Making our House a Home

The house that we are living in this year hasn't been lived in for....I'm not sure, but a long time! It has been fun making the house looked lived in from the outside! Since we don't have an air conditioner for the whole house (we have a small window unit in our bedroom), we've stuck gold this year having quite a bit of cooler-than-normal weather. So we wanted to cool our house using the outside air. Thus, a new project started to develop in my brain! I wanted a screen door so that we could put a fan by the front door and get a lot of cool air in our house! Here is the screen door that Ammon and I built! On most of our projects, Ammon does an awesome job of think it all through and making a plan of how to build it, but for this project, I came up with my own "building plan" and when I told it to Ammon, he said it was really good, so we used it!

Something else we've done to make our house look more lived in is planted flowers. We discovered these kind of cool flowers called Four O'Clocks. The flowers close during the heat of the day, and open in the evening (around 4:00) when the day starts to cool down. We've also planted Naturtiums - which we also really like! They kind of grow along the ground, vine like, and have really pretty flowers! We also planted Marigolds and Petunias and a vegetable garden!

Chicago

We spent Saturday in Chicago. First we went to the Chicago Temple. It is a very odd layout! But it was nice to be in the temple, and it’s always fun to go to a different temple. After that we went to a very large Botanical Garden. We really liked it a lot! We learned a few things about gardening in their vegetable gardens. It was interesting to see different pruning techniques. After that we went and got Chicago Style Pizza at Giordano’s. We've had their pizza before (it was recommended to us by somebody who served a mission in Chicago) and it's so delicious! Then we made the drive back home. It was a fun packed day!

Backyard Tree House

Grandpa Dietz spent some time building the Powell kids a tree house in one of the cut off trees in our back yard this weekend! The kids loved it! Grandpa did a lot of prep work and had it almost done when the Powells arrived. It took about an hour to finish putting it all together. After it was all put together Avri said, "We built a WHOLE tree house in just an hour!" All the adults laughed because it took much more time than an hour!

Also, an update on our garden - it's growing really well!!!