A birthday bouquet (aka. use what you have, part 2)

It was my friend Jeanne's birthday.  And I didn't know it, until I was told that day.  (She knows my birthday, and she always brings a card, which makes me feel even worse that I didn't know her date.)  In fact, earlier this year, on my day, she and Jim gave me the most beautiful bouquet with five different daffodils that they grow in their yard.

I really, really wanted to give her something special.  So, taking a cue from her, I took a look in my yard, where I have been striving to grow enough perennials for a nice cutting garden.

And I thought I came up with a nice vaseful for her!  (Another reason to keep the cute and inexpensive Goodwill vases on hand.)

The first early summer bloom was finished (the irises, roses and salvia).  I have some daylilies, but their name is a clue as to why they make terrible cut flowers.

Still, I managed to put together something really pretty from the few things I have going. 

I've got two perennials looking really beautiful at the moment.  Here they are:

Look at this beautiful astilbe!

I've got purple and white blooming.

The white astilbe is at the end of it's bloom time, so I didn't use it.

This is my shade garden on the shadowy side of the house; it's so beautiful right now.

I've got ferns, hostas and astilbe that just LOVE the lack of sunlight!

The other perennial looking stunning right now is the phlox.

I planted it last year and it's come back looking thick and beautiful.

With the purple phlox and astilbe as my base, here is how the bouquet turned out:

There were three Don Juan red roses, I clipped them all.

There's also a small pink rose, some pink carnations and a little purple lantana that was growing in a pot.

I pretty much clipped everything I could find in bloom.

But didn't it come out pretty?

It felt great to have a "birthday emergency" and rise to the occasion with just what I have in my yard!  I try to grow my perennial garden a little bit more each year.

And finally, one more pic:

We were cleaning the foster kids' sandbox toys with the hose so we could donate them to Goodwill.

I left a box out to pack them in for a few minutes, and - wouldn't you know it - found my cat hanging out there all afternoon.

A great big yard to enjoy and he prefers to sit in a box.

💓🐈😻

Sometimes, you may have a million options, but what's simple just feels good.

A big project completed

The House of Goodwill has some good news!  A major project has FINALLY been completed.  Unfortunately, it's not the DIY kind, it's the pay-a-company-a-lot-of-money-to-do-it-quick-kind.  In the interest of saving money, I usually choose to go with option #1, but this time we didn't.  This time the husband was determined to pay someone else.

The House of Goodwill now has a pet fence!

Anyone who has dogs (and sometimes cats) understands without saying the importance of the pet fence.  For anyone who doesn't understand the significance (due to being pet-less) - here is the reason it's changed our lives dramatically in the past few days: For the last year since we've bought this house, every time our dogs have had to go to the bathroom outside, it's required one of us (usually the husband) to leash up both dogs and walk them around outside until they've located the perfect spot.

If it's raining, they still have to be walked around.  If it's 95 degrees in the middle of the day, they still have to be walked around.  When it's midnight, they have to be walked around.  And taking the dogs out from any door in this house involves going down a set of stairs.  (So imagine two leashed dogs pulling you down a staircase multiple times per day.)

Perhaps now you understand the life-transforming joy of the pet fence.

Now we just open the door in the living room, and the dogs run out and down the stairs and into the yard, where they are safely contained.

Would you like to see this object of beauty?

We thought long and hard over this fence: what material, where to put it, etc.  We finally decided on a green chain link; I know chain link are generally considered ugly (and I agree), but for whatever reason, when I see one in brown, black or green I usually think they look nice.  We chose green because it blends with the grass and trees.

We went with chain link because they tend to last a long time, and we didn't want to use a solid material that would block the views of the lake from the yard.  It had to be see-through.

A second gate opens to the driveway

Can you see the fence in this picture?

(It runs along the slope behind the crepe myrtles.)

It blends so well you hardly notice it!

