Inside and Out

What do painting your bathroom and planting shrubs both have in common. It depends on your point of view. If you are like Derek they are both unnecessary projects and a complete waste of time. On the other hand, if you are like me they are both imperative items on a rather large preparing for baby checklist. While at first they may appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with caring for an infant, the reasoning is quite simple. These tasks have long needed to be done but we could never find the time. I figure that if we can't find the time before becoming parents, we never will afterward and therefore better get done before.

The bathroom was our first project. The walls were all a boring off-white with mildew stains and peeling paint. At first I'd planned to paint the top of the chair rail blue and the bottom white, but as we were almost finished with the blue paint I realized this had been a mistake because it made our closet-sized bathroom look even smaller and darker. So we started over (and covering blue paint is a huge pain), but it looks much better this way and was definitely worth the extra work.Our flowerbeds have been our other major project of the past couple weeks. When we first moved in all the flowerbeds were completely overrun with weeds and filled with old landscaping fabric. Of course this all had to be completely dug up before anything new could be planted. My in-laws have helped us a lot with this when they've been out to visit, but there were still a couple beds in our back yard that we hadn't gotten around to. Also we had a pretty rough winter and a few plants didn't make it and some of those that did needed to be moved.

Derek was nice enough to rip up the 2 beds out back and transplant the cranberry bushes from under our front windows to there. The cranberries looked nice enough, but I wanted something that would grow tall enough to hide the faded bricks under the front window so we planted some baby shrubs in their place. Then there were some flowers that would have looked nice except they always looked wilted and dry, even with the sprinklers. Since I'm not the type to remember to water anything by hand I moved them to a shadier spot and planted some more drought resistant flowers in their place. It's kind of fun to see how tiny our new plants look to last year's. I hadn't realized until now how much they've actually grown.