House List.

I read lots of DIY blogs. I don't know why...I can't DIY anything (or would that be DIM?). Yes, DIM--as in Do-It-Myself, as in DIM-witted, as in...well, you get it. The closest I've ever come to DIYing anything was that time we put together an entire bedroom set worth of IKEA furniture, I made some throw pillows on my sewing machine and we nailed some yellow cardstock to the back of a bookshelf. Yeah, nothing to write Young House Love about. But reading these blogs really makes me excited about doing stuff around our house. And since we are pretty lacking in the "creativity" department (almost as much as we're lacking in the "money" department), for now I will just set SMALL goals for this little starter home. And what better place to do it than here on this blog? At least if other people know our goals, it’ll keep us accountable, no?
 
1. Get a sprinkler system. Okay, this isn't DIY at all. But we need it. We have NO grass in the backyard which really defeats the entire purpose of why we looked for houses with sizable backyards. Who wants a backyard when it's too muddy and gross to even play in? When we moved in, the backyard was covered with jasmine groundcover. It looked nice but scared me to walk in it--you just couldn't see what you could be stepping on underneath that cover. The heat and lack of water has successfully killed all the cover (still deciding whether that's a good or a bad thing). But now we are left with a weedy, dirty plot of nothingness. It makes for a messy afternoon when Jack is out there in his inflatable pool. Water + Dirt = Mud (AKA: a nearly 18 month old boy's best friend and an anal-retentive mother's worst nightmare). Also, the lack of grass will cause some serious erosion problems if and when Texas ever gets rain again. So we need something down stat. And we can't get grass to grow without the sprinkler system (although I do recall in college speech learning something about something other than water making the grass grow...but that is neither here nor there). So yes, a sprinkler system + grass seed is an absolute must for this fall. This one, of course, will be an investment but we think it's worth it. Otherwise, the backyard is useless which will be heartbreaking for our little boy once he's ready to get out and run around AND it'll worry us that our patio is going to one day up and erode away.
 
2. Do a frame wall. This is an easy one. I have always admired those pretty frame walls like these. We have a blank wall in our bedroom that just cries out for pictures of our little family. We are going to Houston in a couple months and I fully intend to grab myself some lovely (and cheap) IKEA frames in differing sizes to make this a reality.

3. New duvet/cover. When we got our duvet and cover, we got it for a queen sized bed...we have a queen sized bed, makes sense right? Wrong. We have a 4 inch memory foam pad which makes our mattress extra high so anything short of a King doesn't fully cover us. I hate that there is no way to properly make the bed. So IKEA to the rescue again. Now that I think about it, we may need to tack on an extra day to our Houston trip because, yes, I love IKEA THAT much.
 
4. Add more frames to hallway. We originally put up 3 frames in the hallway because that's all we had. It was our "home" wall.

But now I am thinking we need more. 3 home-related doo dads are just empty. It’s a decent hallway and those 3 pictures take up all of 2 feet.  We need to keep an eye out for things we can add to this hallway. Otherwise, it just looks oddly naked. Any ideas? I love the YHL frame wall below but our hallway is so narrow that shadow boxes, etc. may make it feel even more claustrophobic.

So for now I will just cross my fingers that we find some cute (and cheap) home-ish things to hang on our wall (right now we have the cheesy “home is where the heart is” stuff and a house blessing, but perhaps we can find other things that fit our style that we love too). OR I could see if my artist mom will sketch a picture of our first home to hang on our home wall. Eh, mom? Whattya say?
 
5. Extend the patio. This one is all John's. We're hoping his dad will come visit us sometime in the fall and the two of them can knock it out. Yes, I have a father-in-law who stated that he wanted to come visit us again to help us do house projects--I know, it's awesome. He actually said the phrase, "John, I'm going to fly down here in a few months and paint the siding on this side of the house." Bob, I love you. Anyway, I'm hoping we can also utilize Bob's man skills to get John's vision of a patio extension to fruition. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure what the plan is but I know it involves flagstone and my garden planters.
 
6. Replace the fence. The fence is in pretty good shape but this one section is rotting all to heck. It's the neighbor's fence, not ours--but it still seems like we need to have a discussion with them to see if they want to go halvsies on replacing it.

7. Replace this light. The light in our dining room is horrible. It just is not our style in the least. So I’d like to replace it at some point with something more us. I figure we can hit up IKEA and get a new fixture for under $50. Now installing it, however, could cost us our lives. We aren’t on a first name basis with wiring skills.

So there ya have it. 7 things I’d love to have done by the end of the year. I figure that I’d like to get them done sooner rather than later since who knows when we’ll decide it’s time to make Jack a big brother and goodness knows that being pregnant/having a new baby will only delay things. So let’s hope we can get at least ONE of these things accomplished by January.