Uneventful Spring

The past couple weeks have been pretty uneventful around the Bois Bungalow. We left town for four days to celebrate our best friend's upcoming wedding. The girls went to Whistler and the guys went to Kelowna, B.C. for the bachelor and bachelorette parties. We had a lot of fun!

We have two weddings in June and will be headed up to Canada for those, so I have a feeling we won't be getting a lot done this month either.

We have been working on maintaining the yard, and just joined a gym... so a lot of our time is spent working out and trying to keep the yard up. We've been having an aphid problem with the roses, so I went out and dead-headed and hopefully we can curb the aphids eventually... We have 33 rose bushes on the property, so we have to get the problem under control. The roses along the picket fence are one of the very few things I love that the previous owner did.

The succulents we planted last year have taken off like crazy. They are called ice plants and have completely taken over the small section on the outside of our privacy fence. They have hot pink flowers that open and close with the sun and add a lot of color to the fence line.

We planted some strawberries and blueberries this year and hope to get a decent crop of fruit for the summer. So far, they haven't taken off... but I have high hopes.

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Rain Barrels and Chains

The most recent addition to our home: rain barrels and copper rain chains. A couple months ago, we had new seamless gutters installed to replace the plastic do-it-yourself gutters the previous owner had installed. We asked the installers to adapt them to fit rain chains, and installed our copper rain chains a couple weeks later. Before: You can see the many seams that the old gutters had. They all leaked! After: This is the front of the house, but you can see... NO seams! :) The next step was to find a rain barrel to catch the water at the bottom of the rain chains. We shopped online and found out that it would be a lot cheaper to make our own custom rain barrel than to buy one. We called around to wineries and found out that they were only charging $30/full wine barrel!! We bought three wine barrels and cut one in half to use at the base of both of the barrels. This helped get them high enough so that our watering can would fit under the spigot. Here are the rain chains befo...

Old House Pictures

I had the chance several months ago to meet up with the second owner's children. Their parents purchased the home in 1928, and lived in it until the late 60's. They were great and were able to find several pictures of the house when they lived in it. These pictures are my motivation to bring this house back to what it used to be. This is a picture of the parlor. It is to the right immediately when you walk in the front door. This picture is in the dining room during Thanksgiving. You can see a lot of the woodwork that we have spent hours stripping paint from. The windows behind the man at the end of the table have not been stripped yet. This is a photo of the backyard during winter. The fence that is in this picture was (mostly) still standing when we purchased the house. We put up a new fence this winter for more privacy and security. This is a picture of the owner's daughter reading on the screened in front porch. They used to sleep out there in the summer. The...

Project Updates

I haven't posted a lot in the past couple months... But we have been very busy working on all sorts of projects. I think we have house a.d.d... But we really have accomplished a lot. Here are some more recent projects: Because we were broken into over Christmas break, we installed two more security cameras and a couple of signs stating that we have cameras. While the signs are not beautiful, I hope they will deter future break-ins. We also have signs in the yard that advertise that we have a security system, so hopefully this makes our house seem less appealing. We also purchased a locking mailbox because our mail was tampered with around the same time that we were broken into. The mailbox has been great because I don't have to worry about the dogs being out front when the mailman comes. It is also nice for when we are gone on short trips... We don't have to worry about having someone come over to bring our mail in. We added the 2x4s to the top of the arb...

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