After multiple back-and-forths, we ended up running the fence through the middle of the slope on the side of the yard, directly through the monkey grass and iris beds.  The main reason was landscape maintenance - if it sat at the top or bottom of the slope it would have required weedeating along it, but by going through the middle it doesn't - the lawnmower can just mow along at the bottom and top of the slope per usual.  Also, for monkeygrass-slope weeding purposes, I can still access the beds easily from the top or bottom.  Having in on the slope incline definitely makes it less visible too.

My husband was pretty adamant about NOT DIY-ing the fence, and to be honest, I was a little surprised.  This is because he's installed multiple fences at our other houses, and he knows what he's doing.  But they were solid wood privacy fences, and the chain link seemed to give him anxiety.

The downside?  We actually had the fence company come out in October to give us an estimate.  But due to COVID reasons, they couldn't order the materials for a couple of months.  By the time they finally could, inflation had driven up the cost of the fence to over $4000. 😐

There is one funny fence story: last fall, the husband and I were out kayaking one evening still debating about the fence material to use.  We noticed a house on the lake with the same green chain link fence, and as soon as we saw it, we both knew that was what we wanted to go with.  It looked great!

As our fence was being built, one of our neighbors, Gigi, was passing by in a golf cart and stopped to see the fence.  She left to bring her husband back to see it too.  When the fence guys had finished the job, they drove to her house to give her an estimate for her own green chain link fence.

So, as much as I hate being trendy, I'm square in the middle of this one. 🙂

But I was trendy in other ways, too.  When the fence guys came to roll the chain link a week after they had set the posts (in the monkey grass), two out of three of them had poison ivy.  (Though not at my level.)

The third guy claimed he was not allergic.

My husband made sure to get his phone number.  ("I'll give him fifty bucks in the fall to come back and pull our poison ivy vines," he promised.)

And this is after he spent a year walking dogs around a yard and waiting for them to go to the bathroom early and late and in all kinds of weather - so I wouldn't have to.

Let me officially declare - romance is alive and well. 💗

The House of Good Will?

It's been a year+ since we bought The House of Goodwill, and I've had nothing but love for this amazing place since.  It's been a source of happiness, purpose, and now...pain.  Finally, a year in, The House of Goodwill has done me a bad turn.  A pretty gross one, too.

If $1 chrysanthemum season and $1 poinsettia season are two of my favorite seasons of the year, perhaps my LEAST favorite season is this one: poison ivy season.  And unfortunately, poison ivy season seems to have no time or weather boundaries.  It can pop up any time, kind of like tornado season in Tennessee.

You may recall a post on my new favorite app, the plant identification app called Picture This.

Picture This has led me to the discovery of The House of Goodwill's secret dark side: landscaping full of poison ivy.  Within the last six weeks, I have rapidly become an expert poison ivy identifier, thanks to this helpful app.

Here's a recent screenshot that's an accurate representation of my thread of saved pics in the app, all taken from my yard:

As you can see, 3 out of 4 plants are poison ivy.

Poison ivy was all over the place!

I say "was" because I have spent the last week pulling poison ivy vines out of the ground all through the yard.  Poison ivy was all over in the front of the house, between the shrubs.  And it was all over in the "hillside" on the side of the house.

The worst part?  The lilyturf (or monkey grass, as it's commonly called) is the groundcover that fills in all the landscaped areas around this house.  I have come to hate the lilyturf, because it grows extremely aggressively, is tough to pull out, and seems to be an excellent breeding ground for all kinds of weeds.  There seems to be a square mile of lilyturf in the yard here.

This slope along the driveway (and along the side yard - it gets steeper) is ALL lilyturf.  (And weeds.)

It's in the front of the house, and all along the sides, too:

The poison ivy vines grow down in the monkey grass where you can't see them till they get large.  They like to lurk out of sight beneath the tall turf, awaiting unsuspecting innocent weeders (like me), who have to step into the monkey grass to pull out redbud saplings, etc.

It's just long enough to hide poison ivy perfectly.

