Happiness is... A Family Project

We're not quite sure why, but in our family we can't seem to keep ourselves from jumping into home improvement projects.  We love working together on something to make our home a better place.  And the fact that we bought a 30 year old home that was in serious need of some work means that we have an unlimited supply of projects to work on.  We look forward to the day when these projects will be great chances to work with our children and teach them the happiness that comes from hard work and the satisfaction of improving something your own head and hands.  Here are a couple of our recent attempts at home improvement:

Painting

When we moved into our new place the whole thing was painted in this terrible peachy-pink color, so we decided to do some painting, changing to a cream over most of the house with a red accent wall in the front room and a blue accent wall in our bedroom.

We got the color for the blue wall right on the first try, but it took us 4 tries to get the red right and 5 tries to get the cream to the color we wanted.  Thankfully Home Depot sells small sample sizes of paint for only a couple dollars each, so we were able to buy a lot of colors, paint small sections of our walls, and then see what the colors would look like.

Once we settled on the colors it was down to the painting.  We learned a little about ourselves in the process.  Rachel was obsessed with drips and getting things absolutely perfect.  Nick painted about twice as fast with about a third of the precision.  Thus Nick was relegated to using taping around windows and using the roller while Rachel was in charge of all corners and tight spaces.

Overall we like how it turned out.

Our Back Patio

When we moved in this is what the back patio of our townhome looked like:

We're not exactly sure what kind of look the previous owners were looking for, but I don't think that was it.

We decided to take out the mostly dead rosebushes, pull up the pavement, and then relay the pavers and build some raised garden beds around the edge of the area.  Rachel took out the rose bushes, Nick dug out all of the base for the pavers, and then one Saturday in September we both rolled up out sleeves and actually laid the sand and the stones.

The garden beds won't be done until the spring, but we're sure happy with the project so far.