depot to replace some white plastic Adirondack chairs that were there previously and we plan to put some stone veneer underneath the two front windows on the right-hand side of the house in the coming month or so.

Later this fall we plan on replacing the gutters and bulking up the columns on the porch (we will make them square rather than rectangular and probably add some type of trim or crown molding at the top/bottom of the columns for visual interest).

If the weather is nice tomorrow, I will take some progress pictures of the house and post them. In the meantime, here are some "before" pictures: