Fire Pit Built By Tim!

 Tim finished a huge section of our fire pit recently! Before I show you what it looks like now, we have to flashback to what it looked like before...

This is the fire pit we inherited when we bought the house. Clearly a DIY half thought out fire pit. It worked but wasn't very pretty looking. Since we had extra pavers after the walkway project Tim got to work building a new fire pit where the old one was. 

We wanted the fire pit to be larger so we could easily fit a pallet on top if we wanted to. Also since they were bricks and not fire pit pavers, it was a bit harder to line them up. (I mean, I didn't do anything...it was ALL Tim...but I did practice lining them up before we actually started and it was difficult).

The pavers Tim used were these ones. They look great and we bought them when they were 25 cents a piece which was a great deal! Tim used Loctite to glue the pavers together. 

We also had crushed gravel left over from the walkway project so really the only cost was the glue to put this together. However we will be adding a steel bottom to the fire pit and adjusting this slightly because after finishing this Tim announced that pavers can explode due to heat. Scary stuff that we didn't realize before starting this project! We will get the steel insert and then surround the fire pit with white rocks. I really wanted to get Adirondack chairs ordered this year but I cannot find the cheap plastic $20 ones anywhere they are all sold out! So for now we will get the fire pit all set up and next spring I will order the Adirondack chairs.

Here is an inspiration picture for what I want it to look like next spring.

Source

Obviously our fire pit won't have expensive Adirondack chairs and it will be brick based instead of huge rocks but I love the white rocks and white chairs. I may go with a different color though, I'm not sure yet!

I just love how it turned out! I'm lucky that Tim is so OCD and is very precise. He really takes pride in these projects and they end up looking so amazing! I know it's not his choice of weekend entertainment but I love when he works on projects around the house. 

So, still quite a bit to do, but this is shaping up to be a great backyard hangout area! I can't wait for some chilly fall nights by the fire pit! 

Do you have a fire pit? Have you ever built a DIY fire pit? I want to know what your backyard looks like, what features does it have?

New Solar Lights

 You guys, I finally ordered some solar lights to light up our front walkway! OneFrugalChick on Instagram posted a deal for Amazon for these solar lights and I was able to snag them for only $13 a 6-pack! I ended up needing 18 lights total so buying three packs worked out perfectly. Although I wish they were more of a white light instead of yellow I am thrilled with how they look for such a cheap price! I had been previously looking at Walmart for clearances out lights but they still weren't getting clearanced out. I was so happy to find these because I knew I wanted to get some in the garden before summer ends. 

The other night I noticed that the lights were starting to turn on one by one at twilight (ayo Twilight fans) so I headed outside to snap some pictures. You can see that some of the lights haven't turned on yet but I love the gentle glow they give off!

Also, the walkway is looking great! A round of applause for Tim on that one!

I think at this point I was just waiting for two or three lights to turn on. They are just enough to give off light if you are coming up our walkway. I'm picturing pumpkins lining the walkway this fall, leading kids up to the door for Halloween. If there is Halloween this year, who knows at this point!

One more light to go! If you head to my instagram (balancingonmytoes) in my home story I have a little video of walking down the walkway towards the house. You can hear the nighttime sounds that we get here in Rhode Island. I love the sound of summer nights here, it's so peaceful with all the wildlife sounds. I love where I live!

When all the lights were finally on I was so happy! It just looks so nice!

These lights are plastic, not glass. I know that may make them "cheaper" but I personally like that they can get bumped around and knocked over and aren't going to shatter. Mostly I prefer things that aren't too precious.  I worry less about Sophie running around like a bull in a china shop when things aren't breakable.

Look at that precious little face in the window! Also, this just reminds me of how far we've come. There were very few gardens, no walkway, no evergreens. We've come so far in such a short time!

Just ignore my heart eyes over here. I'm a little obsessed.

The design on these lights is so pretty too. Look at the glow it sends across the walkway. 

Okay, that's all for my new solar lights! What sort of outdoor lighting do you have at your house? I would love to add some solar lights in the backyard too, but we are still working on our plans for the backyard so we will see what we end up with back there. Tim recently finished part of a project he's been working on and it looks so good, I cannot wait to share it with you all.

Also, I am going to work on my plans for this front garden for next year....and what other plants and plans I have for the yard next spring. Oh, the projects just keep on coming to me!

DIY House Projects: Creating a Garden and Covering a Well Pump

One garden down, a few more to go!

My mom has always loved to garden and her parents always loved to garden too. So, I come from a line of gardeners and I think I was destined to want to dig in the dirt. But, I have no idea what I'm doing. I thought I would start small with a little area that is in our yard up by the road.

Want to see where this started?

Believe it or not, you are looking at the same view. Crazy right? When we moved in we had this ugly rusted well pipe that was broken and sticking up out of the ground. A couple of months back Tim made a call and we got the pipe itself replaced. It was bight white and while it looked better and not rusted out, I still didn't want to look at a pipe sticking out of the ground like a Mario game.