So when I discovered poison ivy everywhere this spring, I decided I had to pull it out.  I don't have a choice about pulling weeds out of the landscaping, and I didn't want to do it surrounded by poison ivy.  Plus, if I left it alone, by the end of summer the vines will be even longer, and spread even MORE everywhere.  And my dogs could get in it.

Leaving the vines in place didn't seem to be an option.

So over the course of a week, I filled five big plastic bags with poison ivy vines.  I had hoped to do it in a day, but after pulling the vines for a couple of hours the first day, I didn't get them all.  Every day for the next five days that I toured the landscaping, I'd see more that I missed.

I started pulling the vines on Saturday.  Here's a pic from my main weed-pulling arm on Monday (with sincere apologies for the grossness):

And here is a pic from this morning, Friday:

I think it's MORE uncomfortable than it looks!

The mystery I haven't figured out is how this wasn't a problem last year, as we spent the summer here.  I remember the foster kids throwing their toys deep into the monkey grass, and we'd run in and pull them out.  My husband, son and I spent quite a few days in the fall weeding.  We were all over in the monkey grass (in the same places I pulled poison ivy), yet none of us had it.

As to the monkey grass, it's officially now my arch nemesis #2.  (After the poison ivy, of course.)  I'm sure that it seemed like a great idea for a ground cover forty years ago.  But I hate this stuff!  And I'm trying to figure out how the weeds were managed in it by the former owners.  We spent many afternoons weeding last fall, only to have the landscaping overflowing with them in the spring again.

If it was just weeds, I'd complain less.  But I'm seeing a yearly battle with the poison ivy in my future.

And a side effect of this misadventure: I'm officially poison ivy paranoid.  Now that I can identify it, I see it all over.  Along the road, in every yard - seriously, this stuff is everywhere!  Will I ever be able to relax outdoors again?

My beloved House of Goodwill, did I misname you?

The Project Pit?

Or the Poison Ivy Pit?

When one project becomes three more

Have you ever taken on a project that seemed pretty straightforward and simple, only to have it slowly devolve into something more complicated, where your single project somehow multiplies into more?

Welcome to The House of Goodwill!

I understand that a lot of major home renovations go this way, but we are not doing anything on that level; a whole-house cosmetic facelift, yes, but nothing involving construction.  I guess that's why why I expected this to be a little simpler. (HA!)

If you've been wondering where we're at in our house facelift, here's the update:

"Simple" project #1: 

You may remember, about three months ago now, my son and I stripped wallpaper in our large entryway room and hall bathroom.  As it turned out, the wallpaper was pretty seriously glued down, and our stripping removed small outer portions of the sheetrock in a few places.  (This has never happened to me before, and I've removed wallpaper quite a few times.)

In addition to this, we uncovered significant holes in both rooms that had simply been wallpapered over; we had no idea that the holes were there.

Here was the hall bathroom before

Here's what was behind the wallpaper in the bathroom, right in the middle of the wall.

This is a pretty good size hole.

What was there?

Well, inside the top drawer of the bathroom vanity was one of those groovy wall radios/intercoms that connected to the main hub in the kitchen.

Advanced technology is responsible for this hole.

And here is what one section of the entryway wall looked like, after the wallpaper removal:

You can see a couple of places where the wall facade got torn, and a strip next to the door where sheetrock is missing.  There were various areas like this in the room.

You may also recall that after trying to find someone for a month who did wall refacing, I finally had a professional come out to give me an estimate to fix both rooms.  (He was recommended to us.)  He gave me an estimate, gave me a date and time he would be there to fix it, then never showed up and never responded to my text messages.

I spent the next month fruitlessly trying to find someone else, only to finally find someone who told me he could definitely do it, but he was booked solid with work and it would be two months before he could put us on the schedule.

And you may ALSO recall that when my husband first offered to try to patch and resurface the walls, I said no, because I wanted it done perfectly, and didn't want a first time do-it-yourselfer result.  (Zero offense intended to the highly competent husband.)

