You light up my life

We have been going light crazy. In 4 months, we've changed 4 lights. It's amazing what a huge difference it makes. I love how it takes our cookie cutter house (nothing against cookie cutter houses, I love ours) and makes it a little more custom. 

Eric and his dad, Bruce, tackled the light in the dining room the day we moved in, which was silly because the dining room sat empty until yesterday. This is probably my favorite light in the house because you can put candles in and eat by candle light. Now that we have a dining room table, we will be trying it soon! 

Way before. 

Dining room light. 

Our next light project was the light above the sink. It was boring and small. We made it not so boring...and when I say we, I mean Eric. It was the easiest light to install in the history of installing lights. Thanks, Lowes for carrying such an awesome product. The mount screwed into the light socket and we were done. The hardest part was trying to decide how low we wanted it to hang. 

Before. No hanging light. 

Before 

Super amazing light kit

After 

Next, we moved on to the bedroom light. Our bedroom furniture is cherry wood. I'm not a fan. I like things to be light...especially in the bedroom. We got an amazing chandelier from Ikea. It's gives the room a very whimsical feel and it's not as harsh as the light we had in there before. I don't need a reason to stay in bed all day, but if I did, this light would be it. Another super easy light to install, but not because Ikea made it simple. It was easy because Eric has become an expert light installer. There are still some kinks we need to fix, like the base not sitting right up against the ceiling and the chain is way too long, but we don't have anything to cut it with, but it's still looks great. 

And last, but certainly not least, we changed the stairway light today, because the first one was just plain boring. Now our stairway has some major character. Eric has an amazing ladder (and sometimes I think he likes the ladder more than he likes me :P) that made it super easy to work on the stairs. I did help in this installation, but only for 2 minutes. But someone has to take the pictures right? 

  Before 

 Awesome ladder. Awesome boyfriend. 

After 

After!!! 

And Capone helped us this morning, by not trying to help us. Good boy, Capone. 

We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig

In our yard, the whole day through. We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig because we enjoy not being able to move our arms or neck or back the next day. That's the version of the song the dwarfs would sing if they helped me with the yard on Wednesday. Spring is here (okay, not for a couple more weeks, but the weather outside is fabulous) and summer will be here before we know it. Last year we had 80 some straight days of temps reaching 100. Let's just say, not a whole lot is growing during that season. So we need to plant grass seed now. In January we moved into a brand spanking new house and our dogs walked and ran the little baby grass right out of the ground, so in patches of our yard we are starting from scratch. 

This is our yard before the project really started. Notice my little digging friend. She was not going to miss out on a chance to dig. 

          Wednesday rolled around. I had nothing to do and I wanted to be outside, so I took on the task of "Turning up the soil." Let me point out we don't have soil in NC. "Turning up the clay" is more like "turning up the concrete." I started raking the clay and making cute patterns and soaking up as much vitamin D as I possibly could. I called Eric out to see if I had loosened enough of it. NOPE. Not even close.

Half an hour later, this is all I had done and it still wasn't even close. I had to figure something else out, so I thought getting it wet would make it softer and easier to rake. To my surprise, the only thing watering it did was make it a clay/mud pit.

Two hours later this is what the yard looked like. Eric came out and said the really dark part at the middle-left side of the picture is what everything needs to look like. Well to accomplish that I literally beat the crap out of the ground with the rake. My arms were noodles by that point, so I came up with a better method. 

                   I just made Harper do all the work. 

Kidding, but she was freaking adorable as always and she took the shovel out to a part of the yard that didn't need to be dug up, and started digging away. 

This little guy was my best friend for the day. 

I got the weeding tool out of my gardening set and just started stabbing the ground and digging it up. It was actually a lot of fun and it felt like something I shouldn't have been doing. 

The guy with a bulldozer in the back lot turned up the entire .25 acre lot in the amount of time I did a 2x6 rectangle on our lawn, but I was pretty proud of myself. 

Don't mess with me. I did this with nothing more than an ice pick looking thing. 

Then it was time to break all the huge chunks up. Eric came out to help me finish it up and this was the final product. 

We planted the seed and watered it and then when I woke up the next morning our yard looked like this!!! 

Not really. Eric said we should have a good lawn by next year. Since I am an immediate gratification person, that did not make me happy. We will give you an update when our grass starts growing. But YAH for me tackling this project and totally kicking it's butt (or it kicked my butt and I couldn't move my arms at the end of the night.)