Dumping Money

Holy cow, since we bought this house 9 months ago, we have seriously been dumping money into it. It is funny to me that we haven't done any "major" projects but it is all of the little things that add up--blinds for the front room, LED lights everywhere, fixing the pigeon issues, changing a few light fixtures, painting everywhere, new garbage cans, a new crib, a new (to us) dresser, a new recliner, etc. The list could go on and on. Wowee, it is amazing that we have saved any money at all these months. So grateful to have a few bonuses from patents (Go John!).

A couple of the projects were more work than others though. First was when we decided spur of the moment to redo our front yard. We had been having yard envy for months and talking about what we liked vs. not liked. But then everything kind of fell into place to do it one weekend.

After

Before

It was bulk pick up so we could pull out the old bushes, plus it was cool enough weather to plant new things. Also, our neighbor gave us some plants which really helped keep down the cost. Then, someone posted a couple of free cacti online that we decided to try to transplant. Transplanting even the small barrel cactus was tricky, but especially transplanting the small saguaro was difficult. We still don't know if it is going to survive. 

Pomegranate blossoms

The first challenge was digging it out. Holy cement dirt! The owner helped us out by bringing out a pick ax. Then there was lifting the dang thing. Wow, it was shockingly heavy. The trick to lifting it is wrapping it with a garden hose, but don't accidentally brush your body against it, or you'll feel it! We had to put it in the trunk of our car, which couldn't close around the saguaro. After that we understood we were supposed to let it dry out for a few days before planting it. This is to help dry out the roots to help prevent disease and rot. Then you plant it without watering it, and never water it. We read that the only way to tell if it survived or not is after a year, you try watering it and measure the circumference before and after watering it to see if it drew in the water. I sure hope it survives. It saved us a lot of money compared to buying a saguaro. A saguaro of that size at the store would probably be $400. And a barrel cactus of that size could easily be $100. So it would be really nice if it worked out! 

Aside from transplanting those two cacti, we changed the landscaping, which was definitely the hardest part. Raking all of that gravel was back breaking. We dug a trench, found a really long, dead drip line, tried to make a little hill, and raked a lot, a lot of gravel. 

In the trench we picked out some rip rap to make a rock river. (It is reddish, and Eliza called it the blood river, like the pharaoh's curse in the story of Moses. Isn't that great...) We also picked out three little boulders to help with the landscaping. We bought and planted a Sago Palm (a dwarf palm), a pomegranate tree (check out the beautiful red blossom), and a dwarf, variegated, pink lemon. Of course, the lemon is doing better than all of the others. We were given and planted three totem pole cactus cuttings, two artichoke agave pups, and two octopus agave pups.

Because of the free plants and doing so much of the work ourselves, we got a lot of bang for our buck with this project, provided they live! The most expensive part was getting the rocks delivered! The horrible part of this whole story is that we got the stomach flu just as we were starting it, but still carried on and did it all. Miriam threw up all over the car and rock yard when we went pick those. She threw up so much the next twenty four hours (like every ten minutes for a time). There was obviously nothing in her tummy after just a short time so just acid was coming up. It was so, so sad. Eliza caught it from her, but it maybe didn't seem quite as severe although she still threw up all the time for a good twenty fours hours. I only threw up once, and John just had an upset stomach. Blessedly, Holland didn't seem to get it at all. What a tender mercy!

Over general conference weekend we painted our bathroom. This bathroom had splotches of paint from before we moved in and thought we would paint it then. I almost miss the blue and grey splotches. :) This was a bit more of a hassle than we thought it would be, mainly because we had to get more white paint, but it ended up being not quite the same color of white as the other white was. So the edging and the rolling were different colors. I think we ended up rerolling it three times and re-edging it twice get it to be the right color. Yeah...

We got a new light fixture, new towels bars, and the new paint makes it feel extra nice in there. I need to take an after picture. There was a big splotch of spilled nail polish from the previous owner that took maybe 10 coats of primer and paint to cover up. Pretty great.

Anyway, we feel like we are just dumping money into this house. Hopefully everything we are doing is making the house more sell-able in the future. The next things we have our eye on is replacing the carpet downstairs and working on the back yard. So. Much. Money. I just try to remember that we don't have to do everything at once. Although it feels like it. Yay for being homeowners!