The Ole Switcheroo: Blogger to WordPress

It’s Official. Yes, so Official that it is a Proper Pronoun. This weekend I am switching from Blogger to Wordpress. Eek! For the past two weeks I have been researching, experimenting, designing, and scaring myself silly as I try to make an educated decision (not spur of the moment that causes chaos) about whether I should make this change or not. After all of my what-ifs and should-I-really moments I decided I was going to do it. Not only was I going to make the change, but I was going to give the blog a whole new makeover.

I had already mentioned in this post that I was most likely going to change the name of the blog. I loved the idea of “The Mego Blog” but I don’t think it showed enough of my personality and the purpose of my blog. It also broke a "cardinal rule" of blogging to not have “blog” in a blog name. But really, can blogs have rules? Suggestions, yes. Rules…blogs were meant to defy standards and be all about how you want them to be.

So after weeks of constantly thinking about names and polling every single person I knew in person, over email, through text, on Facebook, and on the phone about their opinion on a name, I found it. I knew it the moment it popped into my head. I didn’t need to ask anyone if it was a good one or not. It was The Name (there I go with those proper pronouns again), no doubts about it! That name then gave me the inspiration to start the design on my new page and help narrow in and define its purpose.

I don’t want to go squealing on the name yet, as I am sure many Google happy people will go in and find a half-finished site, but I can’t just leave you hanging. So here is a teaser, in the form of a logo I came up with for the site. Eek! I made a logo and it feels so good!

 So please forgive me this weekend if you try and go to this site, as I’m not quite sure how the exporting process will affect it. So wish me luck and here I go. Catch you next week on the other side!

Trash Talk

So rewind two-ish years ago when I made the move into our present home, I never would have guessed that certain things would become impossible to live without. Now, what do you think that is? Washer and dryer? Dishwasher? Master bathroom? Or even more fundamentally a roof and running water? Nah. None of those. Although they are pretty awesome. I’m talking about our trash compactor.

 

 

 Okay, okay I am being a little dramatic and sounding very much like a first world problem kind of girl. I am very grateful for all the wonderful things that I have and try to live a simple life, but I have most definitely fallen head over heels in love with our trash compactor. The way it strongly smashes down all of our waste into a tiny (and heavy) little square of trash…kind of gross yet kind of awesome.  With the composting and recycling that we do and with no trash service at our door (a choice because we are cheapskates budget conscious people) we can use one bag of trash for 2-3 weeks. We actually get kind of a rush when the bin looks full and then we push that little dial and here the “grrr..gog..” push of the compact working hard. Then we eagerly swing that baby open to see 50% - 75% more room appear. Seriously. We have even been known to show off the compactor skills at a party. Now I can list on my resume, “Party Skill: Trash Compacting”. No…too far? We sound a little crazy? Probably. Excellent.

Anyways, the purpose of this is not to make you install one in your kitchen (which you should) but to show you the mini-makeover we gave the trash compactor. Just a way to show our love to this wonderful appliance. Not that we didn’t love its pea green complexion…no actually we didn’t. It especially didn’t go with our other black appliances. So I found this guy:

 

 Black appliance spray paint. Genius, I say! I snatched it up (oh only about a year ago too). Obviously spray painting in the house is a no go, so we first had to extract the compactor from its resting place. The bin was pretty easy to do. It’s on wheels, and I wheeled it right out. The top panel though was hooked into place and into our electricity, so it took some careful extraction. The hubby did a fine job on this step. It really was just unplugging the connections that were carefully marked.

Then came the lovely job of cleaning a trash compactor. And while we had it out, cleaning all in and around it. I think I grumbled like I have never grumbled before. Who likes cleaning up garbage? It was necessary and at the end of the day made me feel pretty great. So I used some pretty heavy duty cleaning supplies and then some isopropyl alcohol to really get it clean.

