Indoor and Outdoor Projects

Indoor and Outdoor Projects

We've been fairly busy at the MinIsland. Not super busy. We work here and there when we are feeling motivated and curl up under warm fuzzy blankets when we are not. Our house was a whopping 51*F when we woke up this morning. Yay for trying to save money and wait until the gas prices go down in a couple months. We can do it, guys. We can do it. 

We FINALLY finished the master closet floor. After four months of working on the floors for the house, we were sick of sanding and staining and achey backs. Fast forward about a year, and I actually kind of enjoyed sanding off the crappy stain and poly (even though I swore I would never refinish floors again). It took about ten hours of sanding (not an exaggeration), to get it to this point. 

Then Sam took over with the random oscillating hand sander and smoothed out most of the ridges that I put in the floor from using the rotary sander. He's a pro at putting down poly (I wouldn't dare attempt it). So my job in these cases is to move the poly tray when the time is right and to pick out hair and dust that fall onto the floor.

Ta da! Freshly poly'ed floor. Don't worry, the shinny appearance dulls after it dries. I think we picked a satin finish. 

While I was working on sanding the closet, Sam was cleaning and rearranging the basement. We ended up "finding" this old shelf in the basement. By finding, I mean that we moved the roofing and random bits of extra tile off of the shelf and out to the shed. Sam wanted to toss it, but I thought that it would look cute as a canned goods shelf. We cleaned it up and put all of our canned goods on it. I think it turned out well!

We (and by we, I mean Sam) finished cleaning up and organizing the basement to the point that we were able to put down our exercise mats and make a little work-out area. Here's to hoping that we will be healthier human beings in the future. 

It also warmed up enough that Sam and I headed outside to the garden and started pulling up all the dead plants. We are starting seeds tonight, so we need to get the garden as prepared as possible. It's turning out to be quite a handful. We got all of the dead plants out, but since we had such a full garden last year, a lot of the fruits and seeds fell straight onto the beds or onto the walkways. I think we are going to have to do a lot of weeding this year. And that is in addition to the grass that found its way in and started to take over. I think we are just going to end up spraying the grass because it would be too much effort to pull it up. Although, it is SUPER easy to pull up most of the time from the cardboard and wood chips. So, maybe we will do it the hard way.

Speaking of doing things the hard way, we discovered that it is quite easy to dig up grass after a recent rain. Sam and I were outside for about an hour yesterday after work digging up plant beds in front of the garden entrance. We will eventually have beds around the entire garden! So exciting! I plan on planting flowers and herbs in the beds, and we are going to get some round river rock to line the beds. It will be SO pretty and attract lots of pollinators to our garden!

The above picture is kind of hard to see. Here's an up close view of one of the beds. Our soil looks surprisingly good. We will still probably put some compost on top and maybe put some landscape fabric down.