It Begins!

Yesterday was my official last day of work before starting my sabbatical. It was funny cause everyone pretty much kicked me out of the office a half hour before I was scheduled to leave :P They were all very happy for me and I'm excited as well! I've created a big list of things to do while I'm on sabbatical and I plan to keep everyone updated on my progress via this blog. Ramin knew I wanted to do a lot of projects as well so we had planned to make a trip to Lowes to gather all of our supplies. He is such a good planner because he was able to get a Lowes credit card before our trip and we won't have any interest for 12 months. We also had a $25 coupon as well. We ended up spending A LOT of money but it's for things we've been wanting to do for a LONG time.
I've included pictures of almost everything we got. First, we got 21 bags of mulch! You heard and see it correctly - 21 bags! Here's the reason. Our house faces South. There's nothing in front of our house for miles...just open fields...so there is nothing blocking the Southerly winds when they blow...and they do blow hard during the winter and spring. Sooo, that means almost all of our mulch we had laid down, has blown away! In fact, it's mostly all blown around the grass...it's horrible. So why would we buy more mulch if it didn't work the first time? Well, Ramin has a theory that if we plant more shrubs then it will help protect the mulch, plus he doesn't think we had enough on there the first time, it wasn't heavy enough.


So we move to the plants! We bought quite a few shrubs, all for the front yard of course. We bought a small spruce tree, it only grows to 5 feet. We bought some English Boxwoods (love those!) and some Burning Bushes (love these too, especially in the fall!) and I included some Lilac bushes for some color. We also bought these really cool red grass type plants, we figured they'd be some contrast amongst all of the green plants. So we plan to plant all of these along the side of the house, where we have all of the problems. We would have started planting today, except for the fact that it's been raining and cold all day. We hope to be able to do some tomorrow or early this week.
As you can see from the pictures, we also bought some paint. We bought a small can of very light green paint for the office (future baby room) and a 5 gallon bucket of paint called Almond Paste...it cost $90!! We were kinda shocked but it is the premium paint from Olympic so it better be good. I plan to paint both of the bathrooms upstairs as well as much of the wall in the great room. I will do that after my dad visits us for my graduation.


You can also see the annuals I bought as well. I'm going to re-pot all of my contains and fill them with petunias and some mums. I love watching how the petunias can fill out over the summer, they really grow great here!

So the gardening and the painting are my main projects, of course I've got a lot more to do! Today I already started working on my scrapbooking but that I've been neglecting for a while. I also plan to do tons of exercising and being outdoors. I also want to get myself really organized again and I'm even going to go to my mom's house and help her get her stuff organized as well.

It will be a busy month but I'd rather be busy doing these fun things I like rather than sitting at home relaxing the whole time, at least I'll have something to show for it all! What a great sabbatical this will be!

BTW - this coming week is my last week of school....and then I graduate on May 8th! YAY!