The results of our hard work

Hubby and I (or maybe just hubby, but since we are married now, I can take credit for things that he did, can't I??) happily finished all our home repairs just in time for my sister's return from Mexico.

I was a bit nervous about how things would turn out due to our deck incident, but after that day-of-a-hundred-trips-to-Home-Depot, we seemed to have gotten a hold of things and were problem free after that.  Oh, except for the fact that we continued to underestimate the amount of stuff we needed which resulted in many more trips to Home Depot - where everyone knows my name now.

So here is our beautiful new-looking deck:

Minus the fact that I can't seem to take a straight picture, look how beautiful it turned out.  We (and our neighbors) were pretty thrilled about the color and happy that we ended up not going with the red.  The deck looks brand new!  Ivan and I are most proud of this.  To be fair, he did ALL the work from bleaching the deck to painting every minute area of it - even those annoying sunburst railings.  He did an amazing job.  We enjoy just standing outside and admiring it.

Then, on Saturday, we decided to mulch and weed the garden.  No one in our house really knows anything about gardens.  Our yard is landscaped with plants that need pretty much no attention whatsoever.  But the grassy things were taking over so we trimmed them down.  There were also a ton of leaves from like 6 years ago that we raked away.  We then poured mulch all over the place and voila, a new garden.  Of course I bought three bags of mulch thinking it would be plenty and we ended up having to go back to Home Depot for four more bags - could I have been any more off with my estimation?? But Ivan did a great job with this too - I cut some of the grass and layed the mulch down on maybe 1/3 of the garden, so he didn't do it ALL alone (hey, I was super cleaning the house and cooking a steak dinner - it's not like he was working hard and I was taking a bubble bath or something).

Sorry for the dark photo but I leave for work soooooo early in the morning that it's not even light out yet.  But you can get the gist of things.  Yeah - our garden is nothing fancy - but the mulch looks great!

So, that was pretty much the result of our first three weeks of married life (the first week was our honeymoon though so it was a bit removed from reality).  We work well together.  It's kind of fun because Ivan likes to keep busy and work hard and do things so that makes me want to do the same.  I usually spent my weekends lazing around the house doing absolutely nothing and enjoying it.  However, these first few weekends we were so busy we barely had 5 minutes of free time and I loved it too.  I'm glad I now have someone to do things with and to motivate me to do things - it's refreshing.

Ivan brings out my good side and it's kinda nice.