My First DIY Art

I have been focusing more of my time lately on our home. I have come to realize that a house is a work in progress, and I’m okay with knowing that there is no such thing is perfect.  My goal for our house is for it to be clean, comforting, pretty, simple and filled with meaningful items that we love. Again, it is a work in progress, and often I will notice something that totally bugs me that has never bothered me before or notice a blank wall or a space that looks either too empty or too cluttered. So this weekend, while Brent was out of town on business, I worked on several quick updates.

First:

We won this framed photograph a few years ago at  silent auction and it has been hanging in our hall ever since.  It’s okay, but a bit boring….no colors, nothing particularly eye-catching.  So, I decided to change it up.

The color is not the best in the photo above, but still, I like it much better!  And the best thing is that it was free!!!  For the past several years, I have clipped stories, recipes and interesting/cute/pretty/inspiring/funny photos out of magazines, old books, etc.  I have folders and folders of clippings and weeded through them to make this collage.  I taped the clippings to the back side of the original photo and flipped the mat around to the backside. Voila!  I’m really excited about how it turned out!

More updates coming!

Hiking Lake Lurleen

Today we both had the day off and decided to spend the morning hiking at Lake Lurleen.  We are in training for Mount LeConte, after all!

We did the Lakeside Trail + about 0.5 miles on the Tashka Trail.  It is out and back, so the total hike was approximately 5 miles total.  It is pretty flat compared to LeConte, but there are definitely some intermittent hills.

It was a fun hike.  The weather was perfect and we only met one other couple on the trail the entire time.  Can’t wait to have a rematch with LeConte.

August Update

This year is flying by.  We are now well into August and getting a bit of a break from the Alabama heat.  These past few days have felt like fall, which makes me so excited for the upcoming season change.

There has been lots of cooking going on around here!  Including homemade marinara sauce, corn salsa, quiche, and little zucchini muffins.

There have been long walks in the neighborhood, along the river and at the arboretum – which, we only recently discovered, has miles and miles of woodsy walking/hiking trails that were unknown to us all of these years!

Diet cherry limeades – perfect after long, hot walks!

The azaleas are back!  So pretty.