The view we have all been waiting for! Our finished street view! We painted our house yellow earlier in the summer/fall and on Thursday the security door was installed. It’s a quite sturdy steel door, painted blue on the exterior and white on the interior. We also installed a new storm door with full view glass (so you can see the pretty deep blue color of the door more), and a built-in retractable screen. On those rare perfect spring/fall days where it’s warm out, but not hot enough to have the AC running, we would like to be able to open the house up to a nice cross breeze and some fresh air.
I think…. this means that we are finally ready for winter?! Pretty close to it! Donald is still feeling a bit under the weather, so once he has recovered from his cold, I’ll ask him to bring in the Christmas decorations from the garage and we will start decorating the house for the holidays!
How early do you start decorating? What are some of your favorite holiday traditions?
We had our first snow of the season today! It wasn’t too much, and it didn’t last very long, but I’m quite surprised that it waited until the third week in November! We’ve had a very mild autumn so far. This is what it looked like – just a dusting on top of the car.
Today, we had our front security door installed! It was a little bit chilly outside to have a gaping hole in the house, but we stayed in our offices and worked while Phil installed the door, and the rooms stayed fairly warm.
At this point, the door was held in place with these temporary pieces of wood, but it was starting to give us an idea of what the finished door would look like – so exciting!
And… HERE IT IS! There’s still some finishing touches left to be done (trimming off the foam that you can see on the bottom after it has set a bit), but it looks great! We’re very happy with the lever and lockset that we have selected as well! I didn’t think that the door would make that much of a difference to the feel of the living room, but I think that it looks like a whole new space! Donald is already thinking about other things we can do to update and decorate the room! (New ceiling fan? Crown moulding?)
It was a bit too dark outside once everything was finished (Grrr, Daylight Savings Time changes!), so I’ll take photos once it’s light outside again. Let us know what you think of the new door!
This wasn’t a planned meal, but we hadn’t made our grocery list yet for the week and were winging it with what we had on hand. What we ended up with was basically a chicken pot pie (minus the pie part) and served it over some jasmine rice.
Ingredients
4 Tbsp. butter – we like KerryGold
1 c. carrots, diced – I didn’t measure them, just grabbed a bunch of baby carrots until I was tired of dicing them
3-7 cloves of garlic, minced – garlic is a variable, add as much as you like
3 chicken breasts, grilled then diced into small pieces – you can make the chicken however you want, but it was nice out and Donald likes to grill
1/4 c. flour
4 c. chicken broth – you might be able to use a cup less, but we were waiting on the rice to finish cooking and kept adding more and cooking it down
1/2 tsp. thyme – I mean, I didn’t actually measure it
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes – again, imprecise addition, no sense in dirtying another measuring spoon
Salt and pepper to taste – I use less salt because I don’t use the low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 to 3/4 c. heavy cream – we used heavy cream in a recipe earlier in the week, so I just added whatever was leftover
Directions
Send your significant other outside to grill up the chicken breasts. Donald had decided to marinate them in Italian salad dressing for about 1/2 hour prior to grilling. While this is happening, prep the other ingredients. Donald also measured out the flour and put all the other ingredients on the kitchen counter.
Set up a cutting board, knife, prep bowl, paper towel, and your iPhone at the table. Watch an enjoyable TV show or YouTube video while dicing the carrots and mincing the garlic. Toss them together into a prep bowl as you go.
In a large pot (hopefully, one with good handles, as mine does not and I used a potholder to hold it in place, but the potholder was too big and I ended up singeing it), melt the butter, then add the carrots and garlic. Stir for a few minutes.
Add the diced chicken, then sprinkle the flour and mix until everything has a nice coating. Cook for a couple minutes, then add the chicken broth (we reserved some, but ended up adding in the full 4 cups as we went). Add in the thyme, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper, then stir occasionally as the sauce thickens.
While the stew cooks, make the rice. Donald used our rice cooker. It took longer than the stew, so I kept adding broth to the stew and cooking it down as we waited. It gave the carrots more time to soften, so it all worked out.
Once the rice is done (and you don’t have to keep cooking down the stew), add the heavy cream to the stew and stir. Let it thicken for a couple minutes, then take it off the heat.
Serve the stew over the rice and enjoy! We are currently watching episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” as our dinnertime entertainment.
We have had this plan for the front yard planting bed for quite a few months. However, with Michigan weather, you have to wait until sometime in May before the risk of overnight freezing goes away. Our plan was to do this as soon as we returned from our vacation out west, but we unfortunately fell sick and that derailed us just a bit as we rested and recovered.
Thankfully, Mom was bored in the house and in the house bored on Sunday, so she called us looking for something to do while Dad watched his races at home. We invited her over and the three of us headed to Telly’s Greenhouse – a local plant shop that we like.
We had a hard time sticking to just plants for the planting bed, as there were so many pretty and interesting plants, but I think we did a good job with our selections! We wanted to have plants of varying heights, and ended up with some grasses and dahlias for the back, cosmos for the middle layer, and some feathery plants and the little colorful ones (I’d have to look at the tags to see what they were) for the short layer up front.
Donald and my mom, starting to plant!
Donald and my mom go to work weeding out the planting bed and getting the dirt ready. There were some existing plants: a couple hostas and my azalea bush. There were a few baby mums, but we transferred these to some pots and will re-home them to the back yard. They had me come out periodically to help determine plant placement. When they didn’t need me, I was inside playing Animal Crossing. My island had been neglected.
First grassy, planted!
We love our plants! I’m so glad that Donald loves keeping our yard looking great! It was a lot of fun to pick these out together. Disclaimer: Yes, I know the house needs painting. We are going to try and get that done this summer.
These are a few photos of the final result! The flowers will continue to grow and get established, and I’ll try to remember to post some updates later on. Of course, as it happens, it decided to rain pretty hard just an hour or so after we finished planting. We checked on the plants in the morning, and – for the most part – they looked to have survived the deluge pretty well. Just the cosmos flowers were bent over.
Donald quickly stood them back up and packed some dirt around them before we headed over to Mom and Dad’s for a Memorial Day lunch. After getting back home, he used some of the posts we had from our foray into tomato growing to bolster the cosmos a bit until they could get a little stronger.
We think it looks a lot better and the pops of color and cute flowers make us smile whenever we see them!
Paroxysm of Giggles / Critical Mass 