house projects

flowers from my front yard

so while ray was away visiting his family in memphis, i was trying to be a busy beaver and get some long overdue projects done around he house. one project was to unpack and display some of the loot i acquired from my grandparents. apparently at one point my grandfather had given me some orange carnival ware that my mother was storing for me, and through a chain of events ended up in my sister's garage at her house in flordia (which is now someone else's house, which is why i now have the dishes). also, sometime back, ray and i were retrieving something from the attic for my grandmother at her house, when i spotted this super cool wall shelf, which of course she let me have. other than a few george and martha lamps and some pink depression glass, if you show great interest in an item at her house that she is not currently using or displaying, she will generally let you have it. so after having the dishes in boxes at my sisters house, and having the super cool wall shelf sitting in a closet for about 4 years, i figured with ray away, now would be a good time to put these two things together and add some life to the kitchen nook (which is really the dinner area, since the dog creates are in the dinning room which we call the dog room). which, if you haven't notice i have used the word which about 40 times in the post so far.

see the new wall shelf with the orange dishes.
i also have some bigger plates that i am going to hang to each side of the shelf.

and i did some work to the back porch. it's a nice space, but one that we have failed to really use since we moved into the house. for a long time there was a big couch out there for the dogs to nap on, but after some really hard rains and red muddy paws, it was looking pretty rough. so pig girl and her boyfriend kindly came over to hall it off for us in exchange for watching their dog jackson over easter holiday. the porch area is not finished, but it's a good working start.

the kiddies and the empty porch.
installing the rain barrel, sitting over there in the corner, is a whole other future project.

the pups love the new rug.

(yicks! please excuse the terrible picture)
so here we have the beginnings of what will hopefully be a super cool back porch.
the pallet and drawers i snagged from different phases of construction going on at work. the next project is to sand those and paint them all one color then add potted flowers and such. i also want to get some ferns to hang out there and ray wants to get some kind of sunshades to keep the sun from pounding in the living room windows.

luckily i finished just in time to enjoy this................

ooohhh pretty!!!!!!

now my new project is to make a cute little dress to wear on my visit to portland.

i'm going to make dress "D" with a pretty little flower print and a yellow bag to match.
yes, i'm a dork.
i know this.