Another Window...

I thought it would be fitting on Friday the 13th to post about our latest window mishap.  You already know about our sliding door and the broken French door window insert, and now we can add to that list a car window.  That's right.  One single piece of pea gravel shot a single hole through the driver's side window of one of our cars.  Cue the shatter sound effect.

At this point I really wonder what our lawn equipment has against us.  The weed eater killed our sliding door, the lawn mower stealthily took out one of our newly-installed French door windows, and this time around the weed eater destroyed a car window.  The ironic part was that Mr. Great Indoors was weed eating this side section of our house one last time before he installed a solution to the pea gravel problem.  (He does, by the way, very carefully cover up our French doors anytime the lawn equipment leaves the shed.)

After picking out every possible bit of glass, we covered up the open window with a kitchen garbage bag.  Good thing it was a clear evening.

Thankfully a local salvage yard/mechanic shop had just gotten in a junked car exactly like ours, and they offered to sell us the driver's side window for $50.  Awesome!!  Oh, yeah... did we mention the window is tinted?  And the rest of the windows of your car aren't tinted? 

Mr. GI brought it home and took about an hour to install the window.  Can we just stop for a moment and reflect on that?  My husband installed a car window.  In under an hour.  And it actually works.  He really can do anything, can't he?

We've looked into getting one window untinted ($5) or tinting the rest of the windows ($180).  Guess which one we'll probably be choosing?  Obviously we've got other irons in the fire right now (like one that starts with bath and ends with room), so this issue is taking back seat.  Hahaha.  We've actually gotten kind of used to it the last few weeks, even if it does look pretty ghetto.

Despite the window issue, we really were aiming for this walkway revamp to be a simple project.  Here's a few pictures to show how it looked before.  The picture on the left was the day we closed on the house (from the outdoors part of the house tour), and the picture on the right was one I took last summer of our potted plants; you can catch a glimpse of the pea gravel and weeds in the background.  I still can't believe how huge that holly bush was -- it was literally as tall as the roof.  One of our first acts as homeowners was to saw those suckers down, but of course they came back with a vengeance and we continue to fight with them.  The other thing I didn't even remember until I looked at this picture was that the stepping stones were originally scattered haphazardly on the path, which Mr. GI fixed pretty quickly, too.  Weird. Oh, yeah-- and we can't forget about Grandpa originally buried under the bushes and pine needles.

To prep the walkway, Mr. GI took out the stepping stones and weed eated the area, and I took out the excess pea gravel.  This was me waving goodbye forever to that nasty stuff.  Good riddance!

After an expanse of landscaping fabric we already had on hand (no weeds = no weed eater!!) and a few bags of pine bark mulch (maybe 5 bags?  at $2 a pop, it definitely didn't break the bank... or another window), it looked a little like this.

We replaced the stepping stones, and that was it!  I don't think it's a completely permanent solution because the mulch moves against the landscaping fabric and shows bald spots fairly easily.  But I'd rather have a bald spot than another missing window.

My mom and stepdad came into town a few weeks ago (right after this happened, which is funny because they also came into town the same day as our smashed sliding glass door...) and brought us a beautiful pink petunia to hang on the pergola.  It really perks up the pergola, especially since our morning glory went the way of all things when it frosted over the winter.  The petunia flower kind of reminds me of morning glory, come to think of it.

Does your lawn equipment have it out for you?  Have you taken on any simple but effective projects inside or outside?  It sure would make us feel better to know this had happened to someone else... 

You can read all about our other glass mishaps: our shattered sliding glass door, our one in a million French mistake.