So after all was cleaned, I had to do some minor taping. First I taped the back off to ensure no paint messed with the electrical aspects. Then I had to tape up the lovely faux-wood paneling screen. With the dials and writing on it, we decided to keep that clean for now. Finally I had to tape off the bottom of the bin, which is actually something you step on that will make the bin open for hands free garbage dumping. This thing really gets better and better, doesn’t it?

 

Duh duh duh. Ready to go, or so I thought. I read the directions as I was shaking it, getting ready to spray, and it said to lightly sand the item you were painting. So just when I was giddy with my finger on the spray bottle, I had to go and sand it. Then I had to clean it with the alcohol again. Thankfully Eric reminded me that it is all in the prep work. It really is, too. Don’t skimp on the prep work if you want a lasting result!

Finally, I was able to get my spray paint on! Word of the wise, make sure your finger isn’t in the way of the stream. It makes it come out gloppy. Ask me how I learned that one, eh? Make sure to do thin, even coats. Have a pattern to your spray painting too, so certain areas don’t receive more paint than others. You may notice that later. Here it is all painted after two coats and a 24 hour period of waiting in our basement.

Now here it is installed:

I was thrilled with the result. Thrilled I tell you! The black matches all of our other appliances perfectly and makes them all fit better together. Now some of you may ask why we left the wood paneling background? We actually like it. It adds some character and reminds us that we are fixing up an older home. We aren’t going for perfect. We are trying to make our home us, with some funk. Like my husband says, “I don’t want to live in a perfect house. It is the flaws that I end up loving.” So wise. There are probably different degrees of flaws that he loves and then others he couldn’t live with (like broken stuff) but I totally agree. The flaws and the little eccentricities make a home feel lived in and have special character.

Here we are again for a before and after:

One of my favorite and easiest updates yet! I totally recommend the appliance paint too, especially if you have older appliances. It is such an easy and inexpensive face lift! What have you been painting recently? It's definitely one of my favorite tricks of DIYing!

Part II: Stones Throw Away From AWESOME!

Welcome back to part two all about stone makeovers! Didn't think I could spread out a blog post about stones over TWO posts, did you? Ahh the magic of the never-ending stones. Because that is definitely how we felt after we finished up part one about stones. You can see a quick peek from the pictures below.

There was still a magically big pile of stones. So it got us thinking, what next? Then the possibilities just seemed to open up. We started in the front yard and moved around to the back.

The first places in the front were around our giant oak trees and perimeter of our driveway. The trees had beds already and the driveway had random brown stones around it. It was time for a little dress-up for them!

Before:

After:

Then (and I apologize for the no before and after, since our magical helper elf the Colonel, aka Eric's dad who is living with us for a while, worked his magic while we were gone) we moved around to the plantings on the side of the house. Don't they look gussied up?

Remember this bed where I reused the bulbs? Yup, another makeover here!

 As we continued our tour around the yard (yes, we still had more stones) we moved to this back patio area. This one is very dramatic as well. Love it!

Before:

After:

With the few we had left, they squeezed into the garden, which is so full you almost can't tell.

Before:

After:

So there you go. A few tons of stones later and we have quite the dramatic complete yard makeover. You also have a completely happy girl! I love how the stones just make the yard look so clean and cohesive. Oh yes, and they are low maintenance! My green thumb is growing, but it is taking a while so low maintenance is sill king.

Question:
Any dramatic makeovers in your life right now? Inside, outside? House, personal? I would love to hear about them!

A Stone's Throw Away from the Biggest Makeover Yet

If you look at any of my posts, make sure you check this one out. Even if you aren't the biggest fan of landscaping; it's okay. The dramatic change will still be exciting. I am still excited about it, and this has been done for about 2 weeks...yes two weeks. I am ashamed but there have been so many projects I have wanted to share that we did before this landscaping adventure. So I am a little behind. This is actually a project that I have been wanting to do for YEARS. So you can imagine my gratification to have it finished.

