Side yard rehab

First off, here's a picture of our house, since most of you haven't seen it.

The guy who used to own the house would fix up cars on the side of the house. When we bought it the side yard was a nasty section covered in old carpet remnants with weeds growing though the carpet, old screws, broken plastic, etc.  

You can kind of see it here. Kinda gross, right? 

This area of the yard has always been at the top of our priority list, but it always seemed like the cost to fix it put it just out of our reach.  Then one day this summer we heard about a place just down the road that had a good price on gravel.  

...so nevermind the fact that I was 5 and half months pregnant and Dan was just barely off of crutches from his hip surgery.  We're farleys, so we went for it! 

We took out all the carpet, tried to level all the ground, and added gravel. 

Here's the job with half the carpet removed.  

Doesn't this carpet look great?!  You wouldn't believe the large assortment of bugs, weeds, worms, slugs, and even a few snakes that we found living underneath it.  Fun, right?  

Here is the completed area of our yard!!  Disregard the few weeds that have popped up here and there.  

We love it!  Gabe particularly likes that he now has a million rocks to throw.  Many thanks to Jen and Travis for letting us borrow their truck, and especially to Travis for helping us haul and fill in the last half of the rocks when we realized that it's really not a good idea to install several cubric yards of rocks when one of you is just barely off of crutches and the other one is pregnant :) 

1 More Dresser Re-Do project

one more dresser re-do project. This one was really fun. We bought this set for $40, taped it off, repainted just the aqua part and resold for $120.

ANOTHER DRESSER RE-DO

Another Dresser Re-Do

I bought this dresser for $40, taped it, repainted it with a high quality Baer paint and these are the results. I sold it for $150

CLASSROOM MAKEOVER PROJECT

Ok so some of you know my classroom this year is a mess. It was a wood shop, then auto shop, then ceramics room and now still has to function as a ceramics room and cheer office and cross age PE in addition to being the home of my English classes. So I am going to document my journey of rehabbing it into a decent space. Here are some of my before pictures.

Here is what I have done so far. Step 1 I painted a cabinet with chalkboard paint

Step 2 I spray painted one of the cool locker style cabinets in here

Suggestions for step 3 would be appreciated. More to follow.

DIY Fruit/Veggie holder

Here is the fruit/veggie holder I made for my countertop.  It ended up being bigger than I imagined it would be...but somehow we still fill it up.  Makes a much cleaner use of that space that used to be piled up with bowls and bags of fruit.

Fence repourposed into compost bins

We have had these compost dirt mounds in our yard for years.  We took fencing materials from the fence we redid last November, and the boys and I turned them into compost bins.  The large mounds of composting dirt looks much neater now, and the best part is....it didn't cost us anything!

Here is my outdoor dehydrator. I used a 1x4 and 2 1x2s for the frame (free from the trash haul -thx treasure haulers!). I had to buy the light difusers for the tray ($14) and the hinges and foam weather stripping so the screens would get a good seal.  I also got 2 matching window screens from restore for $0.50 each.  So it didnt come out a great deal. But the total cost was around $23. Hope it works!