Our new backyard!

Well, I’m kind of cheating. I’m not really showing a fall mantel for Layla’s party. Just a fall fireplace.

An outdoor fireplace. ;)

I figured I can show you the indoor mantel any time – but the final touches on the backyard and the new patio were made today, so I just couldn’t wait to show you!!

Is this allowed Lay? :)

I hope so! Cause it rocks my world!!!

OK, there are a serious amount of pics on this one, so bear with me. (And I thought the deck post had a lot – HA!)

Let’s start with the piece de resistance – the outdoor fireplace:

We almost didn’t add this – at first it was just going to cost too much. But our landscaper worked with us and we figured out a way to make it happen.

And we are SO GLAD we did. It just makes the whole space – it’s the focal point, no doubt!

They used a travertine stone on the hearth and for the details on the front, instead of the brick on the sample we saw. He wanted to pull the colors from our house, and it does just that!

The stone works with the house too, and has some bits of grey and red tones that work with the patio:

It’s been raining on and off for days, and finally today it was just beautiful! As soon as I pulled out the camera, the sun went behind the clouds, again. (Some of the stones on the patio are wet – that’s why they are darker.)

Let’s check out the before and after shall we?:

  

AWESOMESAUCE!!! ;)

We got all of the furniture on clearance at Menards and I LOVE IT:

I think it looks SO much more expensive than it was – all four chairs and the sofa (we have a outdoor SOFA?!), were less than $800:

We got the fire pit at Menards as well (on clearance – notice a trend here?) a couple years ago.

All of the pillows are placemats from World Market – I also used them as placemats (who would have thunk it?) on the table set on the deck:

I adore the colors and the designs – and that I can flip them around for a different look.

Here’s a little tour of the backyard – the before on the left, the after now:

 

We are trying to bring the grass back – it was covered with the deck furniture (while they stained) for so long, it pooped out. We had the drain spout put under the ground – which makes hubby VERY happy. He moved that thing every single time he mowed. ;)

They planted a winding row of burning bushes, which I LOVE, between our trees, and then a couple large arborvitae at the end for privacy. They are so tall and thick – I love them!

You can see how the patio looks from the yard from this angle:

I love all the thought they put into the design of the walls – it could have easily been a plain wall and we would have been happy. But they look so custom with the bullnosed detail around the bottom.

We planned all along to put the grill down on the patio, but in the end hubs wanted to keep it up on the deck. So I put the DIY potting bench there instead and now I think it’s the perfect spot!:

That big black bucket is actually for fireplace ashes, but I keep my potting soil in it. :) Hopefully it will hold up outside – I may spray it with some kind of sealer.

Have the potting bench there couldn’t work better, because my plan all along was to use it for entertaining as well – now it will be a great spot for food, drinks, ice buckets, whatever.

You can see the fireplace from the back here:

It’s hard to see, but on each side of the fireplace are pee gee hydrangea trees. I got them for half off at my local True Value and I’m SO excited about them. Hopefully they will look something like this eventually:

(source)

Isn’t that gorgeous??

Next summer they will frame out the fireplace perfectly. Can’t wait! :)

We especially love how the landscaper used the natural stone throughout the space – like in the landscaping above, and the stepping stones through the mulch:

And the “steps” up to the patio are large stones:

They make it feel like everything has been there forever!

Here’s a before and after from the other side:

You’ll notice the garden is gone. It was a very, very sad day. I’m not kidding. They had to rip the cucumbers from my clutched fists.

OK, OK, it wasn’t that dramatic, but it was hard.  ;) I don’t know yet where I will put it next year, but I have a couple spots in mind.

You’ll also notice that there’s not many plants in the ground. That is simply because we just had to stop! (Our bank account was starting to freak out a little. OK, a lot. ;) ) We’ll budget for that next year. I can’t wait to plan all of the landscaping – I think the plants will make it even more of an oasis!

