addicted

This Saturday was our first non-planned Saturday in a long time. So what did we do...

set our alarms for 6:30 and headed to home depot of course!

It started Friday night on our 'family date night' which consisted of dinner out and a legal pad full of notes, ideas and plans. Thank goodness for the leapster explorer because Lucy's not too interested in yard chat. After dinner and a lot of big ideas we made our first two (with a total of 5 over the course of the weekend) trips to scope out some trees. Saturday morning we knew half the city would be at home depot because it was the first sunny day in forever and well, it was possibly the end of the world and who doesn't want to enjoy some gardening and projects on your last day?! So that's why we took two cars and got there bright and early.

Our tree purchases!

We left h.d. with three full carts of stuff and some really annoyed customers behind us waiting to check out with one tomato plant.

We decided we might as well get everything for our projects at once...

first up is working on our carport area. We have a garage and attached is this carport thing but I would take out a wall if I ever tried to maneuver a car back there so last year we utilized it as a play area, grill area and some random seating. While you're using this area it doesn't seem so horrendously ugly but these pictures...yikes!

So our first plan was to paint this brick wall, paint the ceiling and the ugly brown wood slats and install light fixtures.

Do you like that I only have 'befores'? Well we might have been overly confident in how much we could get done in one day of sun.

We are still trying to determine how all of that space will be used. Part of it will be a play area again but we'll see what we'll do with the rest. My idea of this scene from pottery barn is probably not in the budget:

In the middle of projects we decided to take a break and head to one of my favorite nurseries J&L Garden Center in Bountiful just to make sure there wasn't something we were missing.

Lucy was not as enthused as us.

This is my table of goodies so far.

The rain started in again on Sunday so instead of making progress on projects or getting some things planted we drove north again to see what we could find (and this is why I'm choosing this blog title...) the Costco in Ogden has a pretty big garden center with good prices. Unfortunately we didn't find anything we had to have this visit. So we headed to Valley Nursery in Uintah (near the mouth of Weber Canyon). This is my favorite nursery of all and Lucy found a lot to do here.

Blake spied an AMAZING Japanese maple at Valley for a screamin' deal. We were contemplating picking it up but then realized we had no way to squeeze it into our car. As we wandered away two guys came speed-walking into the green house making a beeline to the exact tree. I freaked out. It's one thing for me to pass up a tree but if I feel like someone else might get it panic sets in. We watched and eavesdropped on this happy couple and when they went to find an employee to get the tree I told Blake he HAD to grab it! They haven't claimed it yet! I would find a way to make it fit! It was meant for us! And blah, blah, blah - ca-razy-town!

Sadly Blake wasn't about to fight someone for a tree and I guess we really didn't have to have it - but it didn't stop of from staring (and taking pictures) like sad saps as they tried to load it into their (much smaller than ours) car.

Addicted I tell you!

But a lot of fun.

(p.s. hopefully 'after' pictures will come soon!)