If you’re thinking, “Wow! 14 Bags of leaves. I guess you’re done with yard work.”, you’re not seeing the big picture (literally). Let’s zoom out a bit:

On the upside, we still have the $50.00 Homelite leaf blower that Micah won five years ago at a corporate training seminar. Every once in a while, the cheap stuff lasts. It saves us a lot of time!

Goodbye, rusted, deathtrap mess.

(Looks like something you’d find on the side of a desert highway, yes?)

Hello, shiny new gutters that won’t collapse when I lean a ladder against them…

(You mean, downspouts aren’t supposed to be held up by an improvised structure resembling a coat hanger? Wow!)

The guys just showed up at the door today and asked if they could start. Odd, but we were expecting an appointment sometime in the next week anyway. I am so glad we have a new gutter system!

I have been meaning to post these photos for a few weeks. This is the giant tree on our corner, which is also the source of most of the leaves we have to rake:

We’ve been dealing with typical Upstate New York weather. On Halloween, we heard big pellets of hail falling on the driveway. Later, it snowed. This weekend, temperatures are expected to reach the lower 60s. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s a good time for us to (finally) finish cleaning up the leaves. Micah and I worked on the front yard from the corner to the apple trees. That required the most work, of course. The twins helped me clean up the back yard inside the fence today. I was so proud of them! I raked, and they put all of the leaves into bags. Now, Micah just needs to finish the right side yard and the (soggy) strip behind the fence. This is the one downside to having a corner lot. We have more privacy than many of our neighbors, but with it comes a lot more work.

Up next: Decorating for the holidays!

Hot weather makes me do strange things, like wandering around with a quart of white paint. No, wait. I do that all the time. Sometime between watering the plants and making dinner, I found myself on the ladder painting coaxial cable and nails. The cable ran across the front of the house near the roof overhang. It always kind of annoyed me. The nails were my fault. I put them in a few inconspicuous (sort of) places to hang Christmas lights. Now that it’s all painted, no one will even notice.

Before:

After:

We finally had the driveway sealed. It looks almost seamless (we had the end of the driveway repaired because it was a mess. The last time we did this was three years ago, so it was long overdue. This is the best it can look without ripping out the whole thing, which is never going to happen! I’m very happy with it.

There are a few updates inside the house as well.

The little shells from Rockport inspired me to add some new decor to the living room. I found this cute little plant stand for $10.00:

I wasn’t sure what colors I should use in this room. We have black leather furniture, but the walls and curtains are made up of greens and neutrals. The colors also had to tie in with my favorite part of the room, my grandfather’s painting (read his story here). I bought pillows in a mix of Waverly fabrics. I like the fact that I can buy covers later to update them for different seasons, too.

Now that we’re a family of six, we struggle a bit with closet space. I handle this by choosing a closet or cabinet every couple of months to clean. I do the same thing with the attic and our clothing. If there’s too much clutter or things we haven’t touched in years, it’s time to send some things off to charities.

There was one area I couldn’t figure out, though. When you have a big family, you have a lot of shoes. Micah and I leave ours in the master closet, but the kids kept throwing theirs in the coat closet upstairs. We store the Dyson and our little Shark sweeper in there as well. We needed some separate place to store their shoes.

Most of the things I found online were intended for entryways, but bi-level homes don’t leave you with much space when you come through the front door. I finally settled on a leather storage bench (this one). The kids also like to sit on it when they’re watching TV.

The driveway is done!

We got a good estimate to have it sealed, so we’ll do that in a few months. In the meantime, we are so happy with the result! The company we used did a great job.

Three years ago, my Dad patched the end of our driveway with concrete, and we had it sealed. Three Syracuse winters later, we can’t ignore the mess.

So much mud and water accumulates every time it snows or rains, which is no fun when the kids are trying to get out to the bus or Micah takes the snowblower to the end of the driveway. Now that spring is finally here, we can get it fixed. It was never going to be in our budget to rip out the entire thing and replace it, so I had to find someone who would do a patch job. We got a $500.00 quote from a local business, and that seems reasonable enough. It will be done tomorrow. We’ll seal the driveway again when the hot weather hits.

We have some other small jobs to get done:

- Fix garage door (there is a gap at the top when it is closed)
- Replace support pole in garage
- Repair gutter downspouts
- Replace drain pipe in master shower, caulk shower
- Caulk seam of front steps
- Fix cracks in cement (garage floor, back patio)
- Re-paint back patio

I also want to figure out a way to refinish the surface of our dining room table. It looks dirty no matter how much I clean it. The problem is that it’s a laminate surface, so I need to find the right product. That, along with touching up the baseboard paint in the upstairs hallway (again), are the only other things I am going to do indoors myself.

