befores and afters

I keep talking about how busy we have been working on the house, so here are a couple of projects we've got going on.

This is outside the guest bedroom patio door. I pulled all the grass(yes, it grows here) Friday. Yesterday the fun was had all day. Here is the before picture at 9:30am when we got back from Mario's Landscaping Supply in CV.

At about 2:30, we finished planting everything. A couple of nice boulders and some flowering plants should finish this off nicely. Gardens are always a work in progress, but I think this is a nice start.

What a change from Chicago gardening! Cacti are quite a challenge to plant. Spikes went through our leather gloves. The Saguaro on the right got Eric pretty good. He said it was like a bee sting. We might have to move it too. I'm not sure it will get enough sun there against the wall. The camera is pointed to the south east. We'll give it a few days :)

Another project I am working on is the countertops. The blue ones came with the house. My original plan was to keep them while we made our own concrete counter tops. A huge undertaking, but the thought of working with the concrete was intriguing to me, and they look so darn cool! Then my good friend Tracy A.(THANKS!!!) sent me a link to this cool stuff called Skimstone, a portland cement based product that goes right onto laminate countertops to create the look of concrete. So after a little research, and a trip to the paint store in Sedona, we decided that the Skimstone would be the way to go. Before doing the kitchen, I practiced on this counter in the pantry. It is sanded and ready for the base coat.

OOPS! I uploaded the wrong photo and didn't have the patience to figure out how to delete it from the the blog. This is in the parking lot of Hayfield Draw, where the boys ride their dirt bikes. The two calves just came walking through, then big daddy followed. That is when I backed off!

OK, Here is the after pic of the counter top. I looks way cool! There are three different materials that get skimmed onto the surface. Two coats of bonding primer, three(or more) coats of the colored cement mix, then five coats of clear topcoat. It comes in about 20 different colors, but you can mix them and layer them, so the possibilities are endless. I kept mine fairly simple, using an espresso and a red, mixing them together to get the redder brown color. Different shades can be achieved using more or less pigment in the cement. Actual work time is not that long, it is waiting for the coats to dry that takes all the time. Two days for this, with about 2 hours of actual work time

I am cooking up plans for the shelving and walls in this pantry. New hardware is in the plan too!