At first I wasn’t sure how to set up all the furniture on the patio, but I searched “outdoor fireplace” online and noticed most of them had the chairs set up like this:

I didn’t want the back of anything to be facing out, so this works great. 

And there’s still plenty of room to get around them, to the potting bench on one side, the firewood on the other:

The lovely folks at Wuslu.com sent these baskets too me, and this one was the largest. It’s just LOVELY as a firewood holder. :)

The massive mums were a STEAL – my BFF and I found out one of the local fruit farms offers $5 mums if you dig them up yourself. We got HUGE plants for so cheap – usually this size would cost (at least) $30! I plan to plant them later and we’ll see how they do next year.

I just love mums. I just love fall. Sigh. :)

Today the landscaper came out and cleared out a TON of the brush in the back – we didn’t think he would do that till next year, and it opened up our backyard SO MUCH:

I mentioned here that our next phase will be to clear all of this out, plant more trees along the back and mulch most of it.

This land is why we built our house here and it’s one of our very favorite parts of our home – if not our favorite. We have been so spoiled by all the green space and privacy. I absolutely love it, and now we have another 20 feet of yard to explore, now that we can get back there!

Since the last minute touches were finished up today, we celebrated by lighting a fire this evening:

It’s no surprise that the evening is the best time to enjoy this space. :)

We grab cold drinks, warm blankets, light the fire, listen to the crickets and look up at the stars:

And it really does not get any better than this.

I feel so lucky I could burst. I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but I sure do appreciate it. :)

I hope you enjoyed the tour of our new backyard! And I need to give a HUGE shout out to our landscaper and his staff – Bill at Eagleson Landscape did an incredible job. They did such an amazing job and took such pride in everything they did – especially the guys who put the stone on the fireplace. We were so pleased with every bit of it! If you are in the Indy area and need anything done outdoors – give them a call!

Be sure to link up your fall fireplace (mantels?!) at Layla’s – I can’t wait to see all the goodies! 

I’m such a rebel. :)

 

I was one of the bloggers selected by True Value to work on the DIY Squad. I have been compensated for my time commitment to the program as well as my writing about my experience. I have also been compensated for the materials needed for my DIY project. However, my opinions are entirely my own and I have not been paid to publish positive comments.

I want to hug my fridge

Hey hey! How was your weekend? We had a wonderful time in southern Indiana in a cabin with my family – we had such a blast!! Indiana in the fall is my very favorite place to be! Well, it’s my favorite place to be any time of the year, but you get it. :)

Well, it’s been a month since our fridge died on us and caused water damage in the kitchen. We’ve since gotten the island installed and put back together, and a couple of weeks ago we got our new fridge.

And it’s beautiful. I mean it people:

Excuse the plywood. :)

Wait…hold on.

It’s more like this:

For reals. We had to wait two weeks for it, since it was out of stock, but it was worth the wait! I knew I wanted the French-door style refrigerator and it does not disappoint. When we went shopping, there were a ton to choose from, and at first I was looking at the counter-depth versions like we had before.

But then I saw this one. Hearts were fluttering out of it, even in the store. ;)

(Duh. I thought I had mentioned the brand! It’s a Kenmore Elite – you can find out the deets here.)

The basic measurements of this one are the same – but the space inside can’t be beat. It’s got 31 cubic feet of space inside. That means 31 cubic feet of AWESOMENESS:

And when you open the doors, there’s singing. I can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from, but it happens.

Wait, maybe coming from my head. Whatever.

It’s HUGE. Part of the reason it holds so much is that the ice maker is in the door:

It makes the cutest ice too. Really. Our old ice was long, these are square-shaped. It really doesn’t take much to make me happy.

It’s got the basics:

And some fun stuff like extra deep door storage:

The bottom drawer inside is my very favorite thing. It’s wide and huge and it is great for flat, wide stuff. And you can open one of the doors or both – which I think is brilliant. So often we’re just grabbing milk or whatever, and I like that we can still just open one door if needed.

