Working with what we have

I realized today that most of our projects of late have involved taking crappy remnants from the previous owner that have fallen into disrepair, and fixin' 'em up. Which is great, because we're recycling and reusing, but more importantly we are totally broke. Really, other than the masterfully constructed squirrel cage (I'll get to that in a moment), all of our projects this weekend have been sprucing up old stuff, and it's worked out great so far!

First up, a few days after moving in we discovered the original 1960's brass house numbers in a spider pile on the side of the garage. Some black spray paint and voila! Elegant new numbers. We took down the hideous tile numbers (I can't even tell you what kind of horrors we discovered living behind it... sweet Jesus almighty) and installed the old-new ones. Then, we took off the cream(ish) colored doorbell and spray painted it black. We're working on doing the same with the old brass light fixtures, but they're not done yet.

I'm sure some people might enjoy this aesthetic, but I am certainly not one of them.

Delightfully dirty plastic grossness

After! Just imagine it with grey paint.... Soon, house. Soon....

Better!

 

I feel like the black fixtures will look especially great once we paint the house. The crappy tan color doesn't do much for them. It doesn't do much for anything.... Moving on!

Hidden in that jungle we chopped back a couple of weeks ago was a cool old metal and wood bench. The metal was dirty and stained, and the wood slats were completely rotten. We disassembled the whole thing and are going to (you guessed it!) spray paint the metal parts to look all shiny and new, and install new wood slats. I can't wait to finish this one!

The before pic. Really doesn't do the rotten wood justice, just trust me on this!

Pile o' metal.

So that veggie patch I built last weekend? It was crawling with squirrels and blue jays within 24 hours. Those jerks were digging up my seeds and burying shit in there! So, I spent an hour and a half this morning constructing a movable "squirrel cage". It is made of thick wire fencing around the sides, and lightweight plastic netting on top. Pretty darn proud of it, myself!

Let's see you get in there now, assholes!

And, since a great deal of my time is spent on gardening, here are some gratuitous flower pics.

Yellow canna

Hot pink dahlias. These are probably my favorite, and are really blooming well.

Herb garden on the left, lavender on the right. Between the two, the back deck smells amazing now!

Pink hibiscus