5 THINGS WE LEARNED ABOUT DESERT LANDSCAPING

I feel like this should actually be titled "5 THINGS WE LEARNED ABOUT DESERT LANDSCAPING...AN ONGOING SAGA THAT NEVER EVER ENDS...EVER."

When we bought our house it was grossly over-landscaped.  The sweet old people that lived here before us probably had a landscaping crew that came in once a week and trimmed, mowed, and blew leaves out from under all of the lovely bushes that drop leaves in our front yard.  After we moved in it quickly turned into the secret garden.  The "before" picture doesn't even show my favorite part:

See that lovely putting green of grass right in the middle of the rocks?  What the random??  We had to comically mow that and worse-pay for water to water it!  And the giant sand pit cherry trees (purple leaved trees seen above) that drop purple STAINING cherries ALL OVER THE GROUND all summer and fall!

I can't even talk about the giant evergreen bush.  Let's just say it was far bigger than our shed AND every neighbors animals favorite place to hide and pee.  favorite.  I don't feel like any of the pictures so far have really done this bush any justice:

BAM!  It's totally trying to eat that man!  And his truck!!  It was seriously taller than the house and probably at least 15-20 feet wide.  (So most of our front yard).

This is actually a great segway into my list.

1. KNOW WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN'T DO.  We were 100% not equipped to handle this bush.  They used chainsaws, magic bush trimmers, several trailers, a stump grinder and so much more.  Just to rent all of that for a day would have cost us only slightly less than what it cost to hire a team to take it on for us.  We also had rose bushes to tear out and they wanted $35 a bush! We had 15 bushes and not nearly enough money to cover them removing them so ripping out our own rose bushes became a personal project.

   

   This is a screen-shot of the insta video my husband posted.  Ripping these out using a truck and chain took an hour and cost us $20 for the chain!!

2. BUY THE EXPENSIVE BLACK GROUND COVER.  If you're putting rocks down it is the only way to go.  With our little putting green we realized that they had just covered the rest of the yard with ground cover and then rocks so we figured we could just do the same.  We bought the cheap ground cover.  I used it to cover the area around the trees too so we could fill them in with rocks (weeds and unwanted grass EVERYWHERE).  Within a month we had grass and weeds quickly growing through the cheap ground cover.  It was so bad it was comical and redoing all of it was a huge pain.  I hate moving piles of rock around with a passion and we ended up doing that A LOT.
3. TAKE EXISTING ROCK WITH YOU TO MATCH.  This is 100% a no-brainer but I really believed I knew what our rocks looked like when I went to buy more!  The first batch I bought were too purple and the second too orange.  Mixed together they almost look like what was originally here.  And as much as I love shovelling rocks, next time I'm totally paying the delivery fee so I don't have to shovel them out of the truck myself!!
4. RE-USE EXISTING LANDSCAPING.  In this area I feel like we did a good job.  There were random rock walls around the underside of the bush, under the trees and on the side of the house built up into walls.  We took that rock and laid it all flat to make rock beds for our new desert plants.  Instead of building them up into a wall they look so good laid out.
5. USE ROUND-UP EARLY.  I'm a hippie by nature.  We use all natural bug killer on our insects because we love the earth and also worry about poisoning our chickens.  When small shoots of grass/weeds started poking through in a few places in the rocks I continued to put off doing anything about it because I just didn't have time for weeding.  HUGE mistake.  Those little shoots quickly turned into a lawn of grass on top of my rock and those weeds quickly grew and spread.  Removing them not only took forever but opened up new holes all through-out my ground cover!  We've learned to just spray them with round-up early on.  It takes a much shorter amount of time, I can go remove them at my leisure and it prevents them from spreading and doing further damage!

Trying to figure out how to make it all look was by far the biggest challenge.  It is terrifying ripping out existing landscaping because there's always the wonder if maybe we should have left it because it WAS actually serving a purpose?  AND it was paid for and the last thing I wanted was to have to turn around and pay to put things back in (because we straight up murdered everything we ripped out).

What have you learned about landscaping?  Share with me below!!

BE SILLY: DISNEY VILLIANS

We had way too much fun with our Disney Villianery.  Silly Girls continues to challenge me when it comes to lighting, creative lighting and trying new things and I love how this single point light looks!  We wanted to be villainous.  Both myself and the lovely Lyndi Benson of SugarRush Photography got to shoot.  This was our first time not doing all our own make-up too!  We had student make-up artists come help and I'm so impressed with how amazing everyone looks.  So much fun...

The Queen of Hearts

Ursula

Cruella

Madame Medusa

The Siamese Cats

Dr. Facilier

Malificent

THE HOUSE: BEFORES & AFTERS

This post has been a long time coming...and I still feel like it's a bit anti-climatic.  We're just not done...BUT we've come a very long way from where we started, so that's wonderful!!  I'll start with the girls rooms, because I feel like they are the most finished:

before

after

before & after

Now, we never actually got to see the house with furniture in it-these are just pictures from an old listing in 2008, but the paint and wallpaper were the same when we bought it as when they originally listed then.  Paisley's room had navy blue blinds, Stella's were bright red.  Both had wallpaper borders across the top and Paisley's had a waistcotting around the middle.  Stella's room actually still had that shelf hanging on the wall (it's at DI, if you act fast you might could snag it!)  We've scraped down the wallpaper, pried off the waistcotting, scrubbed, scraped and repaired the walls, taken down the popcorn ceiling and repainted both rooms.  Thankfully, they had replaced the whole house with new carpet before we bought it!

