Spring Surprises and Making Progress

Spring is bringing surprises! We've seen lots of tulips pop up in our back yard along with some daffodils and hyacinths. There's also 3 bleeding hearts bushes and trees are blossoming.

These are toward the very rear of the backyard.

They were so pretty I made it my cover photo on Facebook.

These are another bunch over closer to the pool. I love the colors!

Our red/pink tree has blossomed too and is looking very pretty. It has a bunch of shoots stemming up on the ground though that I'll have to get rid of some how. I don't want that many trees!

This tree is on the side of our house. I don't see it often and then one day I look out and it's covered with pink. So pretty!

This is an older picture but here's our bleeding hearts bushes.

There are lots of plants that I love that we have but there are a few I may consider removing, like the cactus's in the pots and the rose bush by the pool fence. Because of the wind, a couple of inflatables have blown over by that rose bush and got stuck with thorns. Anyway, I'm so glad that I got pictures of the tulips when I did because not long after that it got hot for a few days and then very windy. They are all pretty much gone now. We also finally got started on mowing the lawn a couple of weeks ago and mowed again yesterday. I do the trimming and it takes longer because I'm trimming the area in our front yard that has mostly dirt with small areas of grass, where our trench was. Last weekend we also finally got our sprinklers fixed and turned on. We've got a little work to do with adjusting some of the front ones that are hitting the house and cleaning out the pipe for the one by the driveway. We couldn't hardly get anything to come out of it. I don't know if putting a new head there would make a difference. Curtis didn't really have time to figure that out yet so we've been doing very little sprinkling. With the hot days we've been having, our lawn is looking a little brown. I hate that!

The boys re-dug the trench where the sprinkler pipes got ripped out from the excavator. At least they didn't have to dig as deep.

The girls helped me pick up rocks out of the yard and we dumped them on the side of the house over by the truck for now. 

This section was in the middle of the yard and we didn't even know we had ripped through it with the excavator until we were testing water lines and I saw a small area of dirt become wet. But we got it all fixed up.

There are two pipes here and we can't figure out what the smaller pipe is for because no water came out of it when we tested before fixing and the new head we attached to it doesn't turn on with the other sprinklers. There are some other weird looking what I think are sprinkler heads in some areas of the landscaping rocks but we can't figure out how to turn them on. We figure they are related to the smaller pipe but it's still a mystery on how to turn it on.

The yard does look a lot better now that we have picked up the rocks and raked up the dirt. We decided that we're just going to grow the grass back and worry about regrading the slope another year. There are just too many other things we need to focus on this year. It was hot that day (last Saturday) so after the kids did their work, they did some swimming. Jack even invited 5 friends over to swim. He is having no problems finding friends and I'm glad that half of them are members of the church. 

Curtis and I finally went on a date again last Friday. It had been awhile. We're usually both too tired on Fridays and just want to rest and watch a movie. Then Saturday do some more work. But Curtis pulled out another date challenge card and it said to take a road trip and drive to a near by town and just randomly pick somewhere to eat. We ended up in West Richland where we stopped at a Kabob house that served Mediterranean food. I ordered a Gyro sandwich and Greek rice. Curtis got a lamb kabob that came with rice and veggies. They were both good! We don't normally order dessert because we're too full but we decided to share a Baklava. I forgot to take a picture before we ate it. It's a pastry layered with nuts, honey and cinnamon. It was fun just driving around randomly and not using are GPS to get us anywhere. We were able to drive back home without it. After getting home, we knew we were going to watch a movie but it took awhile to pick one. I finally made the decision to watch The Mask of Zorro because it's been years since we've seen that one. Jack wasn't so sure about that one but he did end up liking it. Garrett loved it. The girls watched something else downstairs.

In the last couple of weeks we have also been working on the two bedrooms upstairs. I prepped the rooms with plastic during the day and then Curtis removed the popcorn ceiling after work. Prepping takes a lot longer than actually scraping it. The carpet smelled so I wanted it out as soon as possible. It was a strong smell after tearing out the carpets. I don't understand people who let their pets go potty in the house and don't even bother to clean it up. Nasty! I had to sweep up and vacuum the floors and either remove nails or hammer them in. There were also a lot of staples sticking up enough to bug me that I pulled them out also. Then I painted a coat of Kilz primer on the ceilings and two coats of primer on the floors. Some parts of the rooms may need a third coat because I still see a brown line coming through.

This corner was the worst and is where the brown line keeps coming through.

This was in the same room under the window. The room in the corner.

All prepped and ready for ceiling removal (well, after Curtis takes the ceiling fan down also). This is Garrett's room/guest room.

This is the room in the corner which will become part of the master bedroom.

Curtis as he was cleaning up after the ceiling removal. He's wearing the suit and mask to keep the dust off of him.

Ah, no more popcorn ceiling!

Carpet was removed but at this point still had the old padding.

This is what they looked like after carpet and padding were removed. It smelled so bad!

Floors and ceilings both covered with primer now.

Ready for texturing the ceiling next and then painting!