The only difference in size is that it isn’t counter-depth, which means it comes out further than the counter. It sticks out about four more inches than the old fridge. We kept the old fridge in place and moved it out for a few days to make sure we wouldn’t mind it.

We didn’t. :)

And we have the same issue with this one that we had with the old one – the right door doesn’t open all the way:

There’s nothing we can do about that, so I’m not bothered by it. (We’re used to it anyway.) And actually, because this fridge sticks out a bit further than the old one, the door opens more than before.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that ALL of the drawers (even the long bottom one) still pull out completely, even when the doors don’t. SMART.

Our old fridge was a side by side, and it always drove me crazy. I felt like the older refrigerator we had long ago (like, eight years ago) was more spacious. We couldn’t fit much at all in our freezer in the old one, and it especially bugged me that we couldn’t buy frozen pizzas.

I know, my life is rough. ;)

But what really sold me on this one were the THREE drawers in the freezer:

Most French-door styles have two freezer drawers and this extra one totally sold me. Now our meat has it’s own drawer. Love that! And the meat is happy too. I’m guessing. ;)

You’ll notice the freezer and fridge aren’t full – it’s because we’re slowly refilling it all. I had no idea how much food we had in our fridge (that went bad) and how much it would cost to replace it all. It’s crazy! The insurance company will cover some of it, but not all, from what I understand.

The insurance claim did not cover the new refrigerator, which is about the only thing they aren’t covering.

Many of you have asked how I keep our stainless so clean, and I’ve tried just about everything. The best I’ve found is my Shaklee basic cleaner:

It’s all I use on the fridge anymore!

So far the only thing that has slightly bothered me about this new style is that there’s not much room for all that stuff we used to keep in the door – you have to keep it out in the open part of the fridge. This isn’t a big deal because there’s SO much space, but I like having that separate spot for all that little stuff. It’s the organizer in me. ;)

But it’s not a big deal all, at least to me. Overall, I’m LOVING it so far.

And I think we’ll finally see some progress on our floors this week – I’m meeting with the flooring guy to work on stains tomorrow. We’re going the finished on-site route, for reasons I’ll explain soon!

So, do you have this new style? Love your side by side? Traditional freezer on top? (I liked it more than the side by side!) It makes me wonder what they’ll come up with next – but I think this is the best design yet!

 

P.S. I need to get my fall mantel going, because our first fall linky party is this Tuesday over at Layla’s place! Get your fireplaces and mantels ready!!

Candy Corn Love

Well HEY!

First of all, thank you for the lovely comments on our deck! You all are the sweetest!! We are just so pleased with how it turned out.

Sooo, last week I was trying to get some crafty mojo going up in here. (That would be up in hea if you’re hip. I’m not.) I had a GREAT Halloween craft in mind, and I got all the way to the end…and it was just, well.

Wrong. :)

Since I had all the supplies for it, I wanted to reuse them somehow. So I took it all apart and I have a plan in mind for all the parts. (And yes, I’ll show you the unfortunate craft soon.)

I had three Styrofoam cones to reuse, and after a few days, I finally came up with an idea. I got some yellow, orange and white yarn at Wally World and started wrapping, and wrapping:

(The black on the cone is part of the unfortunate craft. Please ignore. Not needed.)

I didn’t use any glue – just wrapped. And wrapped. ;)

You see where I’m going with the yellow, orange and white – especially if you read the title of this post. I’m not so good at the teasers.

I ended up with some big yarny candy (I almost wrote carny – that would be a whole different craft!) corns!:

They are too cauuuute! And WAY better than the original craft. Believe you me.

They were so easy it was just silly – just time consuming. But because I just wrapped (and wrapped) willy nilly, it was a great project to do while sitting in front of the tube watching the new fall shows.

I just tucked the end of each strand into the back of the cone. Easy peasy! I think they’d be a fun craft for kids – maybe with big chunky yarn?

So. cute.

Next up, working with the actual candy corn. I’ve seen candy corn wreaths for a while now and finally tried my own. Again, ridiculous easy.

