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Repotted

I’m not very good with plants. It’s something I am working to be better at because I really like to have them around at our house. I’m learning from trial and error and a lot of Google searching :)

I have noticed lately that all of my plants seemed to be getting worse. They had kind of quit growing and some of them were starting to die. I wasn’t really sure why because I was taking care of them in the same way that I always have. And then I realized, it’s probably because they needed to be repotted. And since that is the action I have taken, I hope I’m right :)

To tackle this project, I bought some dirt and brought all of my plants outside along with some new containers for them. I really only needed a few new larger ones because the smaller plants could be upgraded to the medium size while the medium size went into the new larger size. Here they are all lined up outside along with some of the new containers:

I gently removed them from their existing pots and freed the roots a bit. Some of them I found to be really root bound enforcing the thought that I might, indeed, be doing the right thing by repotting them. Then I planted them in their new container with new dirt, watering them with some fertilizer. And then I crossed my fingers :)

A few of them after. See how sad they look?! A week later and they are already starting to look better!

Once I finished repotting, I started dispersing them throughout the house. I try to rotate where they get placed because some spots get more light than others. This is the fun part, putting them in new places. While I’m on the subject of house plants, I thought I would take you on a tour of where I keep them in my home. Unfortunately, I don’t know the names of them. Your guess is as good as mine!

In the breakfast nook. I recently found this citron colored pot at an antique store for $5. I LOVE the color. So fun. The one in the tiny pot is barely hanging on by a thread. It used to be bigger but I mostly killed it and then I saw this tiny little guy grow. Here’s hoping he keeps growing. This is the best spot in the whole house for light so I thought he would have the best chance there. These are my first succulents so I am still figuring out how to take care of them. Getting better all the time :)

You already saw this one in the recent kitchen tour. I had this bowl on hand that I wasn’t using and I thought it would be nice to add a pop of color. This ended up being one of my favs.

In the living room. I’ve had this plant for forever, it came with us from Oregon. It’s super easy to care for and I have gotten many new starts from it and planted them elsewhere as you will soon see. I originally got it from a start off a plant that my Mom had. This one I could tell a huge difference in since it was repotted. When I took it out of it’s previous container, it was so root bound there was hardly any dirt left!

I like to keep a few on my coffee table. The one on the left is a start from the plant above. The other two are from Ikea. I love to get my plants and pots from Ikea because they are so cheap and if I accidentally kill them I’m not out much.

In my entryway I have another start from the plant in the living room. This one is freshly picked and planted and doing really well.

Another start, this time in Jason’s office. It gets a lot of light here and has been there for several months. It’s a happy little guy!

This Ikea plant hangs out in the laundry room. You know the expression, out of sight, out of mind? That’s this little guy. Thankfully it doesn’t require much water because I forget about it a lot! And maybe that’s a good thing because then I don’t over water it :)

In the family room I have two plants that are doing very poorly. I’m not sure that they will make it but I’m really hoping so. Both of them and their pots are from Ikea.

And lastly, this one I showed you a couple of weeks ago but I figured I would include it too even though it didn’t get a makeover. The pot that it is in is large and it’s still doing really well. It sits by a window in the family room on the fireplace hearth and seems to be really happy!

So, that completes the plant tour. I love how plants bring life to a space and I always feel like I could use more. But, I try and take it a little bit at a time so as not to overwhelm myself :) How about you? Do you like to keeps plants around your house? Do you have a green thumb? And if so, any tips for me?!

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Tagged: Before & After, Misc

More Chalkboards, More Fall

Yesterday I mentioned that I decorated for fall… just a little. If I had more time I might have even added more fall elements to the house but I have been busy so I just have a little bit of decor :)

One thing I just added was a little bit of autumn to our dining room table. We have some friends who grow veggies almost year round in hydroponic towers. Just recently I acquired some bibb lettuce from them. When I brought it home I thought it was so pretty, I didn’t want to just stick it in the fridge. So, I added some water to a vase and stuck it in there on the table and now I’m using it as fall decoration :)

Because plants that you get from a hydroponic farm still have the root ball attached, I could potentially keep this for up to 3 months if it has a water source! Pretty cool huh? I’m not sure if it will last that long though because I have been nibbling on it :)

If you live in the area, you must check out the hydroponic farm. It’s called Glo-n-Gro and there are so many yummy veggies and herbs to choose from and it’s all organic. It’s wonderful to have a source for that kind of stuff almost year round. Especially since my little garden is dying down.

