“Lindsay, flowers need water or they will die..”

…says my husband after I couldn’t figure out why my newly potted pansies were on the verge of death just one day in their new home. I mean sure, that’s common sense – all living things need water in order to survive. I guess I’ve just always had this notion that plants were self-sufficient; that once you plant them outside Mother Nature does her job and they flourish and everyone is happy. I suppose my dead daffodils will tell you my thought process is WRONG. (Blame it on 10 years of apartment living!) So, I am on a mission to become one with nature…or at least our yard. Well, maybe “one with nature” is a strong statement. Let me rephrase - my mission is to become more aware of my outdoor surroundings. (I don’t think I’ll ever become one with bugs and snakes, which of course I think are lurking around every corner.)*

So what was my first step in this mission? I bought myself a watering can, of course.

Well, the first one I bought was a poor excuse for a watering can, but I thought the color was pretty. Jay ended up surprising me with this fine green, sturdy watering can the next day.

No longer dying of thirst, my pansies are thriving – CHECK! (I desperately tried to water those daffodils, but there was no reviving them. They are as a dead as a doornail. Oh well, maybe next year.)

Now let’s take a look around the rest of our yard. I’ll also take this opportunity to provide updates on a few outdoor projects that we’ve begun.  This is the front of the house (might recognize it from our logo at the top of the page). We live on a bit of a hill, so that incline you notice is real and not just the result of a poor photographer.  Eventually we will need to trim down the bushes, they are getting a bit overgrown. I would love to make some other changes like add a little color to the front, but quite honestly, I'm not even sure where to begin. Heck, I could barely keep those pansies alive!

Over to the left is my favorite thing about our property...our gorgeous birch tree! Since this is our first month in the house, every time I look outside I see a new surprise blossoming. Check out those pretty pink plants. Not sure what they are, but I love 'em!

Let's keep going to the left to the left (sorry, couldn't resist a little Beyonce reference). This is the side of our yard. (The first picture is looking from the front to the back. The second is a view from the back yard looking to the front.) Check out that cute little lilac tree that just started to blossom. I've always wanted a lilac tree so you can imagine my surprise when what I thought what was a dead plant sprouted into a pretty purple blossom. I'm no expert gardener, but I'm sure it needs some pruning. Add pruning shears to my list of things to buy!

Off to the back yard we go. The owners before us built this pretty little blue stone patio. (Don't mind the dead weeds in the cracks. Josh's home project this weekend was to spray the weed killer.) 

Let's mosey on back now. This is a view from the wayyyyy back. 

It pretty much gives you a clear shot of everything...including those HOLES. Now let me just say that if there is uneven ground, a dip, a hole, or even the slightest change in level ground, my husband will find  stumble into it. Next thing you know he'll roll his ankle and be on bed rest for a week. Let's just say, he "found" the 2 ft deep hole... and a few others for that matter.  As a result, one of Jay's most recent projects was filling those dangerous holes to prevent another injury. Four bags of soil and two bags of top soil later, the holes were filled. He topped each hole with grass seed and off he went watering them (with our new hose and sprinkler might I add) till his heart's content.

Quick fact about our house. We learned many things about our house and its previous owners at the closing. One of the most interesting things we learned was that immediately after moving in (9 years ago), the previous homeowners filled in the brand new pool and the surrounding cement patio. Although I'm happy we don't have the expensive of a pool at this time, I'm sure I'll be cursing them when that 90+ degree heat starts to filter in. Oh well, let's break out the slip -n- slide!

*(I know, I know it's been a while! Life got in the way of blogging, but don't worry, I'm backkkk and ready to update on what we've been up to.)

Say hello to our little friend!

I’d like to welcome the newest edition to the Marut family! Allow me to introduce you to Toro. With 7.0 ft. lbs gross torque gas-powered guaranteed-to-start (GTS) engine, this shiny red beauty is any man’s (or woman’s) dream!

Let me just quickly start off by saying that my husband is slightly totally obsessed with lawn care. Whereas my dream of owning a home was to decorate, his dream was to cut the grass. To each his own! The second we pulled into the driveway after our closing, Jay commented on the grass stating that it would need a trim soon. Sadly, we did not own a lawnmower, so that dream had to be put to the back burner until we had the funds to purchase one. Thankfully, his wonderful mother offered to buy us one as a housewarming gift. (THANK YOU, CAROL!! xoxo)

After a quick chat with our new neighbor, we realized we better get that grass cut ASAP! (Our cute neighbor next door, an older German man, introduced himself to Jay the other day. After several minutes of small talk he says, “So when are you going to mow that lawn??” Jay nearly died! I laughed hysterically!) So, off we went to our new favorite store, Home Depot, to purchase our new baby!

He quickly put it together and began his task.

