We in the Gross household are already gearing up for spring. After all, what else is there to do in the late weeks of winter with on again off again snow, cold, rain, and sun? I've made my first attempt this year at starting my veggie plants from seed. They sit in the window sill growing ever so slowly under my full sprectrum plant lights to help out with our obvious lack of the big yellow ball in the sky in these here parts.
But in order to be able to put these little guys in the ground we have a lot of work to do! We even bought a truck off of Craigslist so that we wouldn't have to rely on (pay for) renting trucks or having things delivered (which means we are trying to sell my little Mazda3 *tear... but really there is no need for us to have three cars). The first step in our grand plans is having some of our massive fir trees taken down. This is going to happen tomorrow... ack! I took some before pictures.... I'll post them after the trees are down and I have after pics. Once this is done we can bring in dirt to re-do our front lawn, and to turn the area behind our garage into a gardening mecca (at least that's how I have it envisioned in my head :-) Behind the garage, we are going to level it out, put in pea gravel for the areas around raised beds, build raised beds, put in a green house, a composter, a potting bench....ah the dreams go on and on! And on top of that, Noah wants to put in an outside patio where our cherry tree is currently, complete with a brick oven and firepit!
Phew... we'll see how far we get.
Anyway, here's our new truck to help us in all these endeavors:
Ok, so back to reality, a little recap of the last month or so:
For Valentines Day we went to the Olympic Peninsula and did a little winery tour. It's always gorgeous over there and we had a great time with our friends Kris and Angela:
Goofing off on the ferry ride over :-)
Lake Crescent on the peninsula:
We've also finally started building the built in bookcases for around the fireplace... more to come on that as it develops...:
Noah hard at work... what a good hubby! (And also using the awesome high density foam rollers we found... they're doing a great job of getting the paint smooth). After the bookcases for the office, I think we are starting to get this down. The biggest lesson we've learning I would say is about the "swipe". When painting boards one side at a time, it is very important to swipe the dry side with a clean clith after you've painted one side... otherwise you are left with thick collections of paint on the other side that end up drying and are impossible to sand down nicely to make a flat painted side.
Anyway, that's most of the news for now. Here's to hoping March lives up to it's catch phrase: In like a lion, out like a lamb!
