Guess who decided to make an appearance for Memorial Day weekend? Hydrangea!

It appears to be a lightish blue/purple and this particular bud is the only one that is showing color so far. But I am so excited that it deserved its own post. I’ve been on hydrangea watch for days!!

I hope you all had a wonderful long weekend (if you had one). I was in love with having 3 straight days off

The weather is still playing mind games with us. There has been a chance of thunderstorms nearly every day this week, which makes it difficult to plan to do anything outside. We have a bunch of projects we want to do, large and small, so I wrote them all down. Since it’s a 3 day weekend (YAY!!!) I figure one of those days has to be nice, or at least portions of those days and the list will save some of the time we normally spend trying to remember what we wanted to do. Here it is, in no particular order. We’ll call it the Spring/Summer 2011 Outdoor To-Do List, because I am in such a creative mood

1. Paint garage doors

In a perfect world, I would love to have some craftsman style dark wood doors with square windows at the top. But for now we’ll settle for just painting them the same brown as our shutters and front door. Maybe someday we’ll look into replacing the top panels with some square glass windows.

2. Have brush cleared

This one should be coming very soon, since we already have someone to do it and he said it would be a couple of weeks before they could start. We actually have a decent chunk of land, but the builder didn’t clear all of the logs and sticker bushes and random stuff back there. So we’re having the brush removed and of course, keeping the large trees. Should make for an awesome treehouse someday and I’m super anxious to see what our lot actually looks like in its full glory.

3. Stain backyard stairs

We plan to stain these stairs a dark color to compliment the furniture we bought and to bring out the awesome darkness we have going on in the “grain” of our concrete.

It’s funny because from a distance, the patio looks lighter than we wanted. We knew we could always stain it darker so we weren’t that concerned, but on Saturday when we finally stood on it, we saw where those 2 coats of sealer went. And I love it. It looks so realistic and has so much character now

4. Add mulch & river rock to garden beds

We need to freshen up our mulch a little and we want to define some edges with river rock.

5. Landscape around patio/walkway

We already planted a lonely hydrangea by the walkway, but we want to make this whole area an inviting garden that will hide the hose, air conditioning units and the awkward outside part of the fireplace.

By the patio, we’ve been saving any extra dirt (or rather, frozen peanut butter type clay) to fill in where the patio drops to make some raised garden beds there.

6. Replace dead plants in front (halfway done!)

These flat things aren’t dead, but I hate them. I’ve been itching to dig them up. I want something with more height to cover the bottom of the garage. So they’re getting kicked to the curb (literally)! Does anyone in the area want them? I’d like to see them find a good home

ps- that picture is from a few weeks ago and our grass is nice and green now

7. Install storm door

This picture is from the fall, but I thought I had another one on my memory card and I don’t… and it’s already dark out. But sadly, we want to install a storm door. I say sadly because I know it’s not going to be pretty for the curb appeal and ideally I wouldn’t want one. But we get such an awesome breeze through that front door and on nights like tonight when it’s 83 degrees inside and 75 outside? We could really use it. One of our requirements is to get a brown one with the lowest profile possible, so it won’t look as bad.

8. Pick up that damn pile of wood

I know you guys are probably sick of looking at this mess in our backyard. Believe me, we are too. But we know how time consuming it will be to return it to its former glory, hence the procrastination.

9. Build outdoor kitchen area

I wrote about our plans here. It may happen this year, it may not. We’re going to play the wait and see game.

10. Seed backyard

Pre-patio picture from the last weekend in April, but our grass back there isn’t looking so hot. Especially compared to our neighbors on either side, whose grass is much fuller in the back. We waited to reseed because we want to throw some seed back where the brush is going to be cleared.

11. Add planters and find a bench for the porch

These chairs were always a temporary porch solution and will be relocated to the patio for this year. I’ve been on the lookout for a character filled bench since we moved in. Maybe this year I’ll get lucky? I also want to plant some flowers in some pots we already have.

And because I like to cross things out and this was actually on my handwritten list….

