Help Furkids Win a Car!

I just wanted to take a second to write about Furkids, the no-kill animal shelter Greg and I volunteer for. They are in a competition on Facebook to win a car, which would help the organization tremendously! It'll just take a few seconds of your day to help.

Go to https://apps.facebook.com/nalleydrivenforacaus/contests/224746/voteable_entries

You'll have to authorize the app (which you can revoke after you vote if you want in your settings). Then vote for Furkids! It would be amazing if you could vote everyday until June 30th!

Furkids is currently in 2nd place, and we need your help to take 1st! Furkids cares for over 650 animals EVERY DAY! That's a lot of cats and dogs! Greg and I have been volunteering with Furkids for about 2 years, and let me tell you it's truly an amazing organization. They take in as many animals as they can, and they don't turn away from the days old babies and difficult medical cases. My baby Nutmeg, we found on a car outside Petsmart (after someone choose to leave him there instead coming to talk to us about surrendering him) when he was only about 2 weeks old, a Furkids foster took him in and bottle fed him. Trust me when I say Furkids does EVERYTHING in their power to make sure they can save as many animals as possible and another car would help with that!

Garden Tomatoes!

I was able to pick our first harvest of tomatoes from the garden last night- 2 better boys, and 4 romas. Aren't they pretty? One of the roma variety was close to normal size, but the others were all smaller than expected. So hopefully as the season goes on, they'll get larger in size. I got to cut open the 2 better boys this morning to go in a pasta salad we'll be having for lunch today. So excited to eat them!

Backyard Upgrade: Part 3- The GRASS!!!

You got to see our plan, the prepping steps, and now, finally, you can see the grass! Or the beginnings of it anyway. It's been pretty rainy/cloudy here for several days, so hopefully it will clear up so the grass (and the garden) will shoot up!

It's starting to fill in, but there's still a lot that hasn't sprouted yet. We'll probably give it another week and then maybe reseed the empty areas. Since it has been kind of rainy, some of the seed probably got washed away. It's a pretty dramatic change from how it looked back in December when we moved in, and we are super happy with it! Now we'll just have to add some garden art in here and there to make it more 'us'.

You can see where I already got a solar powered kitty to watch over the garden. It was a yard sale find a few weeks ago, I'd seen the same one at Big Lots, but just wouldn't pay $12 for it, but for $2, it was perfect!

Here's what the backyard used to look like, in various stages of progression. Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures of the backyard when we moved in, but just image 2-3 feet of decaying pine straw and leaves, that's basically what it looked like.

And after adding the tiles and watching the grass grow in!

It's still got some more growing to do. And probably another round or two of reseeding. But we're excited! You can't see it quite as well in the aerial view as you can when you look at it. That's probably due to my 5 year old camera....Oh and just to throw a note in about our rain barrel- it's awesome, since building it like a month ago, we haven't had to use anything else to water the garden or the grass!

Laundry Room Remodel- The Plan

This all started a few weeks ago when I started reorganizing the laundry room. I decided that if the top shelf was just a few inches higher, I could put laundry baskets on the lower shelves. Three of them to be specific, one for lights, one for darks, and one for linens. So it has all snowballed now into a complete laundry room remodel. Once it's done, it'll be our first finished room in the whole house! So exciting!
This is the before picture (sorry for the poor cell phone quality)-

It's messy, unorganized, and there isn't room on the shelves to put any laundry baskets, so I just end up putting them on the dryer and then it's in the way.






And this is my vision so far-

Presented in the lovely 3D model I whipped together in Google SketchUp. I'm a dork, I love 3D modeling. Gotta use that engineering degree, right? No dimensions yet. That's because we haven't decided on them yet. And lots of blank space on the space, because other than the baskets, I'm not sure what's going to go there yet.

Most of the differences are subtle. Like the shelves are going to be at different levels, even though they'll be the same wire shelving. I'll be changing the light fixture (it's just a plain 1980's/90's globe light), that's what the yellow cylinder represents. We already chose the wall color, it's close to what's displayed in the 3D, kind of a bluish-minty green. We're going to go with a beach & ocean feel for the laundry room. Most of that will be in the finishing decorating touches. The black rectangles are the laundry baskets I'll use to sort laundry, there's 3 of them, it's kind of hard to differentiate in the model.

One of the biggest projects we'll be tackling with this is tiling the floor. Right now, it's ugly yellowed vinyl flooring, yuck! After a quick brainstorming session of 'how can we make this better,' we decided that it's just going to be much better to go ahead and tile it. The space is only 3' x 5', so it'll hardly take any tiles, and it's just a square room, so not too much tile cutting to do. Once we rip up the vinyl flooring, we'll have to assess the condition of the plywood sub-floor and see if that needs to be replaced, then add some concrete board, then tile. Simple enough, right?? We'll see...

I think the room will be so much better, and it will be 'finished', as in we won't mess with it anymore and we can focus elsewhere. Plus, I can pretend that I like laundry, when I'm really just staring at how pretty the room is going to be!