Happy Earth Day

There's no wrong way to celebrate earth day, except for maybe pouring oil straight down the throat of a baby seal or setting the Gulf on fire, BP. Cutting down a tree may or may not be on that list as well. I'm no expert. But it just so happens to be the way we celebrated last year.

We had this Japanese maple that was crudely pruned by the previous owners of the house and created a huge aesthetic problem for the yard:

It pretty much usurped the whole yard and made it quite difficult to grow the thick, lush grass you see in the pictures and didn't help at all with curb appeal seeing as how you couldn't see the bottom part of the house.

Quick backstory: when i was a young lass at home for the summers from cotillion school, my dad would trim the trees in our yard by removing a few branches. And by "removing a few branches," i mean "leave only a stump." Well, Dad, this post is for you.

I made my old man proud and removed a few branches.

And because i have weak girly muscles and sometimes need help lifting q-tips, i summoned my big-armed husband to Finish Him (Mortal Kombat).

As you can see, the view from our house is the broad side of someone else's house because wtf, layout committee?? But at least now you can see our house that's been banished somewhere off in the corner now that it's not being covered by some haggard tree.

Here's some before and afters...

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Sexy, right? Sidenote: i wonder when they're going to make a Captain Planet movie.

Last Things First

When we moved into this house, the very first thing i wanted to do was replace the floor-to-ceiling sliding mirrored pantry doors in the kitchen with bi-fold doors to allow me to access the entire pantry at once and eat dinner without looking myself in the eye. It's been five years and we've done everything in the house except those doors, until a few weeks ago.

We recently went from this:

To this:

All thanks to Chris, who custom designed and built these himself, thus saving us upwards of $300 if we'd gotten them professionally done. It was a process. First, we destroyed an entire forest and brought back a bunch of wood, which i then whittled down to a bunch of 1"x2" boards with my bare teeth [not pictured].  Then Chris went at it like a gentleman with a circ saw:

After they were cut, he shaped them into actual doors with a place to set in some cheap, light board so the doors wouldn't be too heavy. Please excuse the ridiculous pantry in the picture below. That design is original to the house and, might i add, quite awful. Why didn't the builders just come to my house and punch me right in the throat when they were designing this place? It would've made the pantry easier to handle, because at least then i would be looking at a horrific accident but at least i was no longer being throat-punched. Tangent.

Here's a close-up of the inset of the doors...

And because Chris likes pretty things (obv - he married me), he used his router to put a pretty design along the inside of the door.

See? Don't you just want to take your top off? Beautiful.

Next came my job: Painting. This is the guestroom in the basement that currently is being used for awkward storage. Please excuse that dirty window that happens to have an exquisite view of the underneath side of our deck, which is the graveyard for nightmare-inducing spiders. And yes, that is Stepbrothers on the TV. Helllooo, Miss Lady.

This is my hand doing the painting. You can tell it's me because of the barbarian knuckles.

After all four doors were painted, we ran into a problem we couldn't overlook...the seam between two of the boards  wasn't quite as filled-in as we expected it to be after a light spackle and two coats of paint. See?

So we bought some kick moulding to put as a border around the door, thus covering the seam and actually making it look a lot better. My husband, Vanna White, thinks so too.

And we ended up painting some really cheap, really lightweight board the same color as our walls (gray-ish in natural light) to be used as an inset for each of the four doors. This is Chris' arm, for i can assure you that i am not covered in man hair. Most days.

We flipped the doors over to attach the hinges and slip in the insets. We ended up using mirror clips to hold them in place.

And here is Chris putting the doors on the track we ordered. Almost done...

We put the handles just out of reach of our two year old. I'm hoping by the time she's tall enough to reach them, she'll have some self control and a well-paying job.

I'm aware that the above picture would look much better without the little human seats above. But this is more real. Realer, if you will. So i refuse to stage and make it look like we're something we're not. Like Olympic athletes. We're definitely not Olympic athletes.