13. Buy patio furniture (done!)

But I should probably change this to “Put patio furniture together” because that hasn’t happened yet

Now that I think about it, I should probably make an indoor to-do list incase of inclement weather. Though I’m pretty sure that would just say “paint entryway” 10 times

On Saturday the clouds finally parted for long enough for us to work on part of our spruce-up-our-landscaping project. We had some plans in the morning, then we headed straight to a local garden center to load up our car with whatever we could fit. We decided to tackle the front for now and we could only fit enough plants for one side of the front. We planned to go back to pick up a couple more shrubs for the other side, but we ran out of time.

First, I finally got to set foot on our patio!

My shoes were super muddy at one point and I actually walked around the patio. Yes, I did not want to get dirt on my patio. We admired it for a bit, then back to work it was.

The word work is an understatement actually. We have the hardest soil ever. Ever. I’ve never said this before because I’ve never had a house before and have never dug holes in the ground before. I knew I hated doing it last year and that many of our plants and portions of our sod died due to the lack of “hearty” soil (a lawn guy who knocked on our door told me that once). But when a team of concrete guys in business for 30 years told us we had the hardest soil they’ve ever seen, we were like hey! we’re not weak cry babies afterall!

I’d describe this “dirt” as peanut butter that was put in the freezer for 2 years. It probably didn’t help that it rained all week and this stuff was a million pounds. Mike and I always blamed our orange soil on the fact that our house is new and was once a pile of construction muck.

Yes that puddle is the outline of our house. We do live very near the Delaware River, but our concrete guys were local and I’m sure they would know if our clay soil was a result of that. Basically the builder took all of this muck and flattened it, then landscaped it one day. Most of our plant causalities were because the plants never rooted. I literally pulled them out of the ground in the shape of the pots they were planted in. We really wanted to avoid losing any plants because of this, so we also picked up two bags of top soil to try to mix in with our clay. You know, like on the commercial!

The only plant we picked up that wasn’t for the front yard was a hydrangea. Right after I saw the walkway leading onto our patio and the curve it produced, I knew I wanted to plant a hydrangea. We decided to get one on Saturday because I knew it would be a rainy week and hydrangeas require a lot of water to get established (hydra… get it? okay a garden center employee told me that last year). Thankfully, larger plants weren’t so bad to dig because we could use the big, leverage friendly shovel.

Here’s the pretty curve from the other side, complete with baby hydrangea.

We mixed lots of topsoil in with this guy to make sure he gets established. The tag said he’d grow to 3 feet wide, so we tried to make sure he had enough room to fill out that curve nicely.

We eventually plan to make this whole side of the walkway into a garden bed with river rock and mulch, but for now we have a random hydrangea planted in our grass. And it looks like a giant weed.

Here are the hydrangeas we planted early last year, who survived a heat wave and a winter full of blizzards. They are planted underneath our bay window and will hopefully fill in nicely some day. This picture was taken on April 8th.

And on Saturday!

The one on the right has really taken off and is ready to bloom!

Hopefully the backyard hydrangea will do just as well in our clay muck as its buddies.

Okay enough about the hydrangeas, next we added some day lilies to one of the semi-circles we have in our landscaping. I forgot to take a before, but this area had some small shrubs that died last year.

This area has so much potential and it was just lacking the color and fullness of the landscaping on the driveway side of the house. We also decided to take this bush that remained by the walkway (it’s 2 buddies died) and replant it over here in the back.

It still needs some work but it’s looking better already.

Hopefully these day lilies, which are reddish orange, will grow in nice and full like the yellow ones we have on the other side.

Next, we had to fill in these holes left from dead/moved shrubs.

We decided to make this area into a place for some seasonal flowers. We have areas on the other side where we planted some summer flowers and some mums last year, but no where on this side to balance them. We picked up some orangey flowers that resembled wildflowers since Saturday marked 3 years since we lost Sunny. Last year we decided to plant some orange flowers on his anniversary weekend and thought we’d do the same this year as a little way to let him know we haven’t forgotten him. We also picked up some tiny purpley white things.

At this point I was shaking like a leaf. Digging all of those little holes, with a little shovel, in dirt that was insanely hard was literally painful. I would rather dig out large plants than do an ice pick type of move to get these little things in. Plus I could not get them to stay straight for the life of me. The purple ones are closer to the walkway than I wanted since I was sitting and they naturally gravitated that way. When I realized this, it had started to rain on me (which felt wonderful!) and Mike tried to comfort me by telling me we could always pick up another flat of these and plant another row in between the purple ones and the orange ones to even it out. The thought of digging 24 tiny holes again is not appealing.