But after being told we'd have to wait two more months - my husband resolved to do it himself.  (And I agreed.)

So after watching hours and hours of YouTube videos on wall patching and skim coating (no exaggeration), he began work this week.  Since he's doing it around his day job, it's a multi-day job of skim coating and sanding, till he gets the wall surfaces even.  Meanwhile, we are living in a dustbowl from all the sanding.

Here are the walls in process, after the first skim coat.

Fingers crossed that he can do it!!

Simple wallpaper removal and painting?  Ha!

"Simple" project #2:

A week ago, we were out on the jet skis, and we stopped by to say hi to some friends we had met here.  While we were talking they mentioned they had two jet ski docks (the kind you connect to your main dock) for parking jet skis.  Since they no longer had jet skis, they didn't need them anymore and offered them to us for free.  Did we want them?  Of course!  We'd need to buy some after having the dock built anyway.

So my husband and son rode the jet skis over the next day and disconnected the docks, and towed them back to our house.  Since we don't have a dock yet to connect them to, my husband decided to take them out of the water to store them till we have our main dock built.

But when my husband and son went to try to lift them out of the water, they couldn't.  They were WAY too heavy.  So they decided to tow them back to the boat launch and push them onto the jet ski trailer to bring them back to the house.  They did.

Once both the docks were sitting in our driveway (many hours after they first towed them away), they discovered WHY the docks were so heavy.  A part of each dock (that had been underwater) was cracked and the docks had filled with water.  This wasn't evident till they were on land.

Because the cracks were significant, we realized they were unusable.  Which meant that two giant, heavy jet ski docks were sitting in the middle of the driveway, and now we had to get rid of them.

My husband drilled holes in the first dock, and the water poured out, making it still quite heavy but light enough to put back on the jet ski trailer.  But where to get rid of it?  After talking to our fence building guy (the next day), he found out about a transfer station that would accept anything dump-able.  So he and my son drove it to the transfer station and paid $17 to leave it there.

How many hours had been invested in the free docks at this point?  Sometimes you don't want to try and figure it out.

That left the second jet ski dock.  This one, when holes were drilled, did not drain easily.  And it was just too heavy to lift off the driveway to put it on the trailer.  So my son spent an hour carving it into pieces with an electric saw, then my husband pulled out the waterlogged foam by hand and put it into trash cans, finally making it light enough to push up the ramp onto the trailer.

Meanwhile my son shop vac-ed a million tiny little pieces of styrofoam out of the driveway.  Both of them are currently at the transfer station for the second time.  They've been gone for a while.

The second jet ski dock, cut up and FINALLY back up on the trailer

Sometimes, when the math of multiplying projects is not working out in your favor, you just have to focus on the bright side.  What was the bright side here?  Well, my husband and I independently reached this conclusion:

The friends who offered us the docks had no idea they were unusable.  They have helped us quite a bit since we've bought this house, and he is close to eighty, so obviously getting rid of two big, heavy docks would pose more of a challenge for him.  We did them a favor.  They may not know it, and it wasn't our plan or theirs, but that's how it turned out, and sometimes the best blessings are those you do for people who are not aware of it.  It was many hours and effort, but it was a good turn.

"Simple" project #3:

I have actually reached the home stretch of painting this house - the whole upstairs, minus the two formerly wallpapered rooms - has been painted at this point.  And my son has painted the downstairs bathroom.  Which just left the downstairs kitchen, as the walls in the main area downstairs were in good shape, and (amazingly!) a nice, light color that could be left alone.

But when my son and I went down to officially assess the downstairs kitchen, I took a good, hard look at the (dark!) kitchen cabinets and realized they were more beaten-looking than I remembered.  If they weren't repainted, it was not going to look good.

