Shelves and Ivy

Anders and I have been busy working on house projects-some more fun than others. One I really enjoyed was the building/painting of some shelves for our living room. We spent an afternoon working in the garage to build them (they only took a few hours) and then we had to paint them. I got the instructions off of this great website: http://ana-white.com/. We learned a lot of things a long the way and I would change the way we did things second time around, but overall, I really like them. Here are some pictures of the final products. I'm not sure about how much I like how I decorated them...that may change soon. They also are hung a little high above the couch, but we decided a little high was okay. We wanted them high enough not to get in the way of people sitting on the couch and be far away from little people standing on the couch.



Another house project we had to do was the removal of ivy that was growing all over one side of the house. This was one of those "not so fun" projects. I thought the ivy looked really pretty, but it was destroying the siding of the house. It was growing up underneath it and we ended up having to nail some pieces of siding back on after we were done. There are still pieces of ivy stuck in some of the siding and around the windows. Hopefully it will become easier to pull out once it is dead. It took us most of the day yesterday to do tear down as much as we did and required a trip to the city green waste plant and will require a few more to the dump. We discovered that all of the ivy was crawling up several wooden trellises that were beginning to rot and fell apart as we pulled things down, so we currently have a large pile of stapled wood, ivy, and leaves in the back. We still have quite a bit of work to do back there-the house needs some cleaning and we've got to take care of the bases of the plants. For now though, here are our "before" and "after" pictures of the house. I should have taken before and after pictures of us-there would have been a major difference...