My lovely father-in-law brought his pressure washer over yesterday and cleaned the garden for us. It’s still nasty concrete – I don’t know if ‘nice’ concrete would be much better but this is particularly cheap and nasty looking – but it looks so much better and brighter.
Before:
After:
These are old photos but I thought it was worth sharing. E loves doing this we’ve done it several times since.
Playdough + Feathers + googley eyes + old bottle lids = monsters
As I said yesterday I’d like to do something to cheer up our back yard. It’s a very small walled yard which is concrete throughout (lovely!!) We’re assuming we’ll only have one more summer here so we don’t want to spend a lot of time and money.
We could possibly buy some big potted plants but I think we’d need to spend quite a bit to make a significant difference. The main problem is I hate sitting out there – I think because there is nothing nice to look at – Eli doesn’t know any better so he’s quite happy!
So any ideas of cheap (or free!) things we could do?
I really enjoyed the pinterest challenge I did last half term. I’m the kind of person who needs a deadline so, even though it’s self imposed, ‘publicly’ committing to getting things done works well for me.
The Easter Holidays start on Friday (I know, teachers get far too many holidays). So I’m setting myself another challenge. The weather is glorious at the moment and we’ve given up on potty training (!!!) so hopefully we’ll have lots of day trips out so I’m not planning on a daily challenge this time.
I’ve come up with a list of challenges – it’s possibly too much for me to do in two weeks alongside spending time with Eli and giving the house a good clean and tidy watching lots of TV so I may extend it into the rest of April and May.
Now it’s all written down it seems like rather a lot. Maybe I should have saved some of them for the Summer holidays?
Let me know if you’re going to play along, you could pick one or two of the challenges that are most suited to you or try and beat me to finish the lot (not that I’m competitive in any way).
I’ve had these on my ‘to do list’ forever and my and one of my (equally insane?) sisters have had at least 5 conversations about them. I got the idea and the instructions for the layout from whoopidooings.
The blocks were old building blocks of Eli’s that I’d put away. They’re 4cm cubes which is a pretty good size. I joined them together with masking tape. I found it works better if once you’ve hinged all of the blocks you fold it through and hinge the back of the hinges – I know that makes no sense but if you have a go at making them you’ll see what I mean.
Because you need to cover 6 sides of 8 cubes you need the equivalent of 6 photos that are the same size as your cubes arranged as 2 by 4 rectangles. If you want to do some squares you need 2 2 by 2 squares to replace 1 rectangle. I did 2 rectangles and 8 squares.
I printed the pictures onto photo paper and cut each one to the size of one cube face and stuck them on with PVA and then put another layer of PVA on top – this might not work if you have an inkjet printer because the prints aren’t waterproof. After sticking on each rectangle (or two squares) I waited for 24 hours for it to dry properly. This was hard, I’m not good at waiting for things and had to redo bit more than once because I’d played with it.
I’m a bit disappointed with it to be honest. It works brilliantly but it looks like a child made it. It’s difficult to cut the squares straight so it’s not totally neat and even though I spent ages sticking it all down, the pictures are already starting to peel. I wonder if I might have been better using ordinary printer paper so the top layer of glue soaked through and helped with the sticking.
Eli on the other hand loves it. He figured out what to do quickly and sat and played with it and talked about the pictures for ages.
