The Soul of la Hacienda McReynolds...

Before

After

Evolution of the Backyard

The past few months Matt has been working on the backyard.  He took out our three raised garden beds and reshaped the area to put in a small vineyard (we did keep one raised bed that we placed below next to the grave of the Sharptooth).  He dug 8 holes and laid drip for the 8 vitus vinifera vines he ordered us from California.  We know the climate here is too  hot for wine grapes but we thought we would grow some anyway for fun, for their beauty and maybe one day try our hand at some wine.  We decided to choose the grape varietals we like best regardless of our climate and made sure to get the appropriate rootstock.  We have planted Cabernet Franc, Carignane, Petite Sirah, Zinfadel, Touriga Nacional, Nebbiolo, Sangiovese and Merlot. 

  

A Welcome Addition to the Casa

 We have talked about how awesome it would be to have a hot tub on our back patio since we bought this house.  We had set aside some money to take a trip this year that we were unable to take and so decided to use the money to get a hot tub.  Since we knew it would be delivered with a crane we invited some people over to watch.  The delivery  guys arrived a bit early and I was the only one here.  I took many pictures as I stood there hoping the hot tub would not come crashing through our roof as they lifted it over the house. Thankfully these guys know what they are doing and they lowered it down just where it needed to go.  Unfortunately I was the only one to see all the magic.  They set it up for us and Ariana was the first one in.  We  had dinner with friends who came over to see it that  night and then after Matt got back from his soccer game we got in.  We use it now about  every other day.  My favorite time of day to use it is right as the sun is going down, after a day of work.

It is Finished!

Matt has been working on a big project in our backyard for a couple of months now.  He finished up this weekend just in time for Easter.  Since Sandi just had knee surgery we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to host the holiday meal at our house.  So we had a pizza party for Easter... that is a wood fired pizza party in our new oven!  I can't believe it is finally finished.  It took a long time and it was a huge amount of work which Matt did all by himself.  The oven is gorgeous and being such a breadophile I can't believe we have our own wood fired oven!  Matt has made a lot of things but this one definitely takes the cake.  THANKS, HONEY!!!

We have made pizza three times now and have figured out what it takes to make it just right.  Today was our first go at bread.  It baked in about 25 minutes and turned out pretty good.

Shower Gone Mexican!

Sadly, I can't find any pics of what the shower looked like when we bought this house.  Suffice it to say the master bath in this house was designed in a really stupid way so that we had to remove a wall and door and raise the ceiling before we could re-tile this shower as it was a small dark cave.  We haven't been able to use the shower since we moved back to Tucson so it is awesome to finally have it in working order.  Tavo helped removing the wall, raising the ceiling, and installing some new lights and a decorative beam but the tiling was all Matt.  It took us quite a while to decide on the tile.  We ended up going with this beautiful Mexican talavera and cobalt arabesque tile for the accent and an Italian brick shaped ceramic for the main tile.  It turned out just as stunningly as I thought it would.  Good job, Honey!

Bathroom Gone Mexican!

A lot of Matt's free time is spent on house projects.  Fortunately for me he enjoys this.  We have all kinds of ideas for every room in the house and are only limited by our budget.  Last month he built us a new bathroom vanity, tiled the top and installed a talavera sink, new faucet, mirror, and painted an accent wall behind it.  It turned out awesome!  Someday we would like to redo the shower in this bathroom to match the new vanity.  Here are some pictures. 

when we bought the house

New Bookshelf

I am so lucky to have a husband who is handy and likes to do projects around the house.  Lately he has been working on our guest bathroom for which he built a new vanity for the talavera sink we bought.  This project is almost done and pictures are forthcoming.  He also built us a really cool book shelf in our fireplace room which we hope to eventually deck out with awesome reading chairs and perhaps another bookshelf down the road when we have filled this one up.  He used really colorful adobe bricks that remind me of sandstone.

Matt Loves Tiling!

Okay, the title of this post may be a bit misleading... What's really going on here is that AZ is just around the corner and we are in a mad rush to finish up some work on our MN house in order to be able to rent it out once we leave. In an effort to jazz up our boring kitchen on the cheap we decided to tile the counter tops. Matt doesn't exactly love tiling but fortunately for me he is quite handy and he loves the way tile looks so he is willing to do it! He tiled right over the existing laminate which was in decent shape but quite drab. When we bought this house the kitchen was mint green with beige counter tops that had brick red trim... yuck! Here is how it looks now.Good job, Honey!