After a ridiculously long and cold winter the temperature has started to climb above the 70 degree mark, and spring has officially begun. I don’t care what the calendar says. Spring doesn’t officially start until you can completely turn off the heat and you can be comfortable leaving the windows open.
The past month has been extremely busy in our household. We had our third daughter just over a month ago, and after a brief absence from work I headed back to the grind while Mrs. M has been enjoying a little extra time off with the new addition.
I’ve been absent from the blog for a while, and I’ve been using this time doing two things. The first thing that I’ve been doing is working on the creation of a coffee roasting business (Mrs. M is currently building a business of her own as well). I’m currently in the planning stages, though, and likely won’t have a product to sell for quite some time.
The other thing that’s had a tight grasp on my attention lately is the outdoors. I’ve been outside a lot recently. Even at work, I find every excuse to take my work outside — fortunately I have a job that let’s me do this.
Do more outside.
I’ve spent a few after-work hours playing in my front yard trying to give our house a little extra curb appeal. Instead of contracting the work out, I decided to take on the backbreaking labor myself. The previous (and original) owners of our house, planted Ivy in the flower beds around the entire house. If you’re unfamiliar with Ivy, it spreads on its own, it grows up the side of your house, it grows down into your foundation, and it forms complex deep roots making it extremely hard to get rid of. And it’s fucking ugly (see below).
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This is straight up Nasty looking. If you plan on selling your house EVER, please don’t plant Ivy in your garden beds.
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Here’s what it looked like roughly 2 hours later.
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user for a while now, and I love it for two reasons. One, I can find the best and most cost-efficient people to do work for me after I’ve exhausted my personal resources. And two, because it allows me to see how much money I’m saving by doing the work myself. In the case of my Ivy beds, I’ve saved over $500 (average cost according to local Angie’s List reviews).
So far I’ve spent about 6 total hours weeding, hacking and cleaning up the mess that I’ve made. That means that each hour that I’ve spent on my knees in the garden bed have been worth about $83 each.
Typically, I’ll try to complete house-related tasks on weeknights when the weather is beautiful, so our weekends can be 100% stress and honey-do-list free.
Saving nearly $500 on home maintenance, I figured what better way to celebrate than to enjoy some free fun with the family. Having an obligation-free weekend looks like this:
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This is the entrance to the Irvine Nature Center in Owings Mills, Maryland. It’s a seriously badass place made up of over 5km of nature trails and a cool museum based on conserving our beautiful planet. And it’s completely free.
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Three kids asleep at the same time is a rarity. Fortunately nature wore them out.
Go the hell outside!
We’re in that brief stretch of time where the temperature is perfect. In a few weeks from now we will have forgotten how brutal the winter was and we’ll be avoiding the outdoors at all costs.
Make every excuse to get your ass outside as frequently as possible this Spring and if you need any garden pointers check out my friend Drea’s blog. She’s inspired me to try build one of THESE in the next few weeks.
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