Backyard

I don't know what I'd do without such a handy husband.  Over the 7 years we've been together, Tristan has renovated 4 bathrooms including re-tiling floors, 2 kitchens, installed wood floors, built a porch deck, fixed electrical problems, painted more rooms than I can count...and much, much more.  

His most recent project was our back yard, which is one of those that can be classified as "has potential", but needs LOTS of work.  He decided to tackle one half of the yard this spring/summer, and I'm so proud of what he did - it took him MONTHS of very hard labor which I know many people would just fork over the money to have someone else do.  But for him, his motto has always been why pay for someone else to do something I can do myself.  So I watched (mostly) patiently as he slowly got it done!

  

As usual, I forgot to take before pictures, but did find two.  This picture is the windows to our office/playroom right outside the back door.

And here's them now!  Hand-built beds and some pretty plants that should grow to be relatively big.  We've actually put mulch in since this shot, so it looks even nicer.

 Here's our little picnic area before.  Overgrown flower beds, and our next door neighbors' vines growing over the wall.

And here's after.  Custom built flower beds with succulents of all shapes & sizes, and a cleaned up wall.  We've also put in some grass where the rocks to Mason's left are in this shot, and I'm on the hunt for a cool outdoor chandelier to put over the table.  And see those vines on the right?  Those are grapevines that have started producing grapes!

That's all the before's I found, so here's just some overall shots of the yard.  He and his dad hand-built all of the beds around the yard, as well as the staircase going up to the 2nd level.

This planter is my favorite part of the yard.  It was inspired by a similar one we saw at a local restaurant, and Tristan re-created it perfectly!  The best part is, amongst the flowers we've also included pots of cilantro, basil, chives, and rosemary, all of which I've used for various meals over the past few weeks!

The wall on the right is for vines, we have some planted that will hopefully grow over the next few years.  And the table in the middle is a fire pit.

 

Anyways, we probably won't be featured in Better Homes & Gardens anytime soon, but it's SO much better than it used to be, and I'm just so proud of how hard Tristan worked, especially at hand-building all of the wood beds.  We still have an entire 2nd side of our backyard - complete with a huge outside structure that will one day house an outside fireplace - and our front yard, but those will have to wait for another summer.

In the meantime he's hard at work on to the next project, building a Murphy bed for our office/play room to take place of our guest room, which will soon be needed as a nursery.  He's been working on it for about 3 weeks now and it's coming along well.  We priced them out online and found nothing cheaper than $1,200 (for very basic beds), and by building one himself, it should cost us $600 total. 

Oh, and while I'm in bragging-about-my-husband mode, check out what he did this past weekend.  So badass :)

Family Photo Shoot

I recently decided I wanted to get some family photos, especially after I found out I was pregnant.  Thought it would be a perfect opportunity to kill 3 birds with one...photo shoot.  Mason's 2nd birthday, family shots, and baby announcements.  But we didn't want to spend hundreds on a professional shoot, and all my photog connections are in Florida.  So, Tristan asked the photography teacher at his school if she'd be able to help us out, she assigned two of her favorite students to the job, and we picked a date in mid-May.

We chose Old Poway Park as the location - it's close by, and known for it's old railroad and beautiful scenery.  It was the perfect location for what I was hoping to get!  The photos themselves came out...ok...but they're better than I'd have done, were cheap, and we got a few shots that we loved which is all that mattered to us.

Here's some of the family shots.

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This one was our favorite and we ended up printing out some copies for the house, but I think I accidentally condensed the size wrong to make it my FB profile picture, and I'm too lazy to find the CD to upload the better version again :)

We also got some cute shots of the birthday boy.

I only liked one of the announcement shots we got, but it's such a cute one and all we needed was one, so I was happy!

This one was cute too but the shoes are a little too far away.

I wanted to try to get some cute shots of our feet with the baby shoes (what would we do without Pinterest inspirations), but this was the only somewhat cute one that we got, and it really just looks like a bunch of feet to me.  Oh well, nice try :)

Mediocre pictures or not, we had a really fun afternoon...I love my THREE boys so much!