Weeding the Corner Garden

The corner garden; haven of peace, refuge of safety, and retreat of calm, sublime, serenity...if you're a weed. I have a huge problem with grass in this bed. Here's a picture of before I got started weeding:

You can see that there are by far more weeds than there are flowers. Good thing I think weeding is recreation after a day in the office, right? There really are some flowers there among the thistles:

I don't weed without gardening gloves. Maybe I've got just a little too much feminine in me so I don't like to get my hands dirty, or maybe I'm just too lazy to spend the next 10 days digging mud out of my fingernails. I don't know. Maybe it's really because I'm afraid someone's going to send me a message on my BlackBerry and I don't want to get dirt in it, just rip off the gloves and text away. :) Anyhow, so I got out my trusty butterfly glove (by the way, by the time I was done weeding this garden I had to throw that pair of glove away because they got a hole in them) and my metal hand shovel and set to work:

I got that shovel from the gardening club free as a test product or something. It was advertised as a transplant shovel. I got a hard plastic Fisker shovel from them too, but I like this metal one better since it's a lot sharper because the metal's thinner. It took me several days to weed this lovely garden, but I enjoyed every minute of it. How can you not when you find such pleasent surprises as this Violet Candy Tuft Plant that I didn't realize had actually come up:

Or these beautiful candy cane petunias:

Or lovely purple and pink petunias:

Look at this mammoth pile of weeds I got every night:

I'm not sure what the pink flowers (I like to call them fireworks) are here, but the white ones are baby's breath, if I'm not mistaken:

These blue petunias sure are lovely, wouldn't you agree?

I simply can't stop cooing over how lovely the sunset was this night:

Is that one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen, or what? I just love it. I think it has a very good chance of being my next crayon art subject. Another day, just before sunset, the clouds were so gorgeous:

And when sunset came....you can form your own opinion on this one:

That same day it sprinkled a little while I was out there, and a piece of a rainbow showed up:

Here's another sunset picture from that night:

The weather that day was especially meaningful to me for personal reasons. I really enjoyed my weeding! I think it took around a week to finish, probably a little less, but here are the end results:

Yes, those are a few more weeds there around the power pole. Don't worry, they're gone now. I went ahead and snapped a picture after all the weeds were gone, just for good measure. ;)

All the flowers and the tomatoes in this garden were grown from seed by me. Those are cherry tomatoes on the end away from the street. I think the sunflowers peeking over the fence from the neighbors sure add to the effect...especially next year when I'm weeding them out of the garden again... :)

Cleaning the Living Room Railing

Well, I cleaned the railing yesterday. Here's the picture of before I got started:

Pretty gross, huh? Our railing has this special problem; the paint is sticky. It just collects the dirt. Luckily, it's pretty easy to clean:

The cloth get's pretty sick though. This was a blue cloth that got bleached so it was kind of a pink color when I got started. Look how dirty the cloth and water are:

The part right up against the floor gets lots of dust on it:

See how white it's supposed to be?

My "Hermanita" (Pronounced like air-mon-eat-ah - It's the Spanish version of "Sis") wanted to help. How can you get after little hands like this that helped it get so dirty to start with?

Your guess is as good as mine as to why there was a ribbon tied around one of the posts. I'm guessing at one point it probably had a balloon on it. Nice for me, it wasn't tied on very tight so I was able to cut it off with my dollar store kitchen scissors:

Good thing it's my favorite color, green:

I had to move the piano (it's electric so it's not heavy) to get to the corner. Good thing because then I could vacuum underneath the piano too. I wondered if that had ever been cleaned before:

Yuck!

Doesn't this look much better now?

It took me about an hour and lots of elbow grease to get the end results. After five I lost count of how many times I rinsed the cloth. Now THAT'S what I call a home improvement!

Installing the Toe Skin

I guess you're probably thinking, 'So, what exactly IS a toe skin?' I wondered that too the first time I heard it. A toe skin is a little decorative piece of wood or laminate that covers the bare wood on the bottom of your kitchen cupboard; at least that's what I've been led to believe it is. I had a cabinet built to replace an old broken down dishwasher and they make them to have flooring installed over that place. Well, since this was a renovation or remodel situation and I had no desire to redo my flooring just for that, I asked them what could be done. They supplied me with the toe skin to glue on. That was almost a year ago. Here's what the cabinet looked like this morning (and for nearly a whole year) before I decided to spend 5 minutes doing this:

Yes, that's red food coloring from when we made humming bird food. Oops. :) Here's the toe skin picture:

Pretty, isn't it? So, I got some wood glue and scribbled some on the back:


I guess I probably would have done it more gracefully, but I was trying to do it one handed and take the pictures left handed. Next I stuck it onto the bottom of the cabinet:

It wanted to slide down to the floor past the bottom of the wood so I propped it up with wadded up napkins:

Now doesn't that look better?

Don't ask why it took me nearly a year to decide to do that. It's taken me MUCH longer to post this blog about it than it did to glue it on. :D

List of To-Do Items

Welcome to my blog. This is my first blog and first blog post. Since I'll be posting my Home & Garden Improvements, I thought I'd start off with a list of things I'm going to do first.

*Glue toe skin on the kitchen cabinet.
*Get count and replace plugs and covers.
*Wash the railing.
*Weed the corner garden.

Pretty small, right? Well, don't worry. These are just ones I've been putting off forever. Check back to see pictures and details about my improvements. I just got a brand new camera (Panasonic DMC-ZS6) that's super nice too, so I'll be posting lots of pictures for a while. :)