Living in New England after having lived elsewhere for most of my life, I am constantly amazed at how much snow falls each year. And with that snow comes the sand they use to grit the roads and the rock salt everyone uses to de-ice driveways and sidewalks. Never in my life would it have occurred to me to spend money on a tray upon which to put dirty boots, but the combination of plenty of wet and snowy weather and a mobile baby has changed my mind. I need clean floors, which means I need a way to sequester the sand and salt and melting ice that doesn’t involve simply leaving shoes on the floor of the mud room.

Do I need a boot tray like the one above? OMG, yes. Preferably in a mud room as large and airy as that one. Do YOU need a boot tray? That depends… do you live in a snowy or wet locale and prefer clean floors to somewhat yucky floors? You could, I suppose, clean every day or even after every outdoor excursion, but that’s a little silly when a boot tray will keep dirt and other ick sequestered for a time.

Mistress Martha suggests taking a mass market boot tray and customizing it with smooth river stones. On one hand, I love the way this looks and it gives the water somewhere to go so boots aren’t sitting in it. On the other hand, that water is then hiding in nooks and crannies created by smooth river stones, necessitating regular cleanings of one’s boot tray. In the end, we decided we’d rather have a low maintenance boot tray out of which I can tip lingering moisture than a chic one full of problematic stones.

Need a way to illuminate those wine bottle shelves you slaved over? Drinking all that wine was *such* a trial, so I understand if you need some time to recuperate before starting your next wine-themed DIY project. I couldn’t resist, however, posting a link to Gerardot & Co.s wine bottle torch tutorial.

According to the instructions, making a wine bottle torch is easy and cheap at around $5 for materials. That doesn’t include the cost of the wine, but we all know you were going to have yourself a wee drop even if you weren’t planning on crafting something afterward. Actually, if you’re aiming to empty the bottle yourself, you may want to wait twelve hours or so before beginning this project.

Walk around any town with more than a few triple-decker apartments long enough and you’re bound to see at least one or two faded armchairs or loveseats that have obviously been exposed to their fair share of rain, sun, and, here in Massachusetts’ North Shore, snow.

I personally have always maintained that there is indoor furniture and outdoor furniture, and never should they meet. No plastic chairs in the living room and no couches on the deck, in other words. Not everyone shares my opinion, however. Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d post a poll to find out just how many people do or don’t. Have at it, please:

Do note that so far as I can tell, this pretty upholstered plum settee from The Quill Pen was only let out of doors for a few moments for a unique furniture photo shoot. Otherwise it dwells inside where it is protected from the elements awaiting its forever home. If you’re interested, the price is listed at $850.

Thought you were done, eh? Not quite! When things get chilly, it’s time to put your garden to bed for the winter. What, you didn’t know that gardens hibernate just like squirrels and bears? I kid. Winterizing a garden is less about cleaning dead things up and more about prepping your flower beds and vegetable rows for the growing season that’s months and months (and months and months if you live where I do) away.

The specifics will vary by region and by preference, since when you winterize will likely be determined by your climate and what you like to plant in your garden, but there are certain rules anyone can follow when winterizing a garden. First, if you have a bit of yard to your name, don’t expect to be able to do everything in one day or even in one weekend. Schedule plenty of time so you don’t feel overwhelmed. Second, when you’re done dealing with the flora, remember to put things like planters and hoses in a shed or basement.

So what does winterizing a garden actually entail? Here’s a basic to-do list for those planning to put their gardens to bed in the near future.