He started first by cutting the borders of the lawn and then settled on a diagonal pattern.

He even gave Josh lessons halfway through, looks like there’s a new lawnmower in the family.

It took the two of them three hours to complete the task, but the lawn looks absolutely beautiful! Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for my boys. They look exhausted!

I even helped beautify the backyard a bit by planting some pansies into some pots that we already had. Thanks to Carole Miller for the beautiful flowers!

If you give a kid $5…

…he’ll come home with a framed cheeseburger puzzle. Josh found this lovely work of art last year at a Relay for Life tag sale booth. He bought this striking piece along with several other interesting items such as a dashboard hula girl with the help of Jay (no more tag sales for those two!). Despite my protests, the cheeseburger art made it home. However, we never got around to hanging it up in our old home (what a shame!). So as we were setting up Josh’s new room, I figured it was high time this cheeseburger puzzle be hung up in all of its juicy patty glory! But first, I thought it might be nice to paint the dull wood frame a nice bright white to add to its beauty. *

Before:

After:

I think the white frame really adds to the puzzle. It certainly makes it stand out more (not that it really needed anything else). If nothing else, Josh likes it and it is certainly a conversation piece!

*Why I thought it was so important to paint this during our first week in the house, I will never know. It wasn’t until I was about half way through that I asked Jay why he hadn’t stopped me from doing this project when we had about 6 million boxes left to unpack and operation Easter was in full affect. Oh well! There’s no time like the present, right?

I think I'll just supervise.

My Hunger Games obsession has taken over my life and thus delayed my blogging! I suppose I can take a short break to provide some quick updates. So, last you saw we painted our living room. Well, since then we have painted two other rooms. Actually, to be honest, we painted them the same week we painted the living room. I don’t know why we decided to paint three rooms before hosting Easter for 23 people, but we did. We are nuts, but I wouldn't have it any other way. (Although I'm shocked we pulled it off, Easter went off without a hitch!)

Although I swore I would never paint again after my traumatizing paint job with our living room, I found myself with a brush in my hand just a day later! The hallway is one of the projects that I was really itching to start. It’s the first thing you see when walking into our house and I really wanted to give a good first impression. I figured, maybe if they walk into a nice hallway they will totally ignore the fact that we have a huge empty dining room! Anyway, the hallway was on our to-do list and painting is certainly the first step. I wanted something subtle and of course in the gray family so I chose Olympus White. I know the name has white it in, but it’s NOT white!

So with a bucket of non-white paint in hand, we began another painting journey. Surprisingly, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the living room. Maybe that’s because I took on more of a supervisory role, carefully watching my husband paint to make sure he didn’t spill. His painting skills have really improved in a matter of a day. So, I let him run with it.

Before:

During (Nice job, Jay! Keep up the good work. We've got many more rooms to go!):

After (It's hard to actually see the paint color because of the lighting. We only painted this portion of the hallway. Didn't want to tackle too much before the family came over for the holiday):

I don’t know what brought it on or what was running through his head, but apparently he was so inspired with the hallway that he decided to tackle the main bathroom. You may remember from my last painting post we bought 5 samples of paint – one of which was Glad Yellow.

This swatch really doesn't do it justice.

I love the color combination of gray and yellow. It was actually one of the combinations that I considered for our wedding. (We ended up choosing gray and magenta for our colors.) So you can imagine how excited I was when it hit me that we have yellow paint and a gray bathroom that it is in need of cheer. This bathroom turned out to be our most thrifty project to date! At a mere $7 for a sample can of paint, we were able to add a nice touch to this ever-essential room.

Before:

After:

It certainly looks a bit more cheery if I do say so myself! Well, that’s three rooms down and what seems like a million more to go. Our next big project is the dining room. I have a feeling it will be quite a challenge. Needless to say, we are going to take a small break from painting before we tackle that one. On to the next project!

First of MANY projects

Hey everybody, Jay here.  This is my first blog post soooo please bear with me.  I am not the best writer/typer but here goes nothing.

First off, I want to say "Thank You" to my beautiful wife Lindsay for starting off this blog and doing an amazing job with it.  I hope that I can become half the blogger that she has become over the past few weeks.   Also, a BIG thank you to everyone that helped out with the move!  I could not have done it without the help of  Ryan Marut, Brian Taylor, Dan Marut, Sharon Pagani (Bubba) and anyone else that helped but I have forgotten.  I am sure that I am missing a few people but i can't remember.  So if I have forgotten you, sorry and thank you soooo much!!!

I have worked on a few projects since moving in.  The first one that I tackled with the help of my brothers Ryan and Danny was the Laundry room.  When packing the truck up to move, this was by FAR the hardest things to move.  We were very happy when those came off truck, so we wanted to get them installed ASAP so we could start to crack open the beers!  As you can see here, the setup with this washer and dryer is absolutely horrendous.  

