I have a love/hate relationship with spring. My nose hates it (allergies, who doesn’t have allergies?), but my eyes love it. Everything is green, beautiful and colorful. It’s also the time where we purchase flowers to give our house some additional curb appeal. Last summer when we planted beautiful vibrant flowers, we received a ton of compliments from our neighbors. This year, we plan on planting again. What flowers you ask? Anything that catches our eye. We love pops of color.

We waited until mid-April to go flower shopping. We didn’t want to risk the chance of our new flowers freezing, and mid-April is when we knew for sure there wouldn’t be any over-night freezes until fall. Today we packed up the babies, hoped in the car and headed down to Lowes. We purchased two different types of plants for $15.00. We planned on spending a budget up to $50, but Lowes didn’t have any other plants that made us say “Wow, we got to have that!” We plan on coming back in May to check-out Lowes updated garden selection and maybe a few other places.

So what kind of flowers did we get? The first plant is a Rubylite Rosa Calla Lily in a purple/pink color. This plant lasted all summer. It’s perfect for the wine barrel because the wine barrel receives a lot of sun.

We planted these last year (when our camera went to Camera Heaven) in our wine barrel. It grew and multiplied rapidly. Only one little plant is all it took. We plan on planting the exact same plant in the same location that we did last year. It was so beautiful. I’ll have to snap a picture for you guys later in the summer so you can see it’s blooming glory.

This is our wine barrel that currently hosts an Ornamental Cabbage. The wine barrel is from some place in nearby Lebanon Missouri. I can’t tell you the specifics as to where it exactly came from.  I did ask, but my parents can’t remember.  Boo right?  Maybe if my mother sees this, she may chime in and let you guys know where they got the wine barrel from.  Hi Mom!

My parents purchased a wine barrel about a year ago just for this purpose. They wanted a real rustic wooden wine barrel vs. the plastic ones you can purchase at your local home improvement store. My parents had the barrel cut in half, and they gave one end of the barrel to us. I think it matches perfectly with our brick exterior.

See how the wine barrel matches? It blends perfectly (our house number removed for privacy). We still have to add mulch to the flower beds and the wine barrel.

The next plant we purchased is called an Asiatic Lily.

Isn’t it beautiful? We love the yellow and the spray-painted maroon.

Last year we planted a yellow daisy-looking flower to the right of the house. This year we are going with the same color scheme in the same area. This is where the Asiatic Lily is going to go.

Don’t worry, we turned off that particular sprinkler so the plant will not get too much water.

Later in the evening, about dusk Jeremiah got the itch to plant the flowers. While he was digging in the planter to the right, we discovered why most of our plants end up dying rather quickly. Enter Cement Chunk ‘O Rama.

When our cement was poured for our driveway, we are guessing that some cement leaked out and puddled right under the spot where we decided to make a planter. Jeremiah broke this beast into chunks so he can dig it out. Unfortunately it left a deep hole in the ground. You think one would plant flowers during daylight, but he had the itch to plant at dusk. Yup, dusk. That’s 7PM in our part of the world in April. Due to all the banging that Jeremiah was doing to break up the rock, our next door neighbor came out to see what all the fuss was about. He saw the gigantic hole that was made after the rock was removed. Our neighbor happened to have one extra bag of dirt left over from his backyard garden. He gave it to us to fill the hole. They’re such great neighbors. :)

I was in the house and didn’t have a clue what was going on, and I’m still working on drilling it into Jeremiah’s head that I must get pictures of these kinds of problems before he fixes them. :) In other words, I don’t have a hole-in-the-ground picture but you can imagine it. Who really needs to see a hole in the ground anyway?

What we thought would take less than 30 minutes to plant two flowers, it took almost an hour and a half. Now we have two beautiful flowers planted for the summer (and more to come).

Here they are, the next day. In their new home for the summer.

Gorgeous!