I started with a dollar store wreath and a bag of candy corn:

I wanted to start small for my first time crafting with candy corn. ;)

I needed something black to wrap the wreath with, so I just used black crepe paper. Anything would do – fabric, ribbon, even tape:

For the first row, I laid the candies out to check spacing, and then glued them on with my glue gun:

But after that I just glued them on, without checking spacing first.

And I glued. Annnnnnd glued. :)

I did a three rows on the front and then realized I wasn’t crazy about so much black showing through, so I just kept gluing:

(I apologize for the awful photos – the dark is sneaking up on me lately and I’m losing my picture taking light much sooner than usual!!)

The front is a couple layers deep, the sides have one layer. The second layer of corns on top were just placed to cover the black that was peeking through. It went MUCH faster than I thought it would – you’d think it would take forever and it didn’t. You just put a line of hot glue on there, then plop them on in a row, over and over. And over. ;)

Lots of repeating on these crafts. Wrapping, gluing and plopping.

But this is another mindless one that is fun and goes really fast – the perfect craft in my eyes!!

I hung it with more crepe paper on the kitchen window, then added my Ball jars to the window sill filled with more candy corn:

Again with the LED lights plopped inside. You can find them just about anywhere, but I get mine super cheap at the Dollar Tree. I like to have a bunch on hand, especially this time of year!

I love decorating with candy corn – it is so FESTIVE! :) And there’s no danger of me eating them – I don’t care for the stuff. Crafting with it – love. Eating it – yuck. ;)

Now if I was crafting with Chunky Bars, we’d be in trouble.

The wreath was a whopping $4 to create. I have no idea if it will hold up, so the cheap aspect is a good thing. ;) I will spray it with a sealer of some kind and store it in a Ziploc bag and see how it turns out. We may have a fun science experiment come next fall. ;)

But for now, the kitchen window is ready for fall!:

I love that candy corn is a little bit fall, a lot Halloween – so it “works” for the next couple of months. So FUN!

Got any candy corn crafts? I just think they are the cutest! Do share! (And link to them in your comment if you’d like!) Have you started your fall decorating? I plan to work on it this weekend – can’t wait! :)

The Deck Reveal!

Well, it’s been a loooooong time coming! Our outdoor spaces are finally wrapping up and we are THRILLED. The mulching was finished today, and a few minor patio projects are being finished up this week. I’ll show you that as soon as I get it cleaned up, but for now, I’m excited to share our deck space!

Warning: Picture overload. Don’t say I didn’t tell ya. ;)

It started when we decided to do the patio – we knew it was time to restain the deck and get that under control as well. It was looking OH so sad – when we had the deck built six years ago, we made the BIG mistake of staining it immediately after it was built.

The deck builder came by the day after we finished to tell us we weren’t supposed to do that. Which was AWESOME. Pressure treated wood shouldn’t be stained right away. Which would have been AWESOME to know. ;)

Have I mentioned our deck is about 800 square feet? Yes. We spent two whole days staining just to find out we weren’t supposed to do what we just did.

Live and learn. So after all that time, and because we stained before we should have (you should wait at least a few months to stain – now we know), it was in bad shape.

To make a very long story short – we were going to clean, prep and stain the entire thing over again ourselves. That was all fine and dandy until after about five hours of cleaning the railings and wanting to poke my eyes out. And I wasn’t even half way done.

That’s when we realized we had to decide where to dedicate our time – and we decided to hire out. I could have cried I was so happy! Did I mention 800 square feet – and that does not include the railings?

Happy dance.

The stain the company used isn’t what I wanted – at all. I wanted our deep red deck again, but that’s not how it turned out. But after all the hassle and time, I was just thrilled to have the furniture back on the deck and out of our yard:

It’s not at all what I envisioned but now I SO DO NOT CARE. :) It’s done and I’m happy. It is growing on me – I’m good. I’m especially good that we didn’t have to spend another 15 hours doing it ourselves.

