We've been busy...

June has been BUSY!! I am beyond grateful that it's over, and glad that I survived ;)
Besides all the birthday hoopla, The Husband and I made a few minor home improvements.
Here's the first one:

I don't have a before picture, but we used to have a trendy, square-shaped light here. The Husband accidentally broke the cover (or if you want to be technical, the lens) almost two years ago. You read right, two years ago. So, for the past almost two years we've had bare fluorescent bulbs in our kitchen. Nice. Needless to say, it looks much better now.

Here's the second one:


The Husband is a military brat, so to speak, and he spent about five years in Iran back in the seventies. He was just a child when he came back, but he ended up with these beautiful Iranian prayer mats. The are at least 30 years old, unraveling a bit, and were living in our attic. So, for Christmas, I had them matted and framed. They turned out great, and The Husband loved them, but they've been living propped up against the wall since Christmas. Yes, since Christmas. So we finally figured out where to hang them, which was A LOT harder than we anticipated, because they're so big with the matts and frames. As you can see, though, we finally found the perfect place.

And on to our next project, first I will post some before pictures:


Yes we had a ghetto yard, complete with astro turf where the grass didn't grow. The Husband and I had our house built, it turned five years old this past May. At the time of building we were involved in about three costly ventures, not the least of which was planning our wedding, so we decided to save some money and do the landscaping on the new house ourselves. If you are laughing hysterically at that ridiculous idea, you should be. We put down sod ourselves, dug up years old (and VERY HEAVY) crepe myrtles, and planted a pretty nice front flower bed. The front looked okay, but the back, well you've seen it. However, here's the new and improved backyard! It only took five years to do it! (the fence is next on our list, and you can definitely see why)

That's about all, The Husband and I are enjoying a well-deserved rest. I do have one more picture to show you, though:

Can you see that there's a fly trap hanging above my kitchen table? We have a bit of a fly problem, may be the dog door, I don't know, all the neighbors are having fly issues, too. Anyway, we bought a few outdoor and indoor fly traps. I thought we would put the indoor traps in an out-of-the-way place and hope for the best. The Husband had a different idea. Yeah. To make matters worse, we have a very open floor plan. When you walk into our front door you can basically see the entire downstairs, save for the master bedroom and bathrooms. So, when you walk in now, surprise, fly trap! Besides looking tacky, do you really want to eat your meals under a fly trap. "Oh, I'm sorry honey, I couldn't hear you, did you say pass the potatoes? The sound of dying flies buzzing in my ear drowned out your voice." Gross. The Husband honestly HONESTLY thought this was a good place to hang a fly trap. Ladies, see what I'm up against? ;)