Little Porch Action

As I blogged here, our porch wasn't the prettiest...

So we put in a little elbow grease and stripped all the old layers of paint off...

Then we used a little Quikrete semi-transparent concrete stain...

To get a much smoother, rocky gray look (New England Slate)...

(Little tip if you are thinking about using concrete stain...purchase a small paint sprayer that attaches to an air compressor...our first coat we rolled, and you could see every roller stroke when it dried.)

Our front part of our porch was looking a little rough too. We had actually waterproofed the porch when we first moved in, but two years later it was looking like this...

So I got down on my knees and rolled on a fresh coat of ceder colored waterproofer...

As you can see, it was a BIG difference!

Ahhhh....finally, a porch ready for fall!

Last Lake Weekends

A few memories from our last weekends with the family at the lake before fall...

Gma doing the Gma does best- fishing...

Brandon taking our niece Emarea on a Seadoo ride...

Brandon tipping Emarea into the water (don't worry she still LOVES her some Seadoo)...

Jacque giving Cove some attention...

Cove taking advantage of the attention and deciding she can be lap dog...

My mother in law is WAY TOO nice, exactly why I love her!

Counting down the days until next summer...

Quick Fix

Ever pile stuff on top of your fridge? Ours happens to be right inside the doorway, so Cove's leash and our bread usually ends up on top of it...

I decided it was time to find something to put Cove's leash in. I ended up picking up two baskets, about the same color as our cabinets, from our local Wally World...

They aren't the greatest, but they conceal our top-of-the-refrigerator piles : )

Weekend Plans

We decided to take advantage of the nice weather this weekend and stain our porch with that fancy concrete stain stuff. It really needs a face lift...

Our front door was also in desperate need of a new, darker paint color. In case you couldn't tell, our dog is a  door jumper on-er....

I took advantage of my 1-9pm shift last week, and prepped...

and painted...

the front door. The paint color is Cooper Adobe Brown from the Valspar collection at Lowe's. I've now decided that I don't like the door window trim white, so I plan on painting it too when I put the second coat on today.

Stay tuned for the front porch stain reveal after the weekend!

Random Happenings Part 2

Brandon and I decided we should find a dog park to take Cove to a couple weeks ago. She has actually only played with our families dogs, and never really been to a dog park. We were lucky, and actually found one only 5-10 minutes drive away from our house. It took her a good 30 minutes or so to really warm up, but we think she enjoyed it!

When we were looking for the dog park, we came across a wild life reserve with a trail running through it. We decided to go back over the weekend and take a little hike around the trail. It was such a nice trail I think we may go back on our bikes sometime for fun too!

Finally, my dad bought us tickets to a Royals game last week. The new stadium remodel is AWESOME to say the least. Even though they lost, we still had a blast! Thanks Dad...

I still can't believe summer is almost over!

Lesson Learned

What happens when you don't have a dryer vented to the outside of your house? The dryer causes humidity, and the humidity causes MOLD. Think about the outside of a loaf of bread that got hidden in you cabinet for couple months looking mold. You know, the bluish green mold that grows in circular patterns. This is the kind of mold I discovered on the bottom side of our lower shelves in our storage room while I was down there organizing our stuff. NOT OKAY, HUH?! Here is a little break down of what we had to do to take car of our problem.

FIRST, Brandon tackled the cause of the problem by drawing up these plans...

to build this...

finally allowing our dryer to vent to the outside of our house.

THEN, I took all of of lower shelves outside and gave them a good bath of bleach, let them dry in the sun, and then covered them up in a thick coat of KILLZ...

FINALLY, we made an all important purchase...

Yep, our very own dehumidifier. Why oh why, did we not buy one of these in the first place?!

Sweet Organization

So, what does one do when they only have to work 40 hours a week? I been using my time to condense and get organized. Since finishing pharmacy boards, I have organized...

2 closets
4 dressers
1 storage room
1 desk
3 boxes of childhood memorabilia
and every single kitchen cabinet

This may seem a bit trivial, but turning something that looks like this...

into something that looks like this...

makes me HAPPY.
I think my local thrift store is a tad bit happy with my 4 trunk loads of stuff to donate as well.