Building a garden

Zac and I are both loving his new job. He's a lot less stressed than he was before, he is enjoying the work, he gets free samples of food from their vendors, and he is home on evenings and weekends!! This new schedule has allowed us to tackle home improvement projects that we've had on our list for awhile, but haven't had the time to get to.

Such as... our patio! This is a multi-part project, and we're only about halfway finished. But progress is progress, right??

The first thing we did was clear out dead bushes and extra dirt to prep the area that was the vegetable garden last year.

Then, we started building the raised planter box that now houses the garden. We loosely followed this video here, and chose ceder for the wood. The supplies ran us about $100, but the box should last at least 5 years. The carriage bolts that hold it together were almost as expensive as the wood!

Zac doesn't like it when I take pictures of him, but tough luck. I think he looks cute when he's building things! Our hard work pretty quickly turned into this:

The hardest part of the whole project was leveling the stinking thing. Nothing inside or outside of our house is level. That seemed to take forever. 

Once the box was (mostly) level, we filled it with dirt and then added a few inches of garden top soil so that the plants don't have to grow in our clay.  At this point, we were racing storm clouds that were quickly rolling in, but we finished just in time!

Here's the finished product:

Isn't it the cutest garden ever?? We planted Delicious tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, red bell peppers, green bell peppers, jalapeño peppers and zucchini. Yum!! Now we just have to wait for them to grow...

This was one of our more painless home improvement projects. It took a little while to put the box together, but it wasn't very difficult. If anyone is interested in a tutorial, I have enough pictures to put one together. Just let me know!

Part two of the patio renovation is scheduled for this weekend, so I'll keep you posted!