I have told myself that we will not attempt any new projects around the house until after the holidays…we have way too many unfinished things to tackle and I have a serious case of hibernation/laziness/seasonal depression going on lately. Maybe, maaaaybe, if we spackle holes, hang things already purchased, clean and organize spaces before Christmas we will start something new.  But for now, we’re cleaning up house.

So today I noticed something else needs cleaning up.  I usually browse sites, leave comments, etc. from my iPhone, so typing this was getting a little cumbersome…

So I decided to also register a shorter domain, that’s a little easier to remember and type.  As of today, you can now get to The Lil House That Could from….

Of course the name of the website will stay the same and the old URL still works, this one is just more user friendly. I always casually refer to the blog as Lil House, now it’s just a little more legit!

Our cats have quite the elaborate food set up in our eat-in kitchen area.  They each get a bowl, plus there’s a bowl of water there…

We started out with just the placemats underneath the bowls, but Macky loves to fling his food EVERYWHERE puppy style.  So we bought some plastic trays from petsmart that are actually for dogs to a) collect the hard food he drops and b) protect our floors incase the water spills.

Sometimes we underestimate the mess that Macky can make, as you can see from the image above that he has managed to get several pieces of hard food underneath the plastic trays.  But even we were surprised tonight when we were eating dinner and Macky was drinking some water.  The aftermath…

Yes, my puppy cat has managed to splash water all over the wall and baseboard…and he was only drinking it, not playing in it.  Maybe we should tile their backsplash too….

One of the added bonuses of buying our particular house was that the builder included sod and landscaping in our front yard.  Our sod was laid in April and we went on to have the hottest, driest summer ever.  We don’t have a sprinkler system and we didn’t want to use too much water, so by the end of the summer our grass was looking awful.  It came back to life quite a bit with some rainfall in September and October, but it is still showing signs of the heat.

Good in some spots…

Awful in others…

Many people in our neighborhood use Scotts lawn services.  They’ve come by before offering to maintain our lawn, but we declined.  We reseeded the bare spots at least twice on our own, with no luck.  We knew the grass had to be aerated, but what the heck did we know about that?  This is our first time actually having a yard! I knew you could rent an aerator, but with the cold weather quickly approaching, we knew it was another thing we likely wouldn’t have time for on the weekends.

So when Scotts came knocking a few weeks ago, we listened.  The very nice man told me how the builder is in such a rush to get the sod down, that they are not laying it on hearty soil.  We learned this on our own while planting flowers this summer, when we saw our soil was actually construction zone orange dirt.  Two of our azaleas never rooted and I literally pulled them out of the ground with little effort and they were still shaped like the pots the landscaper took them out of!  What he said made sense, so we signed up for just some aerating and seeding.  Aerated grass looks like goose poop.

No fertilizers, no pesticides, I don’t like that stuff.  We have a little pond across the street, okay it’s a detention basin with fountains in it, but there is a family of geese in there.  I don’t want those chemicals floating around the cute little babies, nevermind all of the people who walk their dogs, the deer in the backyard and the roaming peacocks. Wait, I don’t think I had this blog for the peacock story.  Another story for another day….

So far we’ve seen a few grass sprouts here and there and hopefully we still have some grass growing time left this fall!

My new office wrist rest….

She comes well accessorized…

Happy weekend everyone!

I know mood boards are the popular form of getting room ideas out there, but I’ve never made one and I’m not sure if they are totally me.  I normally don’t find stuff then decide to put it in a room, but rather I think of things then go out and find them… or make them, if possible.  I notoriously drew our condo living room with colored pencils while I was still in college, before we even owned a piece of furniture.  David Bromstad would be so proud.

I looked into getting some sort of software that I could use to get my room’s actual dimensions, where I could try paint on certain walls, a piece of furniture over here, see how the wall color looks with this or that in front of it.  But from the little research I did, they are rather expensive.  My latest method of planning things out/making things visual so Mike stops looking at me like I’m looney? Paint. As in, Microsoft Paint.

It started with some frame arrangements for over our mantle… (note: these are not drawn perfectly as they were made in like 2 seconds..)

We decided to go with neither of these.  Then I whipped up a similar type deal for one of the walls in the office…

The idea of green office walls has since gone out the window.

Then there was the idea for our Expedit bookcase…

This one is very rough but I wasn’t planning on sharing with everyone.  It was again a way to show Mike what I was picturing in my head.  The green cubes are storage bins, the gray ones are left open, the white are Ikea inserts, 2 cabinet doors and 4 drawers.  But I’m not planning on keeping the white totally white.  I just didn’t have time to sketch that in 🙂

So I figured I’d share, since I like using this method to see what options are most visually appealing.  Plus it takes about 5 seconds to make these things… no new software or techniques to learn!  Of course, Photoshop is an option as well, but everyone has Paint!

How does everyone else normally get ideas out of their heads? Mood boards? Sketches?