Baking

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Wine Rack

Lately, I've started drinking more wine. I can't call myself a wine drinker since I can't have less than half a glass at one time. I especially LOVE Chocolate wine. Unfortunately, after I finished my first bottle given to me by a friend, I found out that it was more of a seasonally wine.

To wait out the year, I started trying different wines. I also have lot more friends that drink wine, which means I have a little stash with no "place" to store them.  I knew that I wanted something made out of our pallet collection to hold the bottles.

About three weeks ago, we went to our local home improvement second hand store for a sale they were having. We were there to look for some wood that DH needed, and see a demonstration of Anne Sloan paints. I decided to take a quick peak into one of the used furniture stores in front of it. As soon as I walked in, I saw this beauty.

I knew I had to have it. Impulse buying is not something I typically do, but this I couldn't pass up. Made it even more worth it when the manager gave me a discount, SCORE!!

Giving this baby new life was easy. The black with hint of red is too dark for our space, so I opt to spray paint it silver.

Took almost a whole can to cover up the black, but it was worth it. I like the end result.

EXCEPT, the space benighted is boring. Something had to go there to beautify it.  See my next post on what DH did with this pallet.





Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Pallet Garden

We have had the most interesting gardening season. Today I went out on a breezy, cold November day to clean up the garden and get it ready for the winter. To my surprise I see that our pepper plant that hasn't grown all summer is flowering and has the tiniest pepper on it. 
There is a freeze warning for tonight, so we'll see how long it stays alive. Not sure if I want to water it or not.
 
Now onto the beginning, this was a labor of love from start to end. We broke up about ten pallets to create the beds, dug up the hilly section of the yard and hauled 2 cubic yards of dirt and 1 cubic yard of mulch to fill this baby up. If you know measurements, you know that is a LOT of dirt.  All of it was shoveled and wheeled barrowed over to the garden by DH and myself in two days.  Talk about hurt backs when we were done.  We so appreciated our former community garden because at least the work was done as a group.
 
Here are picture chronicle of our efforts. 

Measuring the locations and the size of the beds

 
The first complete bed
Work Injury. Branch fell from the neighbor's tree
DS "trying" out their beds. One was made for each kid
Here is the complete garden beds. My dad was visiting from London and helped DH fenced it in.
 
The work of building and digging the beds would never compare to how painful it was to haul all of the dirt and mulch to the beds.
 
 
To finish it all up, DH created a door to keep critters out, not to say that the squirrels can't jump the fence.   
DS trying to figure out the lock
All done
We hope to enjoy the fruits of this labor for many years to come. Might change the fence at a later time because this just isn't strong enough but for now, we are proud gardeners.