Then the rain came and it forced us to stop right before I collapsed. Though the weather didn’t let us put our patio furniture together, at least it held off long enough to get some gardening done and give our new plants a nice watering!

We’ve mentioned on here a few times about how we are planning to do an outdoor kitchen. We knew we’d like one someday, but we didn’t really think too much about it until we had our patio first drawn out and I saw this curved area.

Immediately I envisioned a caddy cornered grill here. Mike and I started looking around and found some ideas of what we were thinking of doing.

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Oh and here’s another thing I forgot to mention.. we want to build this ourselves. My brother and my sister-in-law built their own U shaped outdoor kitchen, so we have their help if we need it. I know it seems ambitious, but we’re up for the challenge. We’re not insistent DIYers or anything, but if it’s something we’d think would be fun to do, we do it. If we have no interest in doing it, we hire someone. Simple as that! This house stuff is supposed to be fun, right? So we try not to torture ourselves if we don’t want to do something.

We couldn’t find anything exactly like we had in mind through Google, so we picked up this book at Lowe’s.

I love these books, we have a basement one as well. It has TONS of information about appliance types, finishes and even some general patio advice. It also has great pictures that were different from our Google searches.

(please excuse the iPhone pictures)

We don’t want anything crazy, we’re not about to appear on an episode of cribs or anything. We want a grill, mini-fridge, some storage and Mike would like a burner. I talked to my sister-in-law and found out where they ordered their kit. A kit is basically a pre-sized steel frame that you assemble, add concrete board to, stone and insert appliances. This DIY Network page has the basic instructions, but the kit also comes with instructions and a DVD I believe.

My sister-in-law told me that they ordered their kit from a slightly shady looking website called BBQ Coach Outdoor Kitchen Supplies. I immediately spotted the New Yorker island and it looked just right!

Yes, they only have that tiny image. But! They also give the measurements.

This was wonderful because we could plan out the size of the curved portion of our patio. It was already spray painted, but when they came to pour the concrete 2 weeks ago, we had these measurements in hand and had already marked on our own about how much larger we wanted it. We ended up extending that curved area out an additional 3 feet or so, incase we ever want to put bar stools back there. Here’s an aerial, in-progress picture of the larger area.

You can also see where Mike put the conduit he blogged about under the patio to eventually run some electric to our island.

The kits allow you to choose how many appliance openings you want and also allows for some variation in the plan. They recommend that if you’re using a concrete or granite countertop to provide additional support. I think I’d like poured concrete, but we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there. We know we definitely want to cover our grill in stone similar to the stone on the front of our house, with grays and browns to blend well with our yard, patio and new furniture. It will still be pretty pricey, since the kit is around $900, but it’s still a fraction of the price it would be to hire someone to install one. Our concrete guy even told us it would be better for us to do something like this than to have him do it. Not that we asked, but he offered and when we showed him our plans and what we wanted to do, he realized we had it pretty figured out.

To give you (and me) an idea of what it would look like on our patio, I worked a little Photoshop magic.

Pretty cool huh? And since it took me all of 2 seconds to insert just the grill and I enjoy torturing myself, I decided to add some “mulch” and some of the stone we hope to add to our landscaping. Along the walkway is river rock and where the patio becomes elevated (because of the 8 inches our yard slopes from the house to the end of the patio), we think we are going to add a few inches of retaining stone to make everything look a little more level. We started to investigate all of this on Saturday, more details to come when we figure it all out.

We hope to start our grill project this summer, but who knows when it will be! After our Pottery Barn purchase, we know we’re going to take a little break and focus on doing some landscaping on our own the next few weeks (weather dependent, ugh.)

First, thanks to all of you who gave me the heads up about the Pottery Barn coupon that was making the email rounds today.

Second, I did get one, but the coupon was too late

On Friday after work, Mike and I hustled our rears to Pottery Barn and bought the Chesapeake dining set. Yes after months and months of searching (which you can read about here, here and here if you’re bored), we finally took the plunge. And what a completely random plunge it was, considering my entire dining room is furnished with things from Ikea and Target.

