I finally snatched some photos for the Our House page and should have those ready to go tomorrow, probably in before-and-after form too cause who doesn’t love a good B&A???
Much to my surprise, our calm catch-up weekend ended up being taken over by project ideas galore. I had planned for it to be spent getting better-than-I-got house tour pictures and cooking my little heart out but instead, three projects are now in the beginning stages. Husband rarely has a hand in the DIYs around our house unless I need help, which is fine, he lets me do as I please and does his own thing, fishing, yardwork, garage tinkering, PS3…man stuff. But, he has challenged my DIY-monarchy by planning to build us a pergola with his dad. I have been begging mentioning that we need one ever since we moved in here four and a half years ago, because this is the vision of a pergola the weirdos that had the house before us had:
Extravagant, right?? All five foot high of it. Ugh. The pergola of my dreams is a strong, beautifully stained, tall, focal point that would bring all of our hard backyard work together and make it complete and badass. Like this:
via DIY Network
I guess four years of comments and a declaration of being the only DIYer in our house finally paid off (chocolate chip cookies may have helped) cause now it’s really a go! We went to Home Depot since they have pretty much my dream design out front just to get the scoop on all this pergola stuff. While I don’t think their installed price (~$1800) is all too bad for what it is, husband is determined to do this himself so that’s what is going to happen. Next weekend. This is happening next weekend. Which means plan picking, supply buying, hole digging, post setting, and lumber staining needs to happen this week, all after work. Like, starting tomorrow! Not that I’m complaining, when husband is in the mood to spend some money and do projects, I sure as heck am not going to squash that! Strike while that husband iron is hot for sure ladies.
After pergola shopping, we sauntered over to the garage organization department at Lowe’s. We’ve planned on doing an overhaul of our garage this summer by getting some real storage solutions like strong shelving, cabinets, and bins to put stuff in. Our current loose-bracket, unsecured board, down-angled, shelving was in place from the previous owners (did they do this the same day they put that “pergola” up?) and did not offer much room to organize, or organize safely.
Although we were waiting till summer, once he saw these options in-store, he got excited and wanted to get a few shelving units to go ahead and start the project. We wanted strong, heavy metal, not plastic, but needed to make sure we get something good as everything rusts out here in like a month, literally within a month. We found these, and got three of the 48″ and one of the 36″ widths. We liked how sturdy the metal and the shelves were and that it didn’t take a wrench or anything to put them together. They got built yesterday and stuff plopped back on them so I’ll be back with a full write-up once they are organized, sneak peek though.
My initial hope was to start buying a set or two of the supplies I need for the master bedroom wainscoting project (you know, the only project I had as of two days ago). But I have no patience, we were at Lowe’s anyway, and I was on a project-high from husband’s revelations, so all of the material was bought yesterday! I have decided to go with a fancied-up 32″ board and batten design.
I still don’t have a nail gun to complete it anyway (hammering it all by hand? No thanks!) but it will probably be on the backburner because of Project Pergola anyway. Although I may squeeze some priming in this week and am contemplating getting a nail gun as my birthday present to myself. If so, there may be some wainscoting progress sooner than later. I am going to break that project down into a few future posts with more details though.
That was our weekend, well, really our Sunday. Saturday was spent discussing this stuff and looking at Lowe’s and HD but Sunday is when it all went down. Buying supplies, garage shelf installation, and mega yard pruning. I LOVE days like that, when you get your supply runs done before 11, knock off multiple to-do list items, and can sit back and enjoy it by 5. And by enjoy, I mean have a beer, order a pizza, and pop Aleve from the soreness the rest of the evening….
