DIY Stepping Stones

A while back I saw a cool idea on Pinterest on making your own step stones. I quickly read through it (aka-looked at the photos) and sent it onto the hubby and told him I wanted to do this at some point. So while we were rebuilding our fence a few weeks back Terry remembered that I wanted to do this and purchased an extra Sonotube to use as our mold.



 In case you have no clue what a Sonotube is, they use them for putting concrete into for fence posts and such. Anyways, he cut out some rings from it with a saw to make them perfect for little stepping stones.

We laid out some tarp because I really didn't want to slop any concrete on the grass or patio. Then put a layer of garbage bags over the rings.

 I had to add some stones to make them all pretty and special. Then we added the concrete...

....but since I didn't read the directions from pinterest and was just wingin' it....they didn't turn out right. The weight of the concrete sucked the stones into the mold.

Good thing we only did one tester because I forgot the part where you don't put the stones on the bottom first. You first pour the concrete into the mold... then wait about 20-30 minutes (depending on how runny your concrete is) then place the stones on TOP! At that point you can do fun little hand prints...or dog prints like we did.

Here they are dried and placed in our walk way. It takes about 24 hours for them to cure out so you can step on them. They are a bit smaller than I wanted but they get the job done! I just need to make about 6 more and they will go all the way to the gate.

A new Cozy Couch and Couch Confusion!

Recently we have been looking around for a sectional couch for our family room. In the past it was always harder when we had guests over with our old set up because it we really only had room for four people on the furniture. One in the chair and three tightly fit on the couch. Then we would have to bring out folding chairs or bar stools etc. And the other thing we didn't like is you couldn't cuddle side by side and watch a movie on our old couch!

So the other day our wonderful Costco had a ton of furniture in and we found the perfect couch for our family room. It came in three HUGE boxes and we loaded up two of the boxes in our old grandpa truck and the other fit in our car. It was quite hilarious leaving Costco and going up the huge hill to our house. Our truck looked like that Volkeswagon in from the IKEA commercial...

but we did make it home just fine, unpacked it and here is how it looks now!

We ended up getting a seven piece sectional. Its soooo wonderful we can move the two ottomans around and push them all together to make this huge cuddle like bed. It will be great for over night guests too. We love that we have room for a bunch of people now! The cool thing is that all the pieces can unhook and you can move the couch around in like 15 different positions. (Which is good for my OCD self since I am always rearranging things).

So after we got this new furniture we had to find places for our old furniture. We decided to move it into our living room area...and make it more guest seating friendly as well. BUT for the last few weeks its been driving me nuts. It was not fitting right and the room felt sooo small! Here is how the room looked before. It was open and didn't feel cluttered.

Here is how it looked after we moved the couch over. Sorry for the bad photos they were taken with my phone! It also doesn help I had all the blinds closed to keep out the heat last weekend too!

The little wing wall at the entry way was driving me crazy and having that extra love seat there. It really just closed off the room too much. Then my couch covers were driving me nutzo too. I like that all the furniture is a close match but it just felt cramped. So last night I ended up moving the couch further into the living room and pushing the love seats in closer to the window and ripped off my couch covers to make it look like this.

It does feel more open and I do feel a little better about it but it doesn't flow quite right to me. I think what I am going to have to do is get rid of the love seat closest to the front door and move our reclining brown chair (use to be in the family room, now in our guest bedroom) into that position. It will for sure open up the area so much more and hopefully complete the room and we will still have adequate room for lots of people to sit in this room as well.

What do you think? Am I crazy or does this not look right? If anyone has any other ideas or suggestions please let me know. :)

Other than figuring out the living room furniture we sure have been enjoying our new family room furniture and are very happy that we got it. Now we just need to start inviting people over now that we can entertain more easily.

Our New Vinyl Fence

Our side fence was in desperate need of repair and looked like this! You cant see it from the photo but it was leaning into our yard and about to fall over.

Over the past month we have been doing research on who had the best deal on vinyl fencing and our lovely local Costco won! We were able to get a box of 3 panels for $199 a box and each box covered about 24' and needed two to get the entire fence done.  So our crazy behinds ended up scheduling our fence rebuild with our neighbor on the hottest weekend of the summer. We took off Friday from work and were done by Sunday morning. It was so hot that we were only able to work in the mornings and evenings! I felt so bad for Terry. He had sweat pouring off of him! He is such a hard worker.

The old fence was so rotten that it only took about 20 minutes to get all of the old wood panels down. The pressure treated posts that were cemented into the ground we just kicked over. It indeed was time for a new fence!

The reason it took us almost 3 days to complete is becuase you had to set each post in concreate and let it dry for 6 hours before you set your next post. Thankfully the heat was on our side for that process and we were able to set 3 posts in the first day.

Each hole had to be dug down 30". We had tons of left over dirt to fill in all the holes Cooper digs in our yard looking for moles :)

Progress:

And finally on Sunday morning we were able to put in the final panels and this is the final product!

We are so happy with our new fence! It just looks SO much better and cleaner. We are happy that we dont really have to do a bunch of maintence like a wood fence. We dont have to paint or stain it. Just maybe pressure wash it every few years and it will last a very very long time! We are very happy with it!