I spent a good part of last week in planes and airports and got Photoshop installed on my new computer.  The results look like this:

Inspiration!

I'm no interior designer.  I'll be the first to admit it.  But I'm a bit of a junkie for it and am always looking at images and saving them as inspiration for my own home.  After I chose the color for my living room and moved on to bigger, more important projects, I've felt trapped into the scrub-blue color that was SUPPOSED to be sort of a gray-blue.  I looked many times for blue living rooms to give me ideas for what to DO with this color, because I can't start over at the moment and re-paint.  I will eventually, but so many other projects have to come first.

WELL.

Yesterday, this little room showed up on The Lettered Cottage!
They were interviewing Kim Myles for her episode of HGTV'd and do you see that?  She used a VERY similar color on that living room.  On purpose!
My faith in the potential of my living room is bolstered and I'm thinking of purple curtains.  Even the rug in the "before" room looks like what I have in here and she uses black furniture in the after :D

Now how do I make my couch yellow?

Plexiglas(s)!

My phone has informed me that Plexiglas has only one "s" in it.  So this is a disclaimer that if you see it typed as such, it is not a typo!

I installed Plexiglas this weekend!!!!  The windows in my garage door have been busted out or missing since I bought the house, and there were only hanging bits of plastic where windows should have been.  Now that I've replaced the side door on the garage and straightened out the garage door, I finally got around to sealing the remaining openings so that fewer critters would make it into the garage.

Now, when you see the pictures you will probably wonder why I bothered going to the trouble of installing the plexiglas when I haven't painted the door yet.  There was a reason for this.  My garage has quite the insect problem.  Mosquitoes and wasps have been making a home of the building for a long time and make a meal out of me every time I work on it.  Fogging the garage while there were big gaping holes in the walls didn't seem very efficient.  So, I installed the windows and left the film on the inside and fogged the heck out of it last night.  When I go back in to air it out, I will remove the remaining plastic film from the insides of the windows.

Repair Pr0n!

Also, since I believe I didn't do an official "side door" entry, here's the before and after:

Before:

After:

Dreaming in Photoshop...

I don't get to work on the house every day, but sometimes I can't make it through the whole day without at least *imagining* I get to work on the house.  So that's what I did at work today.  I photoshop-renovated the garage.

If you need a reminder, the front of my house looks like this.

The Garage, currently looks like [the bottom half of] this.

And here's what I did today:

I've been taking inspiration from pictures of children's play houses, cottages and ornate sheds on Google Image Search.  But for the board & batten one, I'm both drawing inspiration from the Tiny Victorian Cottage, and Pink Toes and Power Tools, while the second one is drawing from my house and the appeal of having the finished garage match the rest of the property.  The turquoise accents are just my attempt at adding color without painting yet another door red.  

Please excuse my not taking a picture after cleaning up the tree slaughterhouse in my back yard.

For your enjoyment, some inspiration photos:

Source

Source

Source

source?

HOLY CRAP THAT WEED WAS A TREE!!!!!

I spent the last few minutes attempting to identify the tree that was trying to eat my garage and had found a lot of useless sites claiming to have tools for plant identification.  The most usable tool was the Virginia Tech weed identification site, but it only had a database for grasses, or so I thought.

This, is my new favorite site (of the day): Key to Leaves of Virginia Trees

So, that plant that I thought might be a Virginia Creeper... or a Wild Sarsaparilla?  IT'S AN ASH TREE!!  TREE!!!

IT REALLY WAS A FREAKING TREE


Ahem..  So I'm feeling appropriately vindicated that it took a few hours with my favorite new toy to successfully remove the thing:

Oh Skil Saw, how I love thee

Here are some better pictures by which I attempted to identify the plant, if I'm wrong please tell me