• Pull weeds, dig up the roots of invasive plants, and pick up any debris like twigs, if you haven’t been doing these things regularly. Raking isn’t a bad idea, either. This gives you a blank slate to start with.
• Cut down the previous season’s annual plants, like flowers and veggies, then trim your perennials. If any of your perennials need to be divided, now’s the time to do so.
• Dig up any bulbs unlikely to survive the cold. Cannas, tuberous begonias, gladiolus, dahlias, and quite a few other summer-blooming bulbs cannot make it through the winter in USDA Zone 9 and colder. Then plant hardy spring-blooming bulbs.
• Prior to the first ground freeze, water and apply antidesiccants to any vulnerable evergreens.
• Apply a winter mulch to perennials, evergreens, and newly planted trees if you live somewhere where winter temperatures generally fall below minus 10 degrees F. These can also be covered in burlap to avoid common wintertime damage.
• If you have a vegetable garden, cover it with weighted lack plastic to discourage early weed growth or unwanted seeding in the springtime.
• Water all remaining plants and apply fertilizer as necessary, but consider that fertilizing later in the season can spark new growth that simply dies when temperatures drop.

Photo by Johan van Beuzekom

Summertime may feel like it’ll last forever once it gets going, but the truth is that it’s winding down ever so slowly. I like to keep summer in my life all year long with fun colors. Like lime! It’s so summery — when do we have limeade? Key lime pie? Summertime, of course. If you want to ensure that your summer last, in some capacity, all year long, try these limey goodies on for size:

This Ultra Soft Studio Lime Chair would look as good in the living room as it would in a home office or the corner of a bedroom. I especially like the generous-yet-cozy curves.

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For our second wedding anniversary — the cotton anniversary — my mother-in-law offered to buy me and The Beard a hammock. With thoughts of backyard lazing in our heads, we said yes. Naturally, our hammock’s arrival corresponded to weeks and weeks of rainy, blah weather that does not make one want to retreat to the outdoors with a mojito in one hand and a good book in the other.

Wikipedia tells me that hammocks were created by native inhabitants of tropical regions for sleeping — presumably because they’re easy to rig up and less toasty than a proper bed — but also notes that the invention of the hammock has been attributed to the Athenian statesman Alcibiades, a student of the Greek philosopher Socrates. Sailors adopted hammocks as the go-to shipboard bed because they maximize the available space, and adventurers followed suit because hammocks are quite portable. Eventually, the hammock became a sort of emblem for a certain type of weekend summertime relaxation that is the purview of individuals with a spot of land to their names.

Hammocks, of course, come in all manner of sizes, shapes, and configurations. My mother-in-law opted to purchase for us one that does not have spreader bars on either end (American style), and instead bought a Brazilian style hammock, which requires the operator lie diagonally across it to keep it open. I’m looking forward to trying it out if the weather ever changes.

In the meantime, I’m shopping for outdoor pillows that won’t get all nasty moldy if they do accidentally get caught in one of the downpours that have so far defined the summer of 2009. Check out some of my faves by clicking on the pics!

I have a good but casual relationship with many of my neighbors, especially since having a baby. Nothing encourages crossing the street or popping around the fence more readily than a fresh-out-of-the-womb infant! We chat about the weather and gardening and the baby, of course. We wave hello if we are in our cars. We occasionally lend one another implements like wheel barrows, and once, my neighbor Paul even took pity on our snowblower-less butts and plowed our driveway! And yet, there’s a closeness lacking that might be nice to have. If I needed a cup of sugar, I’d drive to the Stop & Shop rather than knock on a neighbor’s door.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by a post over at The Simple Dollar that explained how one could set up a simple neighborhood cooperative.

Household equipment Why not share a lawnmower with your neighbor? How about a snowblower? One great model for this exists in our neighborhood, where one person owns a snowblower and provides fuel for it, but is not in good enough physical shape to operate it. Thus, one of her neighbors actually operates the snowblower, using it to blow the snow out of both driveways (and often doing a large swath of the block’s entire sidewalk as well).

Gardening If two or three neighbors all have gardens, why not specialize the gardens and freely share the produce? This allows one family to focus specifically on a crop or two, making garden maintenance easier for all of the people involved. You can even carry this to the level of canning and/or freezing, agreeing to swap prepared garden products with neighbors.

