Fire Circle Update

Last Weekend we finally got around to clearing our fire circle (which tends to get totally overgrown in the Summer) and we added some much needed improvements! This year Eric put down weed stopper gardening fabric and gravel around the pit, giving it a much more finished look and hopefully cutting down on the amount of clearing we have to do next year. Here are some pictures of the updated look.

Eric working on spreading gravel

Echo supervises the work

Finished and our first fire of the year!

After these pictures were taken we added more gravel and border bricks. It is already a much more pleasant place to hang out. We have plans to put in benches and fix the death trap of a staircase that leads down to the back yard at some point but that might have to wait until next year. In the mean time it's nice to have the back yard transformed in to a more usable space.

Out With The Old, In With The New

There is something so refreshing and awesome about the start of a new year. As much as I love Christmas and everything that goes with it I am always starting to feel a little claustrophobic from all the extra Christmas decorations in the house by the time January rolls around. All of our Christmas decore is officially packed up and put away and the living room is feeling much brighter and cleaner now. We also have some new house plants so we won't miss the greenery too much. We are getting quite a collection of indoor plants by now, 27 at last count. Watering and keeping track of them is a bit of a chore but they are mostly really low maintenance, succulents and the like. Here are some pics of our latest greenery as well as some other developments around the house.

Three new plants we got recently, lime tree on the left, some kind of fir (not really sure what) that we got at ikea, and a new Christmas cactus on the right. The Christmas cactus didn't bloom this year but it will be yellow supposedly.

this is the aftermath of taking down our tree, so many needles!

a coffee plant I brought back for Eric from Orlando

This is s a trick I learned on Pinterest, I put the old ends of som green onions in a vase with water and let the green part grow back. Apparently you can do this indefinitely. 

Also found time to hang the new painting that our friend Joanna gave us for Christmas!

In other news my brother Logan is moving to DC as of tomorrow. It is crazy how much I will miss having him around! I'm really excited for him and know he will have a great career in DC though. Change is painful but necessary and good in the long run :-) Tonight Eric and I had the family over for a little farewell bonfire and in the process got to burn bits of our  Christmas tree :-)

Christmas tree bits, burning away

fire!

Good luck in your new adventures Logan! I'm going to miss you like crazy!

Fire Pit!

Ever since we bought this house we thought it would be a great idea to to have a camp ground style fire pit in our woodsy back yard. Well at first we were preoccupied with flooring and painting and then Summer came and it was just too hot and buggy to work in the yard. Now that Fall is here and the weather is glorious Eric has been working on putting the fire pit together. It's far from finished but the basic structure of the fire pit is done and therefore it's usable. We didn't want to waste these any of these great chilly evenings so we started using it as soon as possible. Right now it's a dirt clearing with some logs to sit on and the pit toward one side, we plan to add some gravel and a brick border to the fire pit area but we want to leave it somewhat natural so that it won't stick out too much in our totally wooded backyard. To share in the fiery goodness we invited my family over for beer, popcorn and games followed by fire pit and s'more making. Here are some pictures of the fire pit's first use, I'm sure we will be spending many evenings to come in this way.

Fire pit in the daylight

Westley checks it out

evening coming on

fire!

Marshmallow toasting

s'more, it was heavenly

shot of the fire pit from our deck