Okay, back to decorating…

To finish off my little display, I added some leaf doilies and a block of wood. Super simple and it adds some color to our dining room.

Another little thing I did this week was write on my chalkboard plates. Last year, I sprainted some plates with chalkboard paint and hung them in my dining room. I had always planned on writing on them but once they were hung, I liked them so much I didn’t do a thing to them. Here are the plates as they were:

For those of you wondering, I hung them with 3m mounting tape.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I got the new West Elm catalog and they had some Thanksgiving plates that I loved and they ended up being the inspiration for drawing on my plates. Here is the WE inspiration:

Since I was hand-drawing mine in chalk, they didn’t turn out quite this cool but I still like them :)

I tried to draw a corn like WE’s :) I never said I was an artist, ha ha! Plus, either my chalk is bunk or drawing with chalk is hard! I couldn’t keep a solid line going and I had to keep going back over it. I’m really thinking of getting some chalk markers. They are so much easier!

It’s nothing dramatic, but I like my little bits of fall decor. There is just one more thing I would like to make, something I saw on Pinterest. I will see if I have an opportunity to make it and then my fall decor will be complete!

What about you? Do you decorate for every holiday or do you stick to just one?

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Tagged: DIY, Misc

Inspiration From Vacation

I love vacations. Is there anyone who doesn’t? It’s so wonderful to take time to get away and do something out of the ordinary. When I come home from vacation I usually feel refreshed and ready to take on the world. Or at least my little corner of the world :) We just got home from our vacation on Sunday night and we had such a great time. While I am still getting myself back into the swing of things, I thought I would share a little bit this week about our vacation.

For our time away, we headed to Charleston, South Carolina and spent a week there with Jason’s family. It is a place I have always wanted to go to and I loved it. It was even better than I thought which is always a good thing right? While we spent most of our days in Charleston, we actually stayed outside of the city on Kiawah Island. Kiawah is a seriously beautiful place. I wouldn’t mind going back :)

Kiawah is full of beautiful wildlife and while it does have a gorgeous beach, the island is also very marshy. Because it is a resort community, there are lots and lots of large homes. We rented a 3500 square foot house so we could all stay together and the house we stayed in was small compared to many of the houses on the island. Today I thought I would show you some of the house we saw.

One afternoon Jason and I went on a drive and I took pictures out of the car window at some of these homes. I actually couldn’t even photograph the really large homes because they were a bit more private with trees surrounding them.  But I did get some pics. I have always loved driving around neighborhoods, looking at houses. My Mom and I love to do this together. I hope you enjoy it somewhat because here we go!

We had a beautiful day while we were driving around. I love to see all of the palm trees since I have never lived in a place with them. A lot of the homes were this style with the shingle siding and white trim.

I took this photo because of the steps. See what is growing on it? It’s some sort of Japanese creeping fig. Apparently it is better than ivy because it doesn’t damage the brick. Now I would really like some for my brick, I love how it looks!

All of these homes are built up because there is potential for flooding. It makes the houses look that much bigger because then they all feel like they are 3 stories… or more!

Just looking at these homes makes it feel like a vacation doesn’t it?

Lots of pretty tropical landscaping.

Many of these houses had glass front doors and you could see in through the front and out the back windows. I love that!

This one is a little obscured but it was so pretty I took a photo anyway. These houses all looked out onto the marshes or golf courses. Kiawah Island has 5 golf courses! The PGA will be having a tournament at one of them next year.

Impressive, huh? How I wish I could sneak inside some of these and see what the inside is like!

I love all the windows!

Did you enjoy this little tour? All of these houses were from just one street. There were way too many to take photos of them all. Did you have a favorite?

Has anyone else reading this been to Kiawah Island? If not, I would definitely recommend it! Tomorrow I will share with you some Photo 365: vacation style :)

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Tagged: Inspiration, Misc, Personal

A Laborious Day

I hope everyone had a fantastic Labor day! Our Labor day was… well, interesting, and not at all what I thought it was going to be. I had big plans for the day to do some projects at the church (I’m working on an ikat stencil, exciting!!) but plans got a little derailed because of heavy rains. Normally, I love rain, but even for me, this was a little much.

