Planning a garden

I have been starting to plan out our "garden" for a while now, but now that the house is painted and we are getting closer to fencing in our front yard the time to start the labor of planting things is quickly approaching me. I intend to transplant the vast majority of plants that were already on the property when we bought the house. We are hoping to go with an English cottage style garden in the front yard. Basically no grass, just flowers and herbs and things with paths going through the yard. I am still trying to decide on how I want to add a seating area to the front yard - do I want a small patio area in the middle of the yard or would it be better just to have a bench in front of one of the trees or a combination of the two (a patio area right off the tree with a bench and table and chairs).

While I looking up herbs (how tall they get, how far they need to be spaced out, what kind of environment they prefer, etc.) I stumbled upon this great webpage that discusses companion planting. This is of great interest to me because I prefer to keep as organic a gardening atmosphere as possible and knowing what to plant next to what to help control pests is very useful information. I was really excited to see that I can help deter aphids by planting garlic next to my roses. This was super exciting to me because last year I had a huge infestation of aphids in the rose garden at the house we were renting and the house we bought has several rose bushes as well. If you don't know what aphids are you are really lucky cause they are so disgusting to have all over your rose bushes. I saw them on pretty much every rose bush in town last year so I really hope that planting garlic with my rose bushes keeps those nasty aphids away.

Here is a link to the webpage I stumbled across on companion planting: http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/lib2/complant.htm

The house is painted

We are so happy with the results of having our house painted. The painters did an excellent job. We already had one neighbor request a business card from our painter and another one asked me what we paid for all the work. I know several other houses in the area could use a fresh coat of paint like our house just got. For us it was as much about maintenance as it was about aesthetics. Some of the wood trim on our house had no paint left on it and was beginning to warp due to exposure to all the elements. Hopefully we caught it early enough not to have any bigger problems where the wood had been so exposed.

The paint colors have been picked

After painting patches of Dunn Edwards High Noon and Inside Passage on various spots of our house yesterday to help us decide between the two colors. We then turned to all of our friends via this blog, Twitter and Facebook to help us make sure that we were right in the color we were pretty sure we wanted. As all of our friends were leaning towards the same color as we were we have decided on Inside Passage for the main house color and Swiss Coffee for the trim on the house. The darker of the two color swatches above is the house color and the lighter one is the trim color, oddly enough the colors we picked are almost identical to those of our dining room (which is still painted as the previous owners had it). We called our painter this morning with our final color selections and he will be out on Monday to start the work.

test patches of paint

Today we ran to Dunn-Edwards and picked up samples of the two colors we had narrowed it down to and sought advice as to which kinds of paint and primers were appropriate to use on the house so that the paint doesn't fade and chip too quickly. Much of the paint on the trim work was chipped off pretty bad when we bought the house and some areas had no paint left on them so we want to be certain to get a good paint job that would last more than a year or two.

The guys at Dunn-Edwards were very helpful and recommended Ultra-Grip primer for the trim, doors, etc and Eff-Stop primer for the stucco on the house. They also recommended Perma-Sheen paint for the trim, doors, etc and Evershield for the stucco on the house.

Time to paint the house

Well, when we bought our new house we knew painting it was one of the first things we would have to tackle, so here we are tackling the job of picking a color to paint the exterior of the house. After much thought we decided that we wanted to "match" the color of the stone wall on the front of our house and that we would stick with a bright white for the trim. We decided on the trim color partly due to the windows in the addition having no trim around the white windows and therefore thought that the white would help make the trim around the house blend better.

We went through a stack of paint chips several times in order to narrow our color choices for the main exterior. We are now down to two colors. Dunn Edwards Inside Passage and High Noon. Inside Passage is the lighter color of our stone wall and High Noon is the darker color of our stone wall.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc are welcome as to our color choice for the house. We are hoping to keep the cottage look and feel of the house. We are leaning towards an English cottage style for the front yard landscape, various flowers and plants that can just kind of have the unintentional feel about them - as if they just kind of grew there. Of course I will post some of the ideas for our front yard in the future, but we really do need to get the house painted soon as parts of our trim have no paint left on them.

Inside Passage












High Noon