Sometimes I say to myself “we’re going to take it easy this weekend” and then we end up organizing the garage.

And last weekend was one of those.

My mom was coming up for Saturday and Sunday, so I just figured we’d putz around with a few small projects. I was, once again, wrong. I’m getting used to that!

Friday night after dinner (Cracker Barrel ftw) we checked out the new Menards store that opened near us. It was huge and wonderful and so clean & organized! The rebate deals were everywhere so we came away with tons of stuff we’d been looking at: 5 gallon pails (free after rebate!), one of those new expanding hoses that takes up no storage space (and now I can stop yelling at our terrible garden hose), and a slew of other must-need items. We also walked through the garden area and picked out the mulch and paving stones we want to use on our landscaping. That will save us some time down the road. To cap off the evening we stopped by Cabela’s, because it was down the road and we hadn’t been in this one yet since moving to town. It was smaller than the Richfield one, but nice, and worth the walk-through.

And because we have no chill, when we got home from adventuring, tired from the week, we rearranged the living room furniture! Because, why not. I’d had Friday afternoon off, and used that time to clear off the tv stand we were planning to move downstairs in our quest to have no TV in the upstairs living room. We’re going for an old-fashioned sitting room upstairs. So when we got home Friday night, I asked B to carry the console downstairs. The next thing I knew, we were moving living room furniture around, turning the couch to face the big living room window, bringing up my record player and record player table, and even putting a placeholder bookcase where our built-ins will go later.

Here’s a quick sketch of the before and after. I’m loving the “sitting room” feel over a room focused on a TV that we never turned on! It feels very light and airy, and my lovely new wicker desk set is right at home in this room.

Saturday we popped up bright and early, hit the Dane County Farmer’s Market like we do when we’re in town, and then headed home to continue our assault on the landscaping! All the planting beds in front of the house had just gotten overrun to the point where the plants were unhealthy. And they were almost exclusively hostas.  I like hostas, but not that many of them. A few weeks ago we had cleaned out half of the front planting beds, and Saturday morning we tackled the other half. Let me tell you, I’d like to have a word with whoever planted the Lily of the Valley in that front bed. Lily of the Valley are pretty, and I do love them. At our cabin I love them – not 6″ from our house in an overgrown planting bed. Their root system is insane! That entire bed was basically a carpet of roots just under the soil. You couldn’t rake the mulch up because the rake got caught in the roots, but you couldn’t shovel the roots out because of the mulch. It was frustrating, but we got through it. Correction – B got through it. I gave up and raked the freshly mowed grass instead. Now the entire front of the house is a blank landscaping slate and ready for a nice clean simple design. If I only knew what that design was…

Saturday afternoon we got to show off all our recent work to my mom (the wall, the landscaping, the new freezer, etc), and Saturday night we went to a minor league baseball game. So fun. I love minor league games. There’s no pressure at all, and the prices are right on for this frugal couple. Our team, the Madison Mallards, lost but it was still fun.

Sunday morning after eggs, biscuits, and pepper bacon (YUM), we somehow started organizing the garage. The shovels, rakes, and snow equipment had been stored in trashcans at the end of the garage since we bought the place and it was a mess and driving us crazy. Now, almost all of the yard tools are hung nicely from hooks on the wall at the far end of the garage. Long term storage items have been put up in our loft storage (ok so really it is part of the roof of the house that is inside the garage but loft storage sounds better). And we hung the upper cabinets leftover from the bump-out above one of the windows in the garage. They look amazing, and since they were re purposed, cost us $0 for amazing garage storage. We still need some shelves back in the corner, but overall, I’m so happy with how the garage is coming together!

With that done, we pretty much fell into a heap of exhaustion and watched Dawson’s Creek for the rest of Sunday. I end every weekend the same – exhausted but so so so very happy that I get to spend the weekend doing what I love – DIY projects with my husband.

Cheers!