If I was a bluebird, I would want to live here!
We are in the full throes of spring here in the Lowcountry. The beautiful pastel colors are a welcomed sight after the drab winter. Daffodils, tulips, forsythias and fruit tree blossoms dot our countryside. Deciduous trees are popping tiny leaves, and, warmer days beckon us out of out winter shells.
So, we spent the day Saturday doing outdoor
I love my plant house. Major cleanup this year!
things. Brian built two bluebird houses to put on our property.
I spent the day organizing the plant house, cleaning pots, and readying it for a new season.
When I took a break from my tasks, I sat on a bench enjoying the warmth of the sun on my face and the songs of the birds. It was a perfect day. Almost.
Every spring I recall one
I washed about 40 pots on Saturday. I can't wait to fill them up with stuff!
thing that I miss from my childhood that we cannot get in the south. So, I sat on my bench and let my mind drift back to those spring days of my youth, sitting on the porch swing at the stone house, the house I grew up in, catching that subtle wonderful fragrance from the lilac bushes growing nearby.
We can’t grow lilacs here. Many have tried, but our climate is no good for them. It’s not really due to the
I wish we could grow lilacs here.
heat in the summer that they do not grow well here, but, more that they need a long period of winter chill in order to bloom well. We have a substitute for lilacs called the lilac chaste tree. The flowers are somewhat similar, but its blooms are not fragrant, so, it’s not even remotely the same.
I have discovered though, that if I sit very still and close my eyes and go back to that porch swing, I can smell the lilacs. Almost.
We have a period of time, right after Christmas and before early March that our weather is at its worse and we typically do not do much outdoors. It is a great time to do indoor projects and on our old fixer-upper house there are many to do. One year, Brian added shelves to our laundry room. Another time, we closed in the extra unneeded doorway to my office and remodeled. And in 
another year, we removed very ugly wallpaper in our living room and dining room and refinished the walls. This year we decided to re-do our kitchen floor. 
dishwasher for repairs, we saw underneath that our floor was hardwood.
the tiles and do the sanding. On the second weekend, we would stain and finish. Aaah, the best laid plans… We began scraping off the sticky tiles and discovered a sheet of luaun. We removed the luaun and discovered a layer of linoleum. We removed it and discovered a layer of tar based mastic adhesive. Underneath that was another layer of tiles and under that was another layer 
of the tar based adhesive. We scraped the linoleum and the next layer of tiles, thus removing the one layer of that tar based icky stuff, but the bottom layer was going to be problematic. We tried scraping, mineral spirits, goo gone, and other products to remove this icky coating, but nothing was working. I researched the internet on how best to remove this stuff and found out that even Bob 
Vila had no answers. Most sources said it couldn’t be done and to replace the flooring with new hardwood. One source suggested using hot steam.
from our hardwood floor had probably been on there for 60 years and probably full of asbestos, too. So, we needed to get the floor as clean as we could before doing any sanding. Five weekends later, we were ready to sand. 
refrigerator, too, but the only way to fit it through the doorway was to remove its three heavy doors. We decided we would try to work around it, pulling it out away from the wall to work on that area and pushing it back into place while we did the rest of the floor.