I am inspired this week by several things I love that I wanted to share!
Love It!
1. New Siding! Okay this might seem like an odd thing to like but when you see the photos you will understand. Five years ago when David and I bought our house we loved the layout inside and the amount of land it sat on but there were a lot of things we didn’t love. The first thing being the colors on the outside. It was brown, on brown with an accent of brown oh and since there was no grass it was surrounded by brown. Bleh!! It looked like the dirt threw up our house….ok that might be an exaggeration but do you get how much I hated the brown. The original plan was to reside the house as soon as we moved in but we opted for central air instead, you know things like heat and air kind of take precedence 😉 So for five years I longed for new siding and we talked about what colors we wanted and how awesome the house would look. In the meantime we worked on growing grass and planting things to combat the brown that was going on. Today though it is no longer brown!!! YAY!!!! See all those exclamation points that is how excited I am!!! Of course now I have a laundry list of things to do to spruce up the rest of the outside to match the shiny new house. We decided to make our house a mini of my in-laws so we went with white beaded siding and green shutters. On the to do list is a new front door with a window and I’m painting it RED! Oh and either painting or replacing the front storm door with something in white. On to the photos!
Looks like after two weeks of not being able to water the lawn it has taken it’s toll so our grass and flowers look better in the before pic 🙂 It is so pretty now!
So it appears I need a little bit of practice taking before and after pics since I don’t have my angles exactly the same and I’m thinking I used different lenses. Notice we had them paint the eaves green and add a set of shutters to this side. Since you see this side of the house first when you drive up I wanted to pretty it up some. Before it was just a big wall of brown and I didn’t want it to be a big wall of white. The shutters look great and really break up the white wall. The deck is another project that is on the list of someday upgrades 🙂 So that is our house and our new siding and I love it, now to work on the landscaping!
2. Caring Dr’s and Nurses! I of course have a soft spot for nurses since my sister is an RN. I have to always tell the nurses I see that my sister is an RN, you know so I can be on their good side 😉 Inner circle stuff 😉 I probably annoy them more then anything. This week I had to have minor same day surgery and it was my first experience being the one in the hospital bed. Putting on the gown and removing my jewelry had me starting to get pretty anxious. Luckily throughout this whole ordeal I’ve had the most caring dr’s and nurses. David and I have both remarked about how great they have been. I want to send a big thank you shout out to the DeWitt Army Medical Center and Hospital Staff for being so great! I am recovering nicely and am happy to get back into the swing of things. First up is working on my favorite thing, the To Do list!
3. My New Sewing Machine! I love my old Singer that my Gram taught me to sew on but lately it has gotten fussy. The bobbin mechanism would get all twisted and there was no rhyme or reason for fixing it you just fiddled with it for an hour and it would start working again. I started doing some research and after reading consumer reports I was pointed to the Brother PC-420PRW. Ironically it is a Project Runway model which you would think would make it cheap and cheesy but it had great reviews. I headed over to Amazon to check out their reviews and it had raves, everyone loved it! So for six months I longly would check on it and think about how pretty it was and all the stuff it could do. Finally after another battle with my bobbin I checked again online and found it on sale! Wahoo! That was all the encouragement I needed and now it is here sitting on my dining room table so sparkly and pretty! It came with so many different attachments and everything is automated which is awesome. It threads the needle itself and will cut the thread with the push of a button, in fact I can push a button and it will sew on its own! I plan to keep the old Singer around for nostalgia and maybe hand it off to my sister one day in case she ever needs to sew something. It would be fun if we can carry on the tradition of teaching future generations to sew on it!
Hate It!
1. Snakes! This isn’t the first time snakes have made an appearance in my column and it probably won’t be the last. At least this time it isn’t about a snake being in my house! While we were having the siding work done the guys almost stepped on a snake in our garden and since they don’t like snakes they killed it. Well that evening as I stood on our deck I noticed something in our driveway headed away from the house and yep you guessed it, big ole snake!! I called David out to look and he went to get a closer look but we are not as brave as the siding guys, we weren’t getting close enough to kill it. Besides it was a harmless garden snake and there are plenty of moles for him to eat in the yard, plus he was headed towards our neighbors house and out of our yard. Still, ewww!!! I get chills just thinking about having two snakes in my yard in one day.
Melissa Arlena is an award winning lifestyle newborn photographer in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia who has earned her Master Photographer Certification from NAPCP in maternity, newborn and family photography. Her natural and simple work has been featured in magazines and online blogs worldwide. She has been named Best Maternity and Newborn Photographer in Richmond and Charlottesville, VA in 2023.