It's almost Spring!

You wouldn't have guessed it was almost spring in Portland this morning.  While snow is rare in P-town, it's basically unheard of in March.  (and I know that people who live in real snow country wouldn't even call this snow but you would be surprised by how many schools were either closed, delayed or had their buses on snow routes this morning) We woke up to snow this morning and while it now has melted, it was quite the surprise. 

there are a few signs of spring at our house...

Steve even tackled a quick project on Sunday when it wasn't raining.  He used some of the leftover stone from our front walkway project to "extend" the driveway.  We were finding that we needed to step into the dirt about half the time we took Ben out of his car seat and it was tracking lots of mud into the house.  We were also stepping on plants each time we did so. 

this pillow is a little plain if you ask me

And I tackled a little spring spruce up project myself-some lighter, more spring-ish pillows for our living room.  I was getting tired of the dark red pillows that we had.  This fabric took a lot of searching to find being that grey and yellow are the "in" colors (I LOVE them together but they just don't go with our house decor) but I ended up finding it at The Whole Nine Yards on E Burnside.  The best thing about the fabric is that it is totally washable!  Yea for that. 

dead sexy slab

The parking strip is all finished but we still need to add sand and gravel in the joints to the front walkway. The process that we used was:

1. Dig out ~3-4" dirt for path
2. Tamp down dirt
   
3. add ~2" deep 1/4" minus gravel (this is partially because we already have solid soil that drains well)
4. tamp down
   
5. lay quartzite
6. lift stone and add ~1/2" sand
7. put stone so level in sand
8. fill joints with gravel
9. wet down gravel
   
10. admire
    

We decided to tackle a walkway not only because it is not exactly attractive to have a purely soil style walkway and yard, but you would not believe the amount of dirt that was in our house by the end of the week.

In addition, Barrett, our awesome tile guy spent a large part of his weekend over at our house installing our beautiful fireplace tile...more pictures to come soon as it should be all finished this week sometime. You can still see some of the dust created on the andirons from when Barrett jack hammered out the old hearth-it took me two rounds of dusting to get everything up. Now I just need to find some decor for the mantle.