summer to-do list.

We've been doing some odds and ends around the house and the yard to get ready for summer. Here are the updates on our to-do list...

:: DONE ::

-hang string lights

- plant all of our veggies and plants

-put a cage around the vegetable garden. Turns out when we thought it was o-so cute for our dogs to lay in the vegetable garden beds during the winter time, when they were empty... not so cute any more. We had to cage the vegetables, because they kept on getting in there to walk and lay down! I suppose we asked for it. We have to be consistent with our parenting.

-new lighting fixtures inside

[before: in the living room an eye sore of a fan...gold?! seriously?! not my style]

[after: ooolala...nice modern ikea lamp $29 (yeah...I know the lighting in the pictures taken are hard to even compare) super ambient white glow now instead of always looking up at raw bulbs. And it looks like a full moon hanging in our living room...it makes me happy]

[before: in the little laundry/walkway to the backyard, rinky-dink light fixture that was always off-kilter]

 [after: nice old fashioned light fixture with energy efficient bulb...a whopping $8]

 [before: in our kitchen the track lighting, it would physically get HOT after only a few minutes on. Once we took them down we saw that the bulbs are flood lights. ha! I feel bad for all of the energy we consumed in this 6' square kitchen]

[after: energy efficient small track lighting. super bright still- even better ambient light while being nicer to our planet Earth]

-re-situate the patio again

-listen to music outdoors (ok, this wasn't on our to-do list, but it makes for some great mood-setting) Thanks to this little altec speaker, which was cheap ($23!)... we have great sound outdoors.

-bring the wisteria back to life

 [wisteria we managed to kill with frost...so sad.]

[so distraught that we killed our star-wisteria plant, we promptly replaced it with a larger plant...one with cute curly vines, and orange berries in the fall!]

[wisteria...after it pulled through, even though it was downgraded in our yard to the ugly white pot. yay!]

-make patio table with chairs (post about it here)

[...and matt popping up in my pictures, like a yard gnome...happy that the yard feels almost done!]

:: TO DO ::

-plant new sod....only 1/2 of the yard...we are kind of dragging our feet on this one for some reason. And its only like 400 square feet.

 [splotchy bad-half of yard]

 [progressing from bad-half to good-half]

[good-half of yard, minus the dog trail we need to sod-in also, oh sweet dogs]

-finish the other side of our front garden bed.

[finished left side, mulch-i-fied of course]

[to be finished right side, gosh that looks daunting]

-get my bike rack basket/wood box mounted on my bike.

-and now that everything is getting wrapped up the only thing left to do is...go camping!! Like...on our one year anniversary this weekend! Crazy how time flies.