What is interesting, is that August was really dry. In fact, it was the driest August on record in our area. We only got 1/100 of an inch of rain for the whole month! Amazing for this area. Then September came and on September 1st, it rained. It was like it was waiting for September to roll around and the heavens opened up. The problem came on Monday when it didn’t stop raining. We were catching part of the tropical storm Lee and we sure felt it. It was non stop rain from before we even woke up to after we went to bed. By 6:00 PM we had gotten about 8.16 inches and broken all previous records of the most rain in a 24 hour period (previous record of 7.61). By the end of the day we had gotten about 10 inches. That is some serious rain. So we broke two records in a matter of a couple of days. One for the driest and one for the wettest. Pretty crazy stuff.

Thankfully, we are doing well although I was wondering for a little while there if we would have some water damage. We live on a hill so we don’t usually worry about flooding but we do get a little bit of water in our basement occasionally. Yesterday, we got a bunch. We spent most of the afternoon and on through to Midnight (with a little break for dinner) trying to get the water out of the basement. There was so much water seeping in that we couldn’t stay on top of it. Thankfully, nothing got ruined and today the basement is pretty much dry. Here are some shots of our efforts, taken last night:

We spent a bunch of time trying to get everything higher. You can see the bricks under the freezer, trying to get it off the ground. We also set up a small barrier of garbage bags weighted down by wet towels to try and keep it contained. It might not look like very much water but when you see how fast it filled up this area, it had me a bit worried :) Especially since the forecast was calling for more rain.

Our main objective was to push the water to the drain which is under the work bench. You can see the towels leading to it. As long as we could keep the water moving toward the drain, we were okay. It was when we stopped that things started filling up more and more. Which is why we worked at it for so long, to try and keep the water flowing. It’s too bad our basement floor isn’t sloped toward the drain, that would have really helped :)

I was trying to get a picture to show how deep it was. It doesn’t even cover my feet but it sure felt like a lot of water since it covered most of the floor! Another thing we are thankful for is that it wasn’t cold. It was still in the 70’s yesterday so we were able to work down there barefoot in shorts. If this had happened in the winter, the water would have been really cold!

The other side of the basement. We tried to keep the water on the side with the barriers but some seeped over here. Then we found out it was coming in another spot on this side as well. Sometimes you just can’t win! Here Jason is taking a bit of a break after a full afternoon and evening of work.

And a shot of the library. Remember how nice it looked before? We had to use this room to store all the stuff that had been in the other room. The library got wet as well but once we diverted the water, we were able to clean it up and it stayed relatively dry after that.

All in all, it wasn’t that big of a deal but it kind of felt like it at the time. I’m very thankful to be on this side of it though. There were many places that had it much worse than we did. In fact, we couldn’t even really leave our house because all the roads around us were closed due to flooding. So this morning, we left to go to the church to see how it fared.

There is a creek that runs close to the church. It floods occasionally but I have never seen it this high. It filled up the creek and ran over the sides into our parking lot.

This is on the opposite side of the road. There is not normally any water here and now we have a lake.

In fact, it was deep enough that people were swimming in it! There were even some people with kayaks. Good times :)

This normally is our parking lot.

See it pouring over the road?!

Again, more parking lot. Thankfully, no water in the building. A lot of water outside though.

So there you have it, that is how we spent our Labor day. Laboriously emptying water from our basement. Fitting, isn’t it? :)

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Tagged: Misc

Out & About

I had a great week last week. Do you want to know why? Because I got one of these little babies in the mail. I have been wanting to upgrade my camera for a while and so I was pretty much jumping up and down for joy when I ordered it and even more so when it came in the mail. It does so much more than my previous camera and so I have a lot of stuff to learn. But, learning is part of the fun, right? So last night, I dragged Jason to our downtown area to practice so I could get the feel of my new toy. Here are some of our findings as we wandered around…

Now I am all about reflection photos :)

Everything was closed, but it was a Sunday evening after all!

I love these old time barber shops. The inside was even better and I would love to do a photo shoot there sometime.

If you want to get your hair cut, those are your hours to choose from :)

This photo is overexposed but I really love the colors so I thought I would show you anyway!

Some things just look more interesting in black and white, don’t you think?

Occasionally, I could get Jason to jump in a photo for me. But that was a rarity :)

I love these colors…

What did you think about our little walk around town? Did you see it too? The beauty in the mundane? I know sometimes I do. And other times, I let life pass by without noticing. This week I am going to try to find the beauty that is all around that I usually take for granted. And if I’m lucky, maybe I will be able to capture some of those things with my new little toy :)

I hope you all have a wonderful Monday. I will be back tomorrow!

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Tagged: Misc, Photography