BEING ELGIN: It's Project Week

It's been project week at the Elgin house this week. Tuesday was dishwasher day. My Dad very kindly came to our house to help Nick take the old dishwasher out and install the new one. The removal of the old dishwasher went well enough, and we found some interesting things under the dishwasher. Keep in mind we bought the house from my brother-in-law. We weren't too surprised to dig our a Star Wars figurine, a Hot Wheels car, a few markers and pens, and this little crab. Unfortunately the rest of the installation didn't go as smoothly and had to be finished by Nick and his best friend on Wednesday. But we have a functioning, fantastic dishwasher that heats up so much we have to let dishes sit a couple of hours before we can unload the thing. Here's a picture of the final product.

While all of this was going on, I thought about starting my wedding scrapbook. My husband bought me a Cricut machine for my birthday a year or two ago and I was playing around with my new font cartridge and got a bright idea. Meijer is Nick and my favorite new store. That place has everything!! When we go, I always make a pass through the Arts and Crafts because you never know when you'll find something you don't need but can't live without. A couple of trips ago I found vinyl for my Cricut that would allow me to cut out my own words and put them on my wall. But what to write....plus it looked pretty complicated. But I told a friend of mine about it and she tried it on the nursery that she's decorating for the baby she and her husband are expecting. I couldn't stand it anymore. My living room walls needed work and I was DYING to try this vinyl. Not to mention that blank wall was really bothering me.

Yesterday I made a prototype out of cardstock and scotch-taped it to the wall to see if I would even like this.

As you can see, the prototype was green (which I thought about for a color) and horribly crooked but it gave me an idea. And being the impatient person that I am, I decided I HAD to do this little project and made the 35 minute drive to the nearest Meijer. Have I mentioned we live in the middle of nowhere?

The vinyl is $9.00 for two sheets of 12x24. It seemed reasonable enough. But today when I started to cut out my letters, I realized it was a better deal than I thought. See, my Cricut will only cut 6x12 pages, so I had to cut my vinyl into 4 sections, and it only took 2 sections to do our name, so I still have A LOT of vinyl left to use elsewhere in the house. My friend warned me that it was a little tricky, and it was at first. I figured out quickly that it's one of those things you remove some of the backing and stick it to the wall and then peel the backing away a little at a time while sticking the letters to the wall. Here's the finished product...

And a close up...

The final project of the week (so far) was one that we didn't actually do ourselves. The back edge of our property is a fence row with some trees. The branches were hanging down and hitting the ground in our yard, which made it very difficult to mow, especially for me...I'm not very coordinated. We hired a tree service to come in and remove 3 trees in our yard that were growing around power lines and didn't look very good, and to trim the branches that prevent mowing without getting Mulberry stains all over me and the mower. I didn't take before shots but I did after. You can see where I refused to mow earlier in the week to avoid the branches. That's how bad it was.