The Backyard= The Amazon...Well not really.

When we first saw our Bright Little House we were so overwhelmed by her backyard that we have a hard time remembering anything else from that first day...except maybe our memory of sitting in our car in her driveway and looking at each other with stunned silence. I mean there wasn't much to say... It was that bad.

We could have called our house 'Grey Gardens' haha...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Gardens

But once we got over the initial shock of her state, we could start to see her beauty and decided to go for it. After that we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. The more we cleaned her up the more we began to fall in love with her. Bright Little House went from our starter/ investment home to "maybe she'll be our forever home?". We can't imagine selling her at this point, I know we can't see what the future might bring us..maybe we will one day grow out of her and need to move on, but that seems so far in the future.

So I will show you how we fell in love with our Bright Little House..

The first thing we tackled right after signing papers was the backyard. Weeds had been left to grow for so long that some of them were taller then seven feet!

See...

I don't know how long it was left to seed, but all of the 'knock out' or wild roses had started to grow new plants from their roots! It took several days, a lot of hard manual work, and a rented tractor...

Because we all know I love PICTURES more than anything else, I'm posting more pictures than words..I guess this will be less 'blog' and more photo album. Oh well.
Here are some before and after pictures.

Backyard side view, Before :

Backyard side view, After (as of now):

Backyard #1, Before :

Backyard #1, During (Adam and his weedwacker):

Backyard #1, After: I'll have to up date this later...I can't find this picture.

Backyard #2, Before:
Backyard #2, After:

Here are Before shots of the 'Basement Apartment Side':

Here are the After shots of the 'Basement Apartment Side':

Here are front yard Before photos:

And here is a front yard after:

Hope Ya'll enjoy! There will be more of these before and afters to come....

Thrift Store Finds

I love thrift store finds!
I get such a rush from finding something really good and making it beautiful. I love knowing that all day people walked by my new find and passed it over as junk or too old. I feel like I'm giving it a new life and a cozy home.
I feel so proud of seeing the potential that others didn't. When people ask me, "Where did you buy that?", I love being able to say that I made it or found it at a thrift store.
Today I had wonderful luck at a local thrift store. They had obviously had someone donate a ton of old library books from many different libraries; some were local school libraries and a few said on them that they were from public libraries in other states.
I even found an old , or at least I think it's old, teak chopping block. Luckily it seems as if it was never used much. There are a few light scratches, but nothing very deep from sharp knives. It will be easy to sanitize it.
Although, I would have just sanded down any deep scratches if it had, had any.(and re-sealed/oiled it)

*[on a grammar-side note, the words: had,had never look right to me. Despite having made Honor Roll in all my Honors English classes, I still have difficulty remembering all the rules...]


Here's a few photos of my new-ish teak chopping block, or cutting board if you call it that:










Isn't it beautiful! I love it!
It reminds me of two chopping blocks I saw in a kitchen picture of one of Martha Stewart's houses. I about died when I saw her huge, HUGE square of a chopping block! It was the same size as the whole depth of her kitchen counter!! (not to mention it was gorgeously dark and antique-ie looking) I thought, sigh, that I would never have such a thing of beauty in my home...not only because of the fact that I don't have a means to travel the world in search for amazing antiques (the ones here are not as amazing as Europe, I'm sure), but also the fact that a block that size would have to cost a fortune, a fortune to me anyway. Chopping blocks (the good kind not the plastic kind) new are 20 ,or more, dollars. It's probably safe to say an antique like that would be even more.

Ours looks like the smaller one of hers and I was able to find a picture of it, but could not find a picture of the bigger chopping block, sorry guys.



And, that's about as close as I can get, I believe, to her exact chopping block.

So, needless to say I'm pretty proud!












The other things I bought from the thrift store were, in my opinion, just as awesome as that or more.
I bought three old books.

One was a family medical book from 1943, filled with lots of very helpful information and neat old photos.


















One was a colorful three ring binder on gardening from 1973, filled with extremely useful tips and advise for gardeners just like us. We will definitely find it very useful as we attempt to be like our grandmothers and have a family garden in our backyard. (and in some cases our front yard)





This little 'cheat sheet' will help our black thumbs a lot.




Isn't this picture just adorable! I can't wait to have cute little chubby hands helping out around the house.
I love the cute little 70's outfit too. Too cute.

This is a layout for a backyard garden. We're thinking of doing something along these lines...We'll see. Our house isn't laid out quite like this so I'm not so sure where we will end up putting a veggie-garden.

And one was a children's book (Dr. Doolittle) which had great old, black and white, drawn pictures. The kind of book I remember reading when I was little and my mom still had a lot of her old books.

If your wondering why we bought a children's book, it's because we have been collecting great books and videos that we enjoyed as kids, a lot of these items are not sold any more and can be hard to find. Thrift stores and patience have been our helpers in recovering old childhood favorites and sometimes recovering old memories we had forgotten.

Then we also bought a wire basket and a silver vase.

This basket is similar to a basket I love in a picture.

HERE:

It's so industrial, I think it will look great in the laundry room with lots of white and this lamp, from ShadesofLight.com:

The vase will look great in the kitchen window, of course our kitchen won't look like this one for a looong time:

Well, that's it. Everything we bought today. *sigh* I think this is the best I've done at a thrift store eva! Well thats not true, but I'm on a shopping high here people!