Holiday weekend before and afters

With a long holiday weekend ahead of us,
and a great vacation under our belts,
we felt energized to get some work done around the house.

Our first project of the weekend was the massive corner driveway bed!

Before:

 It was full of weeds and patchy grass, with some mulch, but no retaining wall of sorts to keep everything from sliding onto the driveway after a good rainfall.

 

First Sean dug out the perimeter to make some room...

 

Our plan:

Very large boulders!



I don't think we appreciated how heavy each individual boulder would be.

But we got creative and used just about every piece of lawn and garden equipment we have.

 

...and eventually we got them all into place!

There were no second chances in this project. 

Once we had a boulder in position there was no turning back,

no moving it a little to the right or left,

where it landed was where it would stay!

 

After:



2 pallets of boulders and 30 bags of mulch later!

That was some hard manual labor!!

But the end result was worth it :)



Our second project of the weekend was to finally finish the mudroom.

 



Before:

While the room doesn't look too bad in the picture above,

what you can't tell is that the tiles in front of the door to the exterior were cracked and there was evidence of water damage to the flooring below.  So all that had to be ripped up.  The demo part happened shortly after we moved in, but unfortunately that's were the mudroom re-do ended.  We had too many other things that needed repair/updating and the mudroom took a back burner.

 

But recently we had new tile flooring installed...

{we left that to the professionals!}

 

And now we had some motivation (and a bit of extra cash) to get this project done!

 

So this weekend,
Sean installed new baseboard trim...

and picked out a paint color all by himself:

Well, he might have had a super cute little helper with him to make the decision.
And he put that super cute little helper to work later that day...

 

Finally,

the after photo:

 

I am still deciding on the layout for built in cabinets and storage cubbies.

But for now I am happy to have an area to store all the stuff that has been cluttering my foyer and kitchen since we moved in...

backpacks

sports bags and equipment

shoes, shoes, shoes

and overflowing groceries and cleaning supplies!