There are other ideas in the post, though I’m not sure how readily I’d leave my baby with a neighbor or share cooking duties on a weekly basis. I would like to get to know my neighbors, however, as previous to this, I’ve been living in apartments for years and years. This was in the cheapest possible sections of Brooklyn, so there was a lot more wall banging and language barriers than friendly interaction. Now I’m curious to know how well you are acquainted with your neighbors.

My lawd, the winter is finally over for us here on Massachusetts’ north shore, and amazingly, we haven’t gone from intensely cold weather to intensely hot weather in one go like we do most years! There is actual springtime weather to be enjoyed! That means that on most weekends (and even some weekdays) you’ll find the Never teh Bride family parked out in its little slice of suburbia trying to green it up.

This year, we’ve planted romaine lettuce, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, banana peppers, red and green peppers, cukes, cantaloupe, strawberries, and a blueberry bush. The grass I battled with so valiantly last year remains in a state of unpleasant brownosity for whatever reason, bumming me out. But oh well! The weather is fine, and I’ve got a garden! What more could I possible want?

Oh right, kitschy yard stuff. I’m a big fan of bird baths and bird houses and little stone statues and big letters nailed to the sides of sheds. While all of the flowers in my yard — thanks, previous owner! — do give my property a lovely burst of color every year, they’re gone so quickly that I like to replace them with… what would one call it? Lawn decor? Backyard accessories? You know, things like this:

Like this all-weather Vaca pillow, for example. Made with real Guatemalan bovine feed bags, they’re made to withstand the elements.

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I love niche blogs. Back when Manolo for the Home was just getting off the ground, I posted about a blog devoted entirely to faux bois and another that concerns itself with nothing but Ikea hacking. I just recently came across another such blog — this one a tribute to ugly mailboxes.

Where I live, no one keeps a roadside mailbox. All of ours are attached to houses or porches, and some people even have slots in their front doors, as I’m led to believe is quite common in England. My father, mother, and grandparents all receive their mail in regulation-height boxes located on the very edge of their properties so the mail person needn’t get out of their truck. Now and then, jerky teens with driver’s licenses whiz by with bats and knock them over. Perhaps this is simply one of the perils of suburban living?

A certain Tim Morris wrote about suburban mailboxes, and I found his description of the average specimens to be apropos.

I began to look at everyone else’s mailbox on my walks. Were they as nice as mine? Did they have the E-Z Up construction? How did the neighbors manage to attach those foot-thick oblong cedar braces with the provided “Self-Tapping Wood Screws”? I certainly hadn’t been able to do that. Mailboxes were worth another look.

There are two kinds of mailbox: the ugly, and the hideous. Ugly mailboxes consist of a rounded steel box mounted on a plain length of pipe. Hideous mailboxes try to look like they are not mailboxes. Or rather, they try to look like mailboxes that are attractively shaped unlike mailboxes. No one wants to camouflage a mailbox so well that they hide its purpose completely. In this respect, mailboxes are like lamps. You know the lamps that purport to be coffee grinders, clocks, Chevrolets, Elvises, objets d’art, cigar boxes, stumps of petrified wood . . . each one with a lightbulb coming brazenly out of the top of it. So it is with hideous mailboxes. They flaunt their obvious disguise of their own obviousness.

The mailboxes I like least are the ones embedded in the chests of half-sized concrete manatees. It’s a Florida thing, I think. What did the ugliest mailbox you’ve ever seen look like?

I was lucky enough to move into a house that came with a sturdy wooden backyard shed as opposed to some metal monstrosity. I do, however, feel just a smidgen less smug when I’m browsing We Love Sheds, a blog devoted to exactly what you’d think. It’s all sheds, all the time. There are wind-powered shower sheds and sheds on wheels, sheds in ever conceivable color, tropical sheds, tree house sheds, and more.

Compared to all the lovely sheds out there, my own shed now seems so utterly pedestrian. What I’d really like is a shed a bit like this one:

Too bad I’m crap at woodworking…perhaps I could con my father into coming up to visit for the purpose of building us a new Tardished?