Inspiration for the Pool Hole Play Yard

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House on the Hill (more pool hole)

Our house sits on the top of a hill. Or, rather, at the top of a valley/ravine. Good for spying on zombies/incoming attackers and avoiding floods, bad for swing sets.

However, you may have heard me talk about the pool hole. Just a little bit. I've hated that pool hole for a good, long time when I had a major light bulb moment - turn it into a play yard! It's already level, has a good, packed sand base, and is 25' in diameter, perfect!

To give you an idea of how it fits in the back yard, here's a fun diagram:

I have plans, more on those later...

Friday Flashback

• Gardening Via the Grocery Store
• Tips from Models
• My Top 10 Favorite Things (To Eat)
• A Friday Link Roundup: Places I've Been...
• Frugal Luxuries: NOT Using Your Home Printer
• Surprise!
• My Front Yard
• C'est La Vie Garden Update
• A Friday Link Roundup: Places I've Been...
• Hot Hot Weather = Cool Cool Iced Tea

Diet Update

20 pounds and almost two pant sizes down and (slowly) dropping! Woot!

I celebrated with a new pair of pants and a few shirts (all steeply on sale, of course).

Filing SCORE!

One of the best thrift store finds I've ever had, and I got it for a quarter:

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(no, that's not mine, that's the company's pretty photo)

There are so many articles and tips out there on how to organize paper and keep it off the dining table. For a lot of people, their paper piles up as mail. Me, I open the mail just fine and recycle most of it - but the paperwork that I need to file (bills, etc) gets put in a pile on top of the printer which sits on top of a little desktop shelving unit.

my fancy filing tote

The printer that we haven't used in five years.

Ugh.

After thinking long and hard about it, I realized that I will only put paper in folders if the folders are easy to see and access. The dusty tote at the bottom of the closet prior filing system was obviously not working, as evidenced by my complete lack of filing (for three years).

Enter: that desktop organizer. I just knew it would revolutionize my papery life, and for .25 cents it was meant to be.

Of course that desktop organizer has been sitting on the living room floor for about two weeks while I shamelessly avoided the ridiculous mess did more important things, but last night I sucked it up and completely cleared the printer area. The printer and a few other things went into the yard sale box, the shelf got set to the side for another use, and I set up the organizer. The hanging files that we use the most often immediately went in, and I'll add others as needed.

The bottom tray now holds that pile of to-do filing (which I was barely able to shove in there) and the top tray holds some scratch paper, five rolls of tape (no, I don't know why we have so many), and our double deck of playing cards.

This, I can handle.

Destructo-Gardening - the Pool Hole Part 1

I'd mentioned a while back that I'd hired a landscaper to come and do some demo in the yard to remove the pool hole, a flower bed, and pull some fence posts. Well, that was mid-April and it's still not done but I haven't figured out how to gracefully exit the agreement since it's a family friend... So, I'm doing a lot of the work myself.

Sometimes you must destruct to build anew. Bwahaha!

Mission: Pool Hole

Once upon a time, there was an above ground pool. Grandchildren splashed and played. Then new homeowners came along and didn't clean the pool for a while. Ew. Enter myself and hubby and a house contract that includes the removal of the yucky pool. Leaving us with a sloped yard with a 25' round, level dent filled with packed sand. I had visions of a knot garden, lots of herbs, etc.

Fast forward three years, pregnancy, child, and lots of weeds.

Well, my work was cut out for me. I don't normally like to use weed killer, but sometimes it's the best option. I sprayed the whole area, let it sit for a week and a half, then on a hot Saturday during nap time I went to work.

That's a pretty intense before, huh? I considered bothering my aunt to borrow her heavy duty brush whacker, but I needed to sweat, and pulling up from the roots is better than leaving potentially viable roots in the ground. I don't know if you can tell, but most of those weeds are as tall as I am if not taller (5'1"). Lots of cattails and goldenrod. And some sort of nasty fluffy looking grass that cut the poop out of my arms.

Fast forward an hour and lots of pulling, and we have this:

That's all of the weeds, pulled up and waiting for the wheelbarrow, yay!

Another hour of raking and dumping brush (and a tree that got cut down and tossed in there) out back, followed by a pass with the lawnmower set on low... and it's a big, sandy, stubbly circle, 25' across.

Woo-hoo! Ready for phase two (aka a layer of compost and topsoil, currently being negotiated on with the farm down the street). Phase three is being designed... and will involve a garden and a swing set!

Garden Envy - Montreal Botanical Garden

There are definitely gardens that you should be envious of - and the Montreal Botanical Garden is one of them. Hubby took me on a date there earlier in the month (a date that involves travel is one serious date).

We were there for four hours and 12 minutes and didn't see all of it - we bypassed the arboretum and the lilacs (which had gone by of course) and only glanced at the roses. I could spend days there... I was so overloaded with inspiration that we'd been driving for at least an hour on the way home before I could start gushing.

Here's some eye candy for you!

yours truly, feeling at home (I miss Poway)

shade plants + hubby = twice the eye candy