It has been an interesting few weeks here. I’ve had time to work on the front garden and make a few changes inside. First, the flowers.

I went searching for shade loving flowers last week and needed something that stands up to the a Florida heat. There are a ton of leaves, bushes and non flowering grasses that will do fine in shade, but I wanted flowers. Blooming, colorful flowers. I finally found these cute fern-like flowers in purple and white. Perfect.

The flowers are tiny and difficult to see from the road. My spacing also has some room for improvement, but I wanted to keep the begonias that were still doing ok. Amazingly I planted them before Thanksgiving and they only recently needed some help. We also have a white flowering plant that is reseeding itself in the front bed. I planted those my first year here and they have finally decided to grow. I’m hoping for lots of pretty flowers next year since they are slowly taking over the garden.

Overall it’s pretty and I like it. Just need to weed some more and add a fresh layer of mulch and it should be good.

On the inside of the house changes we have a new dishwasher!

Our dishwasher was only six years old, but it was driving us nuts. The vast majority of the time we ended up rinsing the dishes after they were washed to get gunk off them – especially the glasses. We would think we found a solution, but the next time it didn’t work. I finally asked Bob if we could get a new dishwasher before I went back to work. Delivery and all that. Last weekend we spent most of Saturday going from one place to another looking at dishwashers. We finally found one we could agree on and was in our price range. The stainless model was on sale (neither white nor black was on sale) so we decided we could do a stainless dishwasher rather than spend an extra hundred bucks on white. We have a stainless coffee pot and silver door pulls and faucet – it’s fine.

What we were not anticipating was buying a fridge. We had talked about it and looked at them, but our fridge works fine. It doesn’t function great layout wise, but it works and we could not justify spending the money. Until, that is, we saw the exact one we wanted on sale. A very big sale. As in we spent less on both the dishwasher, refrigerator, warranty, parts (for installation), delivery, tax and set up than we would have for just the refrigerator before tax. Everything. We decided to go for it since we probably would not see it again and my luck our fridge would die the week after the sale expired or in the middle of testing when I could not be home for delivery. I’m so excited.

The door configuration is going to take some getting use to. Because of the way they have the ice maker, the door shelves are a little narrow, but I did manage to fit everything in a logical (I think) place. Bob has his beer shelf (yet somehow he still needs some of my milk shelf for his beer) and he can get to it with the cool door-in-door feature.

I can also get to some of my most used cooking items (veggie base, butter, tomato paste) in the same area. I’m considering adding some eggs there, but I almost never cook with eggs. Bake, yes, cook, no. But we will see. We got everything. Set up and cooled before our HelloFresh box arrived today, so the timing was perfect.

Oh, we went with the stainless refrigerator instead of white because it was A) less expensive and B) it was in stock and deliverable this week. White was not available until the end of August. We are keeping the same stove and microwave – my oven is going to have to completely die before I give it up, so we have two major appliances in white and two in stainless. I think because the cabinets are white and we put in the silver pulls it all works. I’m sure we will be learning the quirks of both the dishwasher and ice box, but for now, I love them. Love them and cannot wait to be able to just unload the dishwasher. Or let Bob do it. I may love the appliances, but I haven’t gone insane enough to like doing dishes.