By the time the sun set on Saturday evening (May 8), Lee and I had planted our first garden!  It was so much more fun than painting and went much much faster.  Monday evening we cleared out the remainder of the concrete rubble from last weekend - so all we would have to do this Saturday was move dirt, build a garden box and plant! Lee learned of a great lumber yard nearby and he picked up the wood we needed to build a box earlier in the week.  Then, Saturday morning we headed to a FABULOUS nursery just around the corner from our house.  The place was packed and SO much fun!  If we didn't have months of interior remodeling to do, we could have easily spent hours there preparing to landscape our yard.  As it was, we left with several starter plants for our garden, seeds and even some of our first flowers!

The Felts joined us Saturday afternoon to help us move some dirt around, build the box and yank out some of the existing foliage that we decided to replace with Impatiens and an herb garden.  We loved having them over (and of course loved their help!).  By sundown our garden was planted and we LOVE looking out our kitchen window now.  The view has much improved from the dilapidated old place house to a beautiful garden.  We planted several types and sizes of tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, strawberries, carrots, beans, cucumbers, mint, parsley and basil.  We figured that's a pretty good start for year one.

The inside of our house didn't make as much progress as we would have hoped this week.  Rather than paint our brains out, Lee was helping Abbie's boyfriend with the jacket of a album he's producing.  We were really glad we could help Patrick out and can't wait to see the final product.  As soon as it's in circulation we'll share the product with you all (and promote it).  So, we really only had Friday night and Saturday morning to make progress on the hallway.  I spent hours finishing up the beadboard with a 3/4 inch artist brush - THAT was painful.  I was cursing the numerous door frames while Lee was cursing the same number of doors that required multiple coats of paint.  BUT, the doors are done!  We even got the hall closet painted.  All that remains are hours of cutting-in the upper half of all those doorways and painting a couple coats of paint on the upper walls and installing a few new light fixtures.  Then we'll be in good shape until the floors are installed.  WHICH, BTW arrived on Friday!  We got a steal of a deal on flooring and we LOVE it.  It is absolutely gorgeous and came several weeks earlier than we ever imagined.  We can't wait for the day(s) we get to lay them.

As a side note - seriously bizarre coincidence with the guy that delivered the floor.  He is a friend and colleague of the guy that used to own our house.  He had some first hand stories about the former owner's crazy wife and the situation she got them in to.  SMALL WORLD!  We're just glad it wasn't the former owner who made the delivery - that would have been awkward!

We've uploaded pictures of progress on all our efforts in the gallery.  Check them out here.....