See my mongo cabbage in that pic above? I heart them:

 

Gah…I’m so obsessed with this stuff! I found them at a local nursery (for $7 each)and they are as big as my head! BIGGER. I love these things. And the mums were on clearance at Lowe’s for a buck each – not sure why but I’m not complaining. :)

I don’t show the beast on our deck very often, but we do have a hot tub. It’s not the prettiest thing, but it is pretty darn awesome. We haven’t used it much lately, but it’s all clean now and ready for a nice (WARM) dip!

We moved the retractable pergola over the hot tub and it made that part of the deck look a tad better:

 

We had the hot tub placed down a bit lower than the deck when we put everything in. We would have made it flush, but it has a stereo system (I know! Fancy schmancy! It doesn’t even work anymore.) that we need access to, so we had to leave it up above the deck a bit.

On to the pretty stuff, shall we? ;)

I showed you our new outdoor table set earlier this summer and it’s held up great so far:

I got the plates from Target a couple summers ago, and the placemats at World Market this summer. I LOVE THEM. You’ll see them again soon. ;)

The mason jars are filled with split peas and LED lights – I’m obsessed with those little jobbies!

But the best spot, our very favorite, it rocks our world, we could sleep out there spot, is the other end of the deck. For about four summers now, hubs has wanted a gazebo – and he got his wish this year. ;) We found one for a steal at Sears earlier this summer:

It was on major clearance and now that we have it, I wish we would have done it four years ago. Every time I tell hubby that, he just smiles the “I told you so” smile. He’s always right…why have I not learned by now??

It feels like a ROOM – it’s also a fun new space to decorate:

And you know that makes me happy. ;)

You can see more about the DIY table in the middle up there here. It’s held up awesome and it’s one of my very favorite things on the entire deck:

LOVE it.

Love those pillows too – the square ones were all on clearance at Lowes. The rectangle ones are actually placemats from World Market:

I love their placemats – the stripe and floral are both the same placemat, but they have the different designs on each side. It’s like two pillows in one – for $4! (To see how how easy it is to make placemat pillows, go here.)

The furniture was a fab find on Craigslist a couple summers ago. The cushions that came with it fell apart (not because I left them out in the snow…cough…), so I grabbed up the brown cushions at Home Depot on clearance – in JUNE!:

I actually like these better than the old ones – they’re simpler and not so poofy. They are a bit rough though, so that takes some getting used to.

One of my other favorite parts of the deck is the candelabra:

It was a Wuslu.com find last year and it started out green:

I wanted it to have a bit more impact out there, so I spray painted it RED.

LOVE.

This shot gives you an idea of how monstrous our deck is:

And now you understand why I was giddy at the thought of NOT staining all of that. ;)

I love looking back – here’s  a shot the summer we had it installed – just days after we stained it (grrrrrr…):

Now it feels like we have three separate rooms out there, not to mention the patio.

We are THRILLED. :)

Of course, I love the space at dusk:

But even more when it’s dark:

The gazebo actually has LED lights in the pillars, which are way cool, but the light is a bit harsh. The garden lights are so much softer and prettier. :)

I got the light strands (I used two) at Target last spring, hoping I could figure out a way to use them. I wound them through the gazebo and they offer SO much light (when we want it):

It honestly feels like your inside (but outside) when they are on, it’s so bright. But it’s a warm bright – you know what I mean?

And I love their fun, whimsical vibe. We sit out there and just kind of sigh and look up and count our lucky stars (or light bulbs). ;)

So there you go – enough pics for ya? It’s been a long time coming, and we are so happy that we’ll get to enjoy some cozy fall days and nights out there. And on hot summer days, it’s much cooler under the gazebo, so we’ll be out there even more next summer.

I hope you enjoyed the little deck tour! We honestly couldn’t be more pleased with it. And the patio – well…it’s the cherry on top!! I will be back soon with that!

Wish I could have you all over for an outdoor party. ;) If you’d bring the sangria, I’d be tempted…