New Door... and more!

It was a gorgeous weekend in Summerville.  Saturday morning was a bit cooler, but still beautiful so we went out for a walk around Azalea Park which is right down the road from us across the street from historic downtown. 

Jace enjoyed running around the park but there was no playground so we headed a couple of blocks down to Doty Park so he could enjoy the swings and slides...and take a REALLY long nap ;)

Jace really liked climbing up to the top of the ropes with Tate... I had never done that with him before, so I think he got pretty excited about being up that high and seeing me "way down" below.  We headed home after that and Tate and I worked on gardening type stuff while Jace napped... we're definitely not done planting flowers but we wanted to see how the few that we planted do before planting more.  We still need to pick up some edging once we decide how many flowers we want to plant, so right now our front yard looks... umm random, haha.

On Sunday it was 80 degrees and sunny so Tate took Jace in the backyard to play soccer while I painted our ugly red wall.  Jace LOVES kicking the ball back and forth in the backyard, it was so fun to watch from the window while I painted.  I blogged before about our ugly red accent wall that the fireplace is on.  It was totally out of place and clashed with the green walls and the furniture we have so far.  So when I found extra green paint in the garage I knew I had to paint it.  It looks so much better!  Well, at least I think it does... makes the room look larger and most importantly, doesn't make me cringe anymore.  :)

Before

After

Another after... the room still needs alot, but this is a start!

After I was done painting we decided to start installing the new front screen door.  By "we" I mean Tate and our neighbor Joe, who happens to be 80 years old.  I made myself scarce by using Jace as an excuse for not being able to help, haha.  What can I say, following written instructions gives me the shakes. 

We wanted to install a screen door because the front of our house only has bedroom windows, all the living room, kitchen and dining windows are in the back and the back gets alot less sunlight than the front.  After the owners of our house saw what I did to repair Jace's bedroom they said they were impressed and would reimburse us for the cost of the door.  Sold!  We just picked up an inexpensive screen/strom door.  We didn't want to do the full window because we wanted to let a breeze in, and we didn't want to do a full length screen because Jace would probably eventually push it through.

While Tate and Joe worked on the door Jace and I played with the neighbors Alison and Perry.  Perry is just a few months older than Jace, so they like playing with eachother with eachother's toys.  When we headed home we saw that Joe and Tate hadn't made very much progress so we slid down the slide... backwards.

And we played in the fountain, which is Jace's absolutely favorite thing to do.  He will sit there and splash for an hour straight.  I think it's his way of hinting to me that if I want him to stop I'm going to have to get him a water table to play outside with instead.

Do you like my romper?  I look like a baby again :)

This is his excited face :)



When the door was finished we were so so so happy with the end result.  It adds a TON of sunlight to our house and it makes our house feel more like a house and less like an apartment, since we didn't have any entryway windows before.  I took pictures from the outside right after we installed it, but didn't take from the inside until this morning when the sun wasn't really shining yet, but you can still see how much light it lets in. 

From the inside...

From the outside...

Oh yea, and those are the pots I bought at
Goodwill for 40 cents and then spraypainted
with outdoor gloss paint I had laying around.

So we had a great weekend as a family and got some projects done.  Best part about it?  The projects were free thanks to spare paint left from the owners, and the fact they're reimbursing us for the $87 door.  Yay!  Jace turned 16 months on Sunday so I'll have to post updates on what he's up to at this stage soon... but for now I should really get to cleaning up the crushed goldfish all over the floor since my mom and brother will be here from Minnesota in a couple of hours to visit for a week!