Visit from Mom and Dad Stullken

They came in late July and stayed for a weekend. we had a great time working in the garden and yard, looking and pictures and just visiting.

donna is living with us now! it's so much fun. this is my wonderful sister looking and some pictures in our living room.

and here's me enjoying everyone's company.

me and mom sitting w/ the dogs.

mom discovered a stone wall that was hidden behind the ivy in our front yard.

Jeff's Birthday Dinner

Jeff turned 36 on July 14th and so donna and i cooked him a scrumptious meal including eggplant and tomatoe pie with strawberry salad adn cucumber salad and a coconut cake. and, mom and dad sent him a silly card. this is jeff looking silly showing off his silly card.

Dirt Delivery

woah, that's a really big truck. i'm glad rook was there when it came b/c i was a little afraid that it might take off part of our roof when the dumper went up. rook didn't seem worried though.

window washing.

time to get the dirt moved to the beds. mom and dad gave us this wheelbarrow for our wedding. one of the most useful gifts we received!

our friend lauren came to help us.

Shoveling...

and resting.

a few days after we'd gotten all the dirt in and the doors on the front, the garden flooded! so jeff dug out a drainage hole in the back which corrected everything. it hasn't flooded since.

see my little frog eyes peaking out in the corner?

Weekend #2 in the garden

the windows are up and the fencing is in!

see my little frog?

i love these animals.

hey! i know those feet! those are Rook's feet!

Second Day at the Garden

I guess these pictures were taken on Saturday or Sunday after we started on the garden. See--i did do some work!

The windows on the front of the garden are probably my favorite part. jeff and i took the dogs on a walk one night and found them laying on the side of the road so we drove back and snagged them thinking that they could be useful for something. and they were!

and there you have it, all built. that was the hardest part, getting all those measurements right and leveling things out and hammering these huge nails into the timbers. jeff and seth got a major workout with those nails. they were like a foot long. i did not help with those. i just cheered them on and made them food.

And the garden begins!

By the weekend of July 4th, we pretty much had all the rooms in the house that we wanted to have painted done and we moved on to our next project: the garden. it was so much work but we got it finished and it has been my favorite house/yard project so far. we took lots of pictures of it's progression, from tilling the ground to cutting the landscaping timbers and planks to taking breaks. a good first project for a newly married couple. we learned a lot about eachother that weekend--and how to communicate.

lita ford had fun too.

This isn't a very clear picture, but we picked up our order at Lowes (timbers and planks and stuff) late at night and unloaded donna's explorer in the dark--well, the semi dark (the lights from the kroger across the street helped)

and then, the next morning we started to lay out the garden to see where we needed cut cut the timbers.


nice googles jeff.

jeff got really invovled with that circular saw during this project.

lita fulfilling her role as Project Manager while we worked on the garden.

time for a break. I did actually work pretty hard alongside jeff on this garden. even though these pictures suggest that he did it all. :)

me and lita beeta after a long day of painting the house. (jeff is sneaky with that camera).

our friend seth drinking coffee in the newly tranformed kitchne. check out those fancy black cabinets!

the scrambled egg breakfast i made for me and jeff and seth in preparation for another day of painting the house.

that dog is a nutcase.

that would be me and jeff hiding in the reflection of the saucepan. and trying out our shiny new camera. taking a break from painting.

Shortly after we got married and came home from the honeymoon, we proceeded to rip the house up from the inside out which turned out to be a big project, but worth it in the end. so, here's me making pancakes in the soon to be transformed kitchen.

and, here's jeff eating those yummy pancakes in that same kitchen. that was a fun morning.

then, we took breakfast outside and ate together. notice, there is no garden yet in the back yard...that will all change soon.

the kitchen before it was transformed.

and that's the little laundry/mudroom area. we decided to paint it orange.