Patio-rama

2 weekends ago, Greg with help from our friend and neighbor, Paul, and his Dad extended our patio out back. I was there for moral support, but with the amount of work that I did compared to the guys, I really can't take any credit at all.


Before








Greg digging up the carolina clay








Laying down the base








Pounding the base and laying pavers








Sweeping the sand over the cracks

Playing Hooky

This morning Greg played hooky from work for a couple hours . . . ok, ok so us Rosses don't really play hooky (in our combined 8 years of college, we maybe skipped 4 classes total. Maybe.), but this is as close as it gets =) Greg's boss let him go into work late this morning so that we could get some dirt for our new garden. The place we wanted to get it from is only open during the typical work hours and they don't deliver the small amount that we needed. So, Greg, being the wonderful husband that he is, decided to take the morning off rather than send me up to the farm in a borrowed pickup by myself =)

We now have a garden full of dirt, just waiting for vegetable plants, and a pile of concrete pavers that we'll use to extend our patio (we had to borrow a truck to get the dirt, so we decided to get all our heavy towing done at once). By the summer we should have a great place to hang out and enjoy meals in our back yard!

Consider these the before pictures . . .

The Finished Product!

After many hours of cutting, nailing, sanding, staining, varnishing we now have 2 beautiful bookshelves!

Charleston, Bookshelves and Haircuts

Despite the lack of posting, there actually has been quite a bit going on at the Ross house recently. I just forget to post =)

Our first anniversary was June 17th. It's really hard to believe that we've been married for a year already! It seems like the time has flown since our wedding but at the same time it's really hard for me to remember what it was like without waking up next to Greg every morning. God has been so good to us this past year.

To celebrate, Greg took me down to Charleston where he proposed to me (exactly 1 1/2 years ago, Dec. 17, 2006) and we had a wonderful recounting the past year as well as what exactly we were doing on our wedding day and the day we got engaged.

We spent the first day we were there at the Isle of Palms

This is the spot were Greg proposed to me!

When we got back we started on our next house project, building bookshelves. I LOVE BOOKS and it shows . . . I have boxes and boxes of books that have been piled (somewhat messily, I admit) in our office. We were blessed to have a built in bookcase at the apartment we rented, but we've needed something for our house. We've looked and looked at yard sales and online for several months so we decided it would be best for us to build them ourselves. This is the biggest carpentry project we've taken on, so we're pretty excited about it. We finished the building part on Monday and we'll be working on the sanding and staining part over the next few weeks.

There will be 2 bookshelves this size when we are done

And since our house was getting a little bit of a makeover, we decided to get little makeovers, too. Kind of. Chelle finished up her haircutting division at the Aveda Institute this past week and needed a male and female hair model to test out. I was super excited to get a long needed haircut, and she did a FANTASTIC job! She will be out on the floor cutting hair in the next month or so . . . I highly recommend her!

Greg getting his buzz cut