Project-Filled Weekend

Another great weekend in the books!

It didn’t start so hot, but it ended wonderfully. I had a headache at work on Friday that I couldn’t shake. I thought that our dinner, fish n chips and a beer (British or Catholic during Lent?) would help (ha), but it didn’t and I passed out on the couch at an embarrassing hour.

I woke up feeling muuuuuuch better on Saturday. The day was gorgeous so we headed to Target and Home Depot to pick up a few things for our two big projects we had in mind.

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We decided to do it. We’re planting grass in our backyard.

When it was raining on Thursday, just a day after my toe procedure and Kevin was at work and Gracie got all muddy just by going outside for the bathroom and I had to carry her in the house and stick her in the bath (bad toe, remember) by myself…yeah…I decided grass was necessary. Thankfully, Kevin happily agreed.

The middle portion of our backyard has grass but the two sides are where we need to plant. But because Gracie is back there all the time and we don’t want to totally ruin her backyard for her, we decided to just do one side for now and we’ll do the other side at a later date.

Here’s the before:

Home Depot had this great temporary fencing which ended up being a better option price-wise than the orange plastic or chicken wire fencing we were planning on making ourselves. Thanks, HD!

It doesn’t look like much, but it’s probably 1/4 of our yard that’s blocked off. Don’t worry mom, Gracie still has plenty of room to run around.

Here she is when we accidentally fenced her in on the wrong side. OOPS.

We started the process of picking up all the rocks, sticks and leaves to make sure the ground can easily be prepped.

Thanks to Danny & Sara who came over on Sunday, we were able to get this massive concrete boulder out of our yard!

It was there from where the old fencing used to be, and was exposed so we knew it needed to be removed if we ever wanted to plant grass.

We practically dug to China, but they finally got it out.

I bet it weighed more than 200 lbs. I said Kevin and Danny officially earned their Man Card after rolling that bad boy away.

Anywho, back to Saturday!

In addition to setting up the temporary fence and starting to prep that part of the yard, we worked on something we’ve wanted to do since last year. We hung string lights over our deck and I AM OBSESSED!

I’ll be back later this week with a full tutorial of how we did it, but it only took a couple of hours and can’t believe it turned out as great as it did. Here are some sneak peeks!

LOVE!

After a busy day of house work, we headed downtown to 4th Street Live to meet up with Kevin’s friends from grade school for a few drinks.

Unfortunately, Kentucky won.

Gordon Biersch Pilsner for him, Falls City Pale Ale for her and two not-pictured GB Marzens for both a bit later.

Kevin and Danny joined a men’s soccer league so Sara and I packed a cooler (literally, mimosas) and watched them play Sunday morning.

They came over afterwords to dig up the boulder and we went to El Torazo to celebrate their birthdays! Sadly, they forgot to do the surprise tequila shots this time. Kevin’s mom and her friend also joined us for dinner because they went to the Billy Joel concert down here!

We spent the night out on our deck because the weather was gorgeous and we had new lights! Before our string lights, you could hardly see anything out there so that project was just as needed as it was wanted.

And then Monday morning rolled around all too soon. Always happens, right?!