I decided my best bet was to pick up a fake rock from Amazon and I ended up purchasing this one. Any one else with weird quarantine purchases? A huge fake rock might be the number one strangest item purchased in quarantine...but I'm not trying to start a contest or anything!

So, I dug up the area and got the fake rock set up and this is what our neighbors looked at for a couple of weeks. 

Then, I got my act together and headed to Home Depot to grab some mulch, top soil and a few plants!

I planted what I picked out and realized I needed more mulch and a few more plants so I headed to Walmart to finish up this area.

My little car can't hold too much but I got what I could fit!

I plan to shape out the area a bit more and add some more mulch on the edges to neaten it up, but I'm waiting for a few more garden areas to be dug out to get more mulch. I am so pleased with how it turned out!

I realize that in the future I may need to move some of the shrubs in the future if this tree grows, but I plan to adjust my gardens as needed. There are a few annual flowers in the front, which I plan to dig out at the end of the season and hopefully replace with tulip bulbs in the fall. Hopefully this will make this area come to life early each spring and prevent me from having to buy new flowers each season.

My main focus was to get some perennials in here so I would have to do less work in the future. I also wanted to make sure several of the plants were evergreen. Our gardens contained zero winter interest, meaning that all winter long all I saw was white snow and brown dead trees. I want to have some evergreens to see all year long!

I also planted some perennial flowers and a lilac bush. I hope these will bring some color to the garden. I mostly stuck with coral, white and pink for my colors. I have seen some gardens with a ton of color and some with the focus on only a few colors and I'm still trying to decide exactly what I prefer. 

I think when I do get tulip bulbs I will try to get only pink and white tulips to keep this area fairly color-coded. (See I'm even organizing the plants.....out of control over here!)

My plan is to stay far enough away from the well pump that if they need to dig it up for any reason it won't disturb the larger plants, but if they do it's okay. Nothing that I purchased is super expensive, so if it was dug up in the future that wouldn't be the end of the world. 

I took far too many pictures of this area and I apologize for that, but I was just so darn excited to do this area all by myself!

Up next? Gardens around the walkway, which I hopefully will be able to share with you soon!

I hope it's sunny where you are today! After some intense rain on Saturday, the sun has been shining the rest of this long weekend and I love it!

DIY House Projects: Completed Front Walkway

Today I'm sharing our completed front walkway! I can't stop gushing about my husband. I am in awe with the amazing job he did!! I never knew he was so talented at home projects but this walkway is just incredible. 

Remember where we started?

It was just an empty lawn and when we stepped off the front steps it was muddy and gross.

Then we had the moat...

Now, we have this......

Isn't it beautiful?!

I love the pattern and cannot believe what a great job he did!

He did such an amazing job and I'm so proud to have an amazing and talented husband.

My plan is to create gardens to surround this walkway with gardens and I can't wait to get this next part of the project done!

Also, do you see that little fluff ball in the window? :)

What do you think of the walkway? Have you ever built something like this before?

The Start Of Our Front Walkway

Good morning everyone! We lucked out and never lost power over here, although many of our fellow Rhode Islanders weren't quite so lucky. Today I wanted to share the start of our front walkway project.

I had a ton of "big ideas" when it came to the front walkway but honestly it mostly came down to price! We ended up choosing gray pavers for the material. Our house is gray so I thought that the gray pavers would be the best choice.

Lucky for us Lowe's had a sale on gray pavers!

I was able to order them online for 60% off! When making a huge home project purchase like this I always like to look for a sale. I knew we would be spending a big chunk of money but saving 60% off a big chunk of money makes my deal loving heart so so happy. So 1000 pavers later we had two pallets sitting outside ready to go!

Tim and I spent some time laying out rope to see where we wanted the walkway to lay.

We plan on bringing the gardens to wrap around the walkway so hopefully it will look really nice once we finish, make the gardens look nice, and get some nice looking grass in here!

Now here we go with the before pictures:

Now we were able to get started laying the pavers.

I highly recommend laying out a row or two of pavers so you can see the flow of the walkway. Sophie was very interested in what was happening. 

We kept going back and forth between a curved edge and a flat edge. You will have to come back to see what we decide!

This past Saturday was digging day! We attempted to both dig with Sophie around and......

it wasn't working. Sophie was interested in what we were doing, wanted to dig in other areas and was just crazy. So I left Tim to dig and sat with Sophie inside. Just when Tim was ready to quit, our neighbor came over to help! We are so grateful because with his help Tim was able to get the whole walkway dug out!

There are now a million other steps to complete before this walkway is done, but we are excited that this part is complete!

Sophie was thrilled to roll around in the dirt and mulch.

Poor Tim was exhausted.

But check out our moat! I kept joking in the torrential downpour on Monday that we could get some alligators and turn this into a moat.

Here's Sophie watching her dad work.

Some more pictures throughout the process. 

Now, over the past few days we haven't really been using our front steps since there is a big muddy drop at the bottom, but it makes me hopeful when I look out and see our new moat :)

Have you ever put in a walkway or another outdoor project like this?

Have a great day!