My plan was to stack our LG Front-load washers to save space and look better.  Something that I always wanted to do but the setup in our apartment didn't allow me to do it.  With the help of my trusty Black and Decker level that I got for Christmas as a gift, we had to level the washer.  This took a little bit of time because my brother forgot how to use a Wrench, but he figured it out after a few tries.  Once the level was green we were good to go!


Next was the dryer.  "All we have to do is lift it up and plug it in and hook up the exhaust, then we are done".  Sounds pretty easy, right?  Come on, this is our first day as homeowners, why would it be easy?  Turns out, the outlet was a 220V and the plug on the dryer did not fit.  Time to make my first trip to Home Depot as a home owner.  Good thing I had to drop Dan off at his car which was on the was to Home Depot.  Just as I was about to pull in, I remembered that I could just pull the plug off of the old one.  WHAT WAS I THINKING???   So after turning around, I made it back home and started to take off the plug off of the old unit.  Sounds easy, right?  Well, it would have been easy, if I had a socket wrench set.  After getting two of the three nuts off with a pair of needle nose pliers, the last one would not budge.  Stuck again.  Thankfully I was able to get a hold of my mom while she was one the way to see our home and she picked up a socket wrench set for me.

So now that I have my socket wrench set, I can finish the project.  Sound's pretty easy, right?  Well guess what, it actually was!   It is amazing how easy some projects could be with the right tools.  I disconnected the cord and connected it to our dryer.  Once that was done, all we had to do was lift up the dryer on top of the washer and connect the exhaust.  We lifted it up without a problem and Ryan was able to screw the exhaust to the back and we were finished!  A project that probably should have taken about 20 minutes took close to 2.5 hours!  But the thing is, it was totally worth it.  What do you think?

Hopefully, you enjoyed reading my first home project.  I know it might have been a little long, and hopefully my editor (Lindsay) doesn't kick my DUPA for going on too long.  Come back soon and you can read about fun with electrical and thermostats along with a whole bunch of other stuff!!!

Yellows, grays and blues, oh my!

If it were up to me, our whole house would be painted in various shades of gray. There is no hiding it, I love me some gray! However, as my husband so lovingly pointed out, a successful marriage is built on compromise. (Don’t worry, I’ll persuade him to the gray side!) So, with our Sherwin-Williams color deck in hand we intently scoured the fan of colors searching for the perfect shade to paint our living room (paneling and all!). We searched through reds and greens, blues and purples, whites and tans, but in the end, guess where it all led back to – GRAY! Well, not just gray, but yellows and blues as well.

Here are some factors we used to choose the perfect color:

· Although we have a large bay window at the front of the house, the majority of sunlight enters in around 5 or 6 pm. Therefore, mornings and afternoons are on the darker side so we knew we needed something light and cheerful.

· Additionally, we wanted a semi-neutral color palette so we could use bright pops of color to liven the space up.

· Lastly, we wanted to stick with a calming palette of colors to provide some kind of unity throughout the painted spaces on the first floor.

We narrowed our living room paint choices down to five colors – Glad Yellow, Misty, Grayish, Gray Screen, and Passive (or as Jay refers to it – Passion). (Colors are listed in the order in which the samples were painted on the wall).

Although we originally thought a nice and cheery yellow living room would be a great way of brightening up the space, I just couldn’t pull the trigger. So we chose…I’m sure the suspense is killing you…MISTY. According to the Sherwin-Williams website, Misty is technically in the blue family but is pretty much a combination of pale blue and gray with a shot of yellow (PERFECT!). Pretty much, all of our three color choices combined!

I’d like to add a little disclaimer at this point. I can’t remember the last time I painted - maybe my mom’s house 10 years ago? I painted her dining room this green color and from what I can remember, I didn’t do such a great job. As for Jay, I found out he was no Picasso either. Actually as we were preparing to prime the paneling he said, “Now I just have to warn you, I’ve spilled about two gallons of paint before on my dad’s floor”, Really dude?? Get the heck off of our hardwood floors with that half gallon of white primer!

So off we went priming the paneling, painting the paneling and then the walls. Though Jay didn’t spill the paint, he had a few technical difficulties (don’t worry babe, I still love you!). He actually had to leave half way through our painting project to take Josh to lacrosse practice. I’m not sure if I was upset or relieved. At least now I wouldn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder to make sure our floors didn’t have paint stains. But, two coats later and all by my lonesome, I was thoroughly traumatized and vowed to hire a painter for any future painting projects!

After what felt like an entire day of painting, the room was complete! Check out some before and after pictures below.

Before:

During:

After (voila!):

Although you can't tell online, the color of the room changes depending on the time of day. Sometimes it's completely blue, other times we only see gray. However, what we can say about the color is that we absolutely love it!