The living room is really difficult to truly capture, but it's one of the main reasons we bought the house!!  It's very large and split in half with a cut-out wall.  It actually used to be a living room and formal dining room, but we changed it into a living room/music room.  We love it.

before-gotta love this plaid blue carpet!

music room before (from a different angle)

As you can see, the carpet makes a huge difference!!  I'm so glad it was replaced before we bought it because we love it.  The fireplace originally was brown and the walls were dingy yellow.  The entire house was popcorn ceiling, so all of that was scraped down and redone.  We primed and painted everything, repairing and scrubbing as we went.  Luckily none of this living room was wallpaper, but most of the rest of the house was or at least had borders!  We painted the fireplace gray and I'm really thinking I want to do some sort of an accent wall in here...but I'm so scared to paint any other colors!!  We don't even have pictures in the frames yet...it still feels really unfinished, but we're getting there.  I'm so hoping to have a mantle built before Christmas, but we'll see!

This is my laundry nook.  I loved this house because instead of having seperate rooms it really has nooks.  Everything is open and connected, but at the same time everything has it's own place which I LOVE!!  We are so happy about our craigslist find of new washer and dryer!  I'm sold on front loading!

Below is actually my office where I'm currently sitting...writing this for you!!  I love it because it's part of our family room so the girls can be playing and watching movies and I can be working and cooking and watching them all at the same time!  I also love the window so I know which chicken I need to go rescue when Paisley is loving them too much.  I might paint it...I can't decide.  Jon says our house needs SOME texture-I can't just paint over everything!  Which is probably true.  I just think it would be soo cute gray or white or even navy or something.  We'll see.  I'm kind of thinking that most of the pictures will actually end up as "befores" in the long run...

my office.  i love.

I have big plans to blog about chickens and birthdays and such...someday...someday!

THE BILLS BINDER

So I've been working on a project for the last couple of weeks and I wanted to share.   My new love is Pintrest and I'm happy to say that I feel like I spend as much time working on projects that are inspired by Pintrest as much as I spend time on Pintrest...so its ok, right?  I might be a little bit addicted...Anyway, a recent blog I got to from there had ideas for a pantry revamp, including a family binder revamp.  AMAZING!!  I have yet to revamp the pantry (it's in the works), but I loved some of the ideas for the family binder so I took some of what she suggested and made up a lot of my own...and it became this!!  My new Bills Binder:

 Something that she suggested was the dividers with pockets-super brilliant idea!!  I used to put my bills in a bin and sort through them twice a month or so.  Jon has never been involved in the bill paying and it's something I've wanted him to be involved in for a long time.  With this system, paying the bills could be done by Paisley!!  I made a tab for each bill that we have with a cover sheet with the logo and following information and due date.  This way ANYONE (which is a little scary) could log into any of our accounts for any of our bills and pay them.  This way when I forget which password is which, or I have customer service on the phone I can readily reference all my information quickly!  I also plan on keeping all the bill stubs for the year behind the tab for records and comparison (normally they go into an accordian file, but I hate filing them so sometimes it just ends up being an endless pile!!)  So ideally* the bill comes in the mail or e-mail, I place it in the tab folder, I sit down to pay bills once a week (or Jon or Paisley, lol) and I have EVERYTHING I could possibly need to sit down and pay everything.  I mark whats paid, place it behind the tab and continue on with my life!!

Another thing that I've wanted is a clean cut "which bills are due when."  I hate having all of that on my normal day to day calendar (it's full) and if the two of us are going to be paying bills I really wanted a visual to show when, who and what has been paid.  I actually have an app on my phone and so does Jon that was supposed to help with this, but so far I really just like having things on paper.  So I put together this worksheet.  This way if something gets paid, or doesn't we have a quick reference at the beginning of the binder.  I added EVERY bill that is a possiblility-some we don't actually always have to pay (like my Victoria's Secret card), but this way if I do have a balance I have a note to check and pay it on time. 

And lastly, the Budget worksheet.  This layout is stolen from "One for the Money," but I split it into 2 groups because we get paid twice a month.  This way I have a general idea how much spending money I have versus bill amounts in the 2 pay periods.  I'm debating on using the cash method for this...we tried it for a minute-it's just super hard because I hate going to the bank!!  (we don't have a drive thru on our side of town and I'm SUPER lazy).  Ideally too I can watch these and add in the actual as we go to see how we're really doing.  Once again, I have an awesome website that make pie charts and everything (mint.com) BUT it updates too slowly and I have to go categorize EVERYTHING that we spend if we want it to work properly.  ug.  So I'm hoping with this revamp that Jon and I can be on the same page, and that we can be more organized and aware when it comes to bills and budgeting!!

I share because I hope this works!!  Jon and I have struggled our entire marriage with bills, budgeting and staying organized and I hope so much that this helps us get on the same page!!  I really want him to be involved-to help relieve some stress and so he can see more clearly where his hard earned money is going!!  What things have worked for you in your budgeting???