Nesting has officially begun at the Novak household. I got the itch this week, probably because we received confirmation that our stuff is arriving Tuesday. And by stuff I mean, all 10,000 lbs of household effects and consumables! In case you weren’t counting, that’s 40 days ahead of schedule folks and we’re thrilled!
Since I’ll tackle the inside in the near future, I went to town on the outside this week. Gardener Davie has been doing a sensational job cleaning up our jungle of a yard, which is not looking nearly so jungle-y anymore, btw. I got fixated on this idea of creating some pots of flowers, so I convinced Davie to take me out one morning to go shopping for clay pots and flowers.
This is Malawi, so while there is one fairly nice (read: expensive) nursery, it’s much more fun to pull off into the ditch and buy from the vendor haphazardly set up on the side of the road. The more ramshackle the store, the better the prices! In fact, most plants were around 50 cents and the large clay pots I got were each under $10. I went a little crazy (it was all so exciting!!!) and we ended up with a car-full of plants.
I decided I didn’t want boring old clay pots though, I wanted Santorini blue pots to offset our white house. Funny how the pots seemed so gigantic at the store but look so teeny tiny in front of the house. Next time I’m going even bigger!
I had also seen some lovely wrought-iron patio furniture at my neighbor Alison’s house and if there’s one thing I know about government-issued furniture, it’s that if someone has it in their home, you can bet there is a whole lot more of it around. So I simply put in a work order and the next day all this brand spankin’ new patio furniture arrives!
Our house is a lacking in open space, which makes it less than ideal for entertaining (which we plan to do a lot of here). To compensate for that, we’ve decided to invest some money into turning our spacious backyard into a more party-friendly place. First step is to add a brick patio to the back. We had the contractor over today to look at our space and give us a bid. He’s bringing stone options by on Monday and hopefully they’ll be able to start the following Monday (which is fine because I’ll be up to my ears in stuff with the shipment anyways).
The current plan is to create a rectangular patio that would extend from the edge of the stairs all the way to the wall that’s jutting out on the right. Then we can move our new patio set to that space. The yard needs something and we hope this will give us a nice foundation from which to add. Stay tuned for photos of the finished product to come….