I’m not mad about the coupon, because we weighed our options before we decided to go buy it in person. I priced out purchasing online and realized that with the high shipping costs (even with the current promotion), it was best to order it in store. We know it was expensive and kinda blew our budget. I say kinda because technically we stayed in budget, we just got half of the furniture we planned So we don’t get a loungey area this year, but that’s okay since we’re completely in love with the set we ended up with.

The floral cushions on the stock images are killing me, so I gave you the plain ol’ view.

So what made us find this set on a Wednesday and buy it on Friday when I’ve been agonizing for weeks/months? Well here’s a list! Some of which are listed in my previous post, but hey, I like justifying expensive purchases

1. We love it, which we could only say about the uber expensive Ventura set from Crate and Barrel before this guy came around.

2. It is still a fraction of the cost of the astronomically priced (have I mentioned that before?) Ventura set, and we actually like this set more.

3. It is solid wood and can be sanded and refinished rather than having a cheap set get crummy or go out of style in several years.

4. The table extends to 104 inches long and the extensions are stored underneath the table. Plus the chairs stack for storage. We realize that even with just either of our immediate families, we need more than 6 seats. Why buy a nice table if we always have to stick a folding table at the end?

5. We can add to this over time and mix and match other pieces of differing styles. I was having a hard time thinking of what I could add to the wicker sets I was previously eyeing. Plus doing this makes it a little more budget friendly.

6. I think this style better suits the patio, but I had to see the patio done first to realize this one.

7. I just finished 2 graduate classes with 101 average in one and a 99.6 in the other. Work hard, play harder

8. My twitter friends said I should buy it.

9. We want to sit on the patio this summer, and we’re not getting any younger here.

10. I nearly died this past week, please refer to number 7.

We also picked up a bench to use when the table is extended, rather than picking up extra chairs. We figure we can also use the bench as extra loungey seating, plus I’ve always wanted a table with a bench!

The only “extra” we purchased was 2 of these throw pillows which were 20% off.

I’ve wanted wide striped pillows for ages and I figured I’d make my own, but for around $20 for these pretty large pillows I figured I couldn’t do much cheaper. Oh and I haven’t used my sewing machine yet, so actually making them may not have happened this summer.  I plan on sticking these on some plastic adirondack chairs we already have to make them look a little nicer until we can do better. We didn’t pick up any of the chair cushions that went with the table or anything because a) I don’t know if we want them and b) I can get them cheaper elsewhere. We started with the bare minimum for now.

We opened a Pottery Barn credit card to receive 10% back in reward points. With the money we’ll be getting back, we’re thinking of buying a fresca blue square umbrella.

It’s amazing, I thought I wanted such a bright and fun backyard but once it started to come together, it just wasn’t screaming bright fiesta. I guess sometimes you can’t plan these things out no matter how much you think you have your mind set!

So we justified, planned what to get and purchased it. Shockingly, the store had every single piece in stock. We have an SUV now, so no problem, right? Wrong. The table box was ginormous. So on Friday, we left with only 3 chairs and a bench.

We asked my parents to come down yesterday with my dad’s pickup and we were able to get the table and remaining 3 chairs. Thank goodness they followed us to Pottery Barn because only the table and 2 chairs fit in his pickup (he has a hard top on it) and we were able to take the final chair. I meant to take a picture of the boxy chaos, but I forgot.

I wish I had a set up after picture to show, but sadly, it rained all weekend and this is what the weather is looking like for the rest of the week.

Whooomp whoomp. Sunday is supposed to be clear so hopefully we can put our furniture together then. Supposedly we “just have to put the legs on” (Pottery Barn Employee, 2011). I hope you get what you pay for in the assembly department and we’re not battling an Ikea-esque purchase. Though I must say, Ikea has gotten way better the past 2-3 years. Anywho, the minute this thing is together I will be snapping pictures!

ps- I’m still recovering from this semester (see #7 and #10 above), so I know I’m way behind in housekeeping around here. I owe everyone an updated blog feed, I wasn’t getting email notifications when I received comments so I’ve been awful at responding to those, and I have 8 million projects left unfinished. I’m slowly easing my way back into blog loving, so bear with me