So this project is all about landscaping the beds in the front of the house. When I moved into this house, there was just old landscaping and this terrible ground cover that had just gone crazy. It had started to run the place. It bugged the heck out of me. So one random day after work I just took a hoe and hacked at it  like crazy. I didn't do that great of a job either. The hubby came out after my mess and had to clean it up. I didn't have the muscle to get at that roots. So that was my first attempt, get rid of the terrible ground cover. Just taking that out made me happy, but we still had a long way to go...and a long way to wait until we were able to tackle it again. Last fall, we were randomly at Lowe's and I had the urge to finally start (or would it be finish?) the project. So we bought a ton of plants and put them in...during the effects of a hurricane. Remember that one that ran up the east coast last fall? Yup, during that time. Eric's parents were in town, and we wanted to take advantage of his Dad's super landscaping skills. So in went the plants during a hurricane. Why all the explanation? Because up until that point (and I am still kicking myself about this) I never took pictures of anything. Hence the minimal original house pictures. Now you are up to speed. This is where we were from September up to a few weeks ago.

So there are the "before" pictures. All the plants are in but it doesn't really look like it with all the dirt surrounding them, does it? It just looks, well dirty and messy! Our next step was the barrier paper. We are all about doing it once, doing it well, and making it as maintenance free as possible! So we gathered rolls of barrier paper and started laying it down.

 I already think it looks better! Having a darker color makes the plants pop with contrast. This step was fairly easy but definitely a two person job. The hardest part was cutting the slits for the plants. Also, make sure you get a lot of anchors to hold the barrier paper down or use rocks from around the yard. We used both. So after we finished this step, life got in the way a little and we proudly boasted a half finished project in our front yard for a few weeks.

Then we finally had the time to move on to our next step. Can you guess what material we decided to use (hint: title!). Yup, rocks. What made us choose rocks? Two words:oak trees. We have two gorgeous oak trees in our front yard. The problem? They drop humongous amounts of leaves in the fall, pollen in the spring, and acorns all year round. When I say humongous, I mean it. So much that it dictated this decision. Rocks will allow us to leaf blow the beds, which makes it much more low maintenance (there it is again!). If we went with mulch, we would be there on our hands and knees scooping up pile after pile of debris and lugging in our cart back to the fire pit (talking from experience). Then there comes the whole burning episode which takes time (and our neighbor likes to call the cops on us when the smoke blows into his yard). Also, mulch has to be put down every year to keep the beds looking nice. Although rock was a pricier initial investment, we consider it exactly that, an investment. Our nicer neighbors (meaning the don't call the cops on us) have had stone for years and never regret it. Let them live and us learn!

We had fun shopping around at all the stone lots. There are many choices - light, dark, red, purple! We decided to go with a nice neutral. Eight scoops later (delivered thankfully) there was no turning back on this project.

Now that's a big pile of rock (6 tons to be exact!). So we set to (hard) work of putting this stuff down. Thankfully we had some muscle around to help. The in-laws are living with us for a while so we have put them to work (love you both so much!). Armed with shovels, rakes, carts, and buckets we began. Oh, did I mention it was lightly raining? It tends to rain when we have big projects scheduled. We haven't melted yet! Here are a few action shots.

I had the much easier job as the raker. The big men decided they would be the shoveller and haulers. I would have gladly hauled some around, but why fight too hard for that job? Mine was just as important! So here we have it folks, the final reveal:

One more before and after for the dramatic finale!

I love it SO MUCH! You can pretty much find me at least once a day standing outside and staring at our landscaping. After two years of wanting this project to happen, it finally did! I couldn't be more pleased with the result.

Another plus of the project? There was more stone left over, so the rest of our yard's beds could have a makeover. Check back on Wednesday to see the smaller bed makeovers. I've gotta tell you, they are pretty awesome too. They just bring a whole cohesive look to the place. Anyways, more on that Wednesday.

Question:

Any big projects in your house (or life) that you have been wanting to attack for a while? Please share!