Tag Archives: Home Improvement

My New House Mondays: Destruction of Trees

I was organizing photos and found some pictures from the first day that we started ripping out the trees in our front yard. The process of hooking the tree up to the truck and pulling it out was actually pretty cool, so I decided to share photos of it.

My husband and father pulling out trees!

All the trees they had pulled out so far. Told you it was a lot.

Pull!

Pretty cool.

And finally, a cute reflection picture of me and Peanut.

I’m really happy with how our yard is coming. Now we just need to figure out what to put in place of those trees!

My New House Mondays: Ripping out Trees

We knew when we bought this house that there was a lot that we wanted to do on the outside. Since we worked so hard on the inside last year, we didn’t do much to the outside property. This year we’re making some drastic changes, which includes taking a lot of stuff out of the yard. So one weekend we enlisted in my father with his truck and a few friends to come help us take care of some trees. We hooked the trees up the the truck and pulled!

Before:

These are the trees when we were first buying the house. All the ones straight in the middle of the photo.

After:

And here's that same area after we ripped out 5-6 very old, haggard-looking trees.

Before:

A pictures from last summer of Squeed, her mom, and I sitting on the ledge that shows all of the vines.

After:

All the vines are gone! And only one friend was sent to the emergency room in the process. :-(

Here is just one of the two loads that we took to the dump. That also included a tree we chopped down in the back last year.

There will be plenty of changes to our yard in the near future. This summer we’re working on the front because that’s what people can see. If we finish all we want to do in the front this year, then we’ll move on to the back next year. As you can see, we still need to plant stuff in the areas that are missing plants now and we need to knock off a bunch of that concrete that’s where the vines used to be. Old houses can be a lot of work.

Peanut’s New Bed

A few weeks ago, I posted pictures of all the things we’ve done to Peanut’s room in our new house. One of the things I said that I still wanted to do was to get her a bed.

A mattress for Peanut was on the list of things to buy once we got our Homebuyer’s Tax Credit, but shortly after getting the money, my husband found out he was going to lose his job because the small business he was working for is shutting down, so spending went on hold. Luckily, the world—even in recession—is always in need of programmers. He started his new job on Monday, missing only one work day between one job ending and the other one beginning. Yay!

So now that we’re allowed to spend the money we had planned on spending again, we decided to get Peanut her mattress.

Oh boy, does she love it!

She loves to lay on her pillow (which we bought mostly for me while I’m nursing her to sleep) and read books. She thinks it’s cool to walk around on the bed. She actually cuddles me—without nursing!—a little bit while laying on it. I’m thoroughly happy that we bought it for her.

We still co-sleep, but she goes into her bed for the times that she would normally be alone in ours. This mostly equates to naps and from the time she goes to bed until the time I do. It’s really nice to have her in her own room and bed while I’m still awake.

This means I can put away laundry while she’s napping, I can get changed without worrying of waking her, and gasp! I can do “unspeakable things” in my own bed! What a thought!

It’s also nice that we’re actually using her room. Yeah, we still put stuff in there before the bed, but we didn’t actually hang out in there or anything. Now I rock her in the rocking chair when she doesn’t want to sleep. We read books on her bed before she goes to sleep. She even goes into her room to play with toys more often now.

For reading all that common-sense nonsense, I’ll reward you with a cute picture of Daddy and Peanut reading on her bed.