Can you imagine a wine barrel full of these beauties? I can! Oh, and the big empty space in the flower garden behind the wine barrel is a work in progress. More on that later!

Here’s what the Asiatic Lily looks like without the pile of cement/dirt.

…and more..

Yup, I know. It’s absolutely stunning.

Have you done any planting lately? Link to it in the comments. I’d love to see what you’ve done!

Pst – This post is featured in Serenitynowblog.com.

Before I open my design services to the public, I had to create a theme that I designed vs using another person’s theme. Lets face it, Thesis is great, but it didn’t have all the functions and design styles I specifically needed to add without having to jump through a bunch of custom functions. Sorry, that’s web design code talk. AKA geeky talk.

Lets get down to the pretty part and how to navigate this blog. Here’s a screen shot of the before and after.

The overall design is a little bit the same. It’s a box theme. I like boxes. I like clean and simple. Don’t you? I could design something more complex, but if I did that, then I would never settle on one design. I would keep designing multiple themes instead of settling on one theme design.

Lets talk about the navigation. I cleaned up the navigation to include pages that you are only interested in clicking on. There’s no more excess information in the navigation.

Instead of having a separate contact page just for an e-mail address, I’ve included the e-mail address with the social media icons.

I moved the sidebar to left of the blog per google’s recommendation for higher ad performance. You can find the information from google here. I plan on offering advertisement slots in the near future once Fall For Design grows. You can help it grow by subscribing once a new post is made. You can find the sign-up form to the left.

There’s a few other tweaks I made, but those are pretty easy to locate. IE, like the comment option on the top of the post and the bottom.

How long did it take for me to make this theme? It took me a month to learn WordPress design structure and php (sorry, geek talk again). Not to mention I did it during all my available time, which is very little. You can find out more on how I manage my time with a toddler and an infant by clicking here.

Have you gave your website a make-over lately? If not, subscribe to the left and get notified about design freebie giveaways. I can make your website over for free. Yup. Just because I’m cool like that. ;)

When I was writing my contract, I scavenged the internet to see what other freelance designers were using on their contracts as well. Here I was, thinking I was the Queen of Google and was able to find anything that I seek. I searched and searched and could not find a legit enough contract that was easy to understand but legal. I did find a ton of information on freelanceswitch.com and on Sessions.edu. Most of the information I found would not fit into my business model.

Remember when I talked about making a freelance contract and letter you guys have a copy too? I decided that it’s best not to share this information since I would be practically spilling the beans of my business model. In other words, I don’t have anything free to give you guys on this one. Boo. I know, I’m sorry. I did search the internet and found what seemed like a standard contract that some designers are doing. I took points from several examples and formed my own contract of what I wanted that fits my business model.

I did pick up some fabulous tips from others that I wanted to share with you guys (see, I did find some free stuff). I like the point made in this contract from Smashing Magazine about the Limitation of Liability clause. It basically states that a client cannot hold the designer liable in the court due to deadlines not being met due to unforseen circumstances.

Another point that a designer discovered is to not include your clients personal information in your portfolio. My previous career was in the healthcare industry and this particular situation would constitute as a major HIPAA violation. I wouldn’t publicize my clients personal information that was provided to me. It’s like airing all your secrets to your competitors. Plus, lets not forget about spam. I hate spam and I hate people contacting me with unnecessary requests such as e-mail forwards that say I will face grave consequences if I don’t forward the e-mail to 10 other people. I think it’s great to promote the product you created, but the personal contact information needs to stay private. I believe that a contract should state that the client agrees to have their project hosted in my portfolio. Your contract should say you are transferring the copyrights to the client, but you are keeping some to use in your portfolio.

Copyright transfers bring me to my last point. Oh My Handmade wrote a very informative post about copyright transfers for logo designs. They discussed if full rights should be transferred to the client vs partial rights. You can find more information about how this needs to be included in your contract here along with examples and resources.

What resources and tools do you use for your freelance contract?