My c-section is scheduled for May 28th. I will be out of commission Labor Day weekend! That was always our big weekend for yard work, so it’s going to be tough. My parents will be visiting for 4 or 5 days. They may be able to watch the kids while Micah gets the work done. I cleared the overgrowth in the back yard last year and planted grass (part one, part two). That should save us a lot of time in the long run.

We have plenty of things to keep us busy, but it’s still a beautiful time of year.

Parents always buy the best Christmas presents. This year, my parents presented me with an early surprise. I am getting a new storm door! There will be no present under the tree this year, but this is perfect.

Our storm door was bent and never was installed right by the PO. It also was a piece of junk. I painted the outside of the front door recently to match the shutters and garage doors. It looks so much better, but it’s still masked by that ugly storm door. You also can’t leave the door open and let a breeze in because it won’t shut completely, and bugs get in. Having a new one (Andersen 2000 series fullview, to be precise) is going to be great. A little tax rebate doesn’t hurt, either.

We made some progress in a few unexpected areas as well. My Dad figured out how to fix the leaky toilet in the kid’s bathroom. We hired a tree company to remove 8 stumps from the property (I’m talking about these, along with a few shrubs). They were working in our neighbor’s yard, so we stopped and were pretty shocked at the good price.

Next on the list is to replace a heating element on our dryer ourselves. It takes 90 minutes to dry a medium size load of laundry on high heat, so something is not right.

I’m sure I’ll get over that soon. I recently read from a blogger who used many samples to pick that perfect shade. She is right. I have painted every room in this house, only to decide after a year or two that it wasn’t “What I was going for”. This drives my husband crazy, but I can finally say that our large “open concept” area upstairs flows together well. It was very difficult. There is only one wall separating the kitchen from the living room, which flows into the dining room.

I ended up painting the kitchen. I liked the pumpkin color, but it was too bold for the rest of the house. I tend to lean toward neutrals, and I have decided to stick with that. I tried using Wheat Bread (Behr) in the kitchen, but it looked terrible. Everything in that room called for something darker, but I didn’t want it to be too dark. I went with Valspar’s Faint Maple, which turned out lighter than the swatch. It is perfect, though. It is the lightest color I could have used that still works (matching with the backsplash was tricky as well).

When all of that was done, I did some work outside. The paint on the shutters had chipped in a few places. It had been annoying me since winter, so I finally dragged out the ladder and re-painted them (same color). After that, I touched up the foundation wherever it was needed, and washed all of the windows. Windex Outdor Multi-Surface is a great product. It attaches to the hose and makes it a lot easier to clean windows from the outside.

I will take a break for a while. I think being home with the kids all the time has made me kind of stir crazy!

By the way, photos of the aforementioned rooms are here.

I was motivated to work today. I cleared another big plant on the left side of the house, then decided to bring a rake with me while the kids were playing in the back yard. They were having fun, so I kept going. A couple of hours later, I had cleared all of the weeds, right down to the roots. Micah was at work, so I had to take the kids to Home Depot by myself. Will was so proud to help push the big metal cart, and I loaded it up with bags of soil and grass seed. It wasn’t easy, but I was so glad to get it done. I really hope this grass grows. It already feels like a big accomplishment. I filled 18 paper lawn bags and spent a combined total of 9 hours on this.

We had some overgrown, half-dead shrubs in the back yard that needed to be cleared. All I had were some hedge clippers, but I managed to get them chopped down. I’ll worry about the stumps later. Micah broke the branches up while I ripped out weeds.

The goal is to plant grass here and disburse a few small plants. It’s going to take a lot more work, but we’ll get there.

Then, we got to the “rock garden”. It was basically about 20 half-decent rocks and a lot of heavy ones stacked on top of them. It made no sense, and I couldn’t keep up with the growth around them anymore. I realize how ridiculous this sounds, but with 3 preschoolers, you just can’t dedicate time to proper gardening. I will try that in another ten years.

Micah rounded up the flat rocks that I could use, and I created a “floor” inside the playhouse of the swing set. This worked out very well, since there was a lot of mud and dead grass in there before. I couldn’t believe the look on Mia’s face when she saw it. It reminds her of our walks on the rocks at the lake, and Molly likes to pretend she’s by the ocean. I’d call that a win-win.

I also replaced the light fixture by the patio. I replaced it when we first moved in, but it was a cheap brass fixture. It was covered in rust. The replacement was not expensive, but it has a nice oil rubbed bronze finish. I added a few solar lights around the patio as well.

Our tiny tomato garden is growing well. The kids love checking on it every day!