(The upstairs kitchen cabinets - also painfully dark - are actually in good shape after forty years.  Their only crime is being too dark.  But after painting this house for a year, I am not inclined to repaint them, though I initially hoped to.  I just don't have it in me.  There are also twice as many upstairs kitchen cabinets as downstairs.)

Anyway, I made the decision to sand and repaint the downstairs kitchen cabinets.  (Have I mentioned how much I HATE sanding??)

There is also one dark-painted accent wall I was going to paint.  But during my official kitchen assessment I also noticed that another wall in the kitchen had many scuff marks and holes that you don't notice till you're standing a few feet away.  So I'll paint that wall as well, which will give the kitchen two accent walls.

So in preparation to sand the kitchen cabinets, we taped plastic cloths from the ceiling to the bottom of the kitchen cabinet in an attempt to trap the dust inside the kitchen, and not send it all over the great room downstairs.

Here's how the kitchen looks currently:

I CAN'T WAIT to paint over that dark accent wall!

I think the former home owners here must have been allergic to light.

Pretty good sanding job, don't you think?

(Especially for someone allergic to sanding.)

It was about five hours of sanding to get these inside cabinets done.

(Not counting the prep and clean up time.)

But once again, the project gods were not on my side.  And the math got ugly once more.

I was SO HAPPY to get his part of the sanding done!  But that was until we removed the tape attaching our plastic sheets to the wall...

See these marks on the wall?  This is where removing the gorilla tape (attaching the plastic sheets) ripped the facade of the sheetrock off.  I almost cried.

So I had to deliver the bad wall news to the husband who was currently skim coating the upstairs walls where the sheetrock facade had been torn.

But honestly, he has the easy part!  He's going to try to patch coat these tears (fingers crossed) - but I have to repaint the whole wall.  And that's not the biggest part of the problem.

The biggest part of this problem is: I have no idea what the paint color of this wall is.  And there are a total of four walls with this color on them in the downstairs.  I can't have one be a random color while the other three are something else.

This was supposed to be the ONE room in this house that I did NOT have to paint.  (And it's a huge room!)  This was the one that I was going to be able to leave alone.  And if I try to somehow match the paint on one wall but I'm off a little, and it obviously doesn't match the other three, it's not going to look good.  If only we hadn't taped the plastic to the wall!  If only, if only...

So I haven't even faced this yet, and it may end up with me repainting the whole room.

At some point, you just have to laugh.

When we bought this house a year ago, I thought for sure we'd have it rented by this summer.  And as the painting dragged out this year, I thought my work might end up holding us up.

But at this point, even with all we've got left to do yet, it actually isn't holding us up being able to rent this place, which is kind of a relief.

What is holding us up?  The boat dock.

We bought this house to be a lake house rental.  (And for our use as well.)  A lake house with no useful waterfront area is a hard sell.

This house didn't have a dock when we bought it, it just has a crumbling shoreline of old railroad ties and unstable ground.

It took almost a year to receive a permit to build a dock from the TVA.  Then we had to find a capable dock builder (which was a process similar to trying to find a wall resurfacer).  We finally did find a great dock builder, but after submitting him the plan, haven't heard from him in almost two months.  (Despite his assurance that he could fit our project in "soon.")

This is ok, however, as we were hearing rumblings that the price and scarcity of lumber (along with other building materials) is making construction projects much more expensive, if not downright impossible.

My husband has begun to call this house "The Project Pit."

Should I rename the blog?

A few "new" things

Over the last few months I've made a few Goodwill visits and a few antique mall stops when I've had a day off now and then.  While I have most things I need for the house at this point (though the house has yet to be "arranged"), when I see something I'll be able to use I still pick it up.

When we're finally done with all the interior painting and we put the house together, I'll be able to see what furniture and items I'm missing and still need to find.  But it's nice to know that we've already bought most of what we need.

Here are a couple of things that caught my eye that I really liked, and wanted to put in the house:

A lot of my "art" I'm going to use in the house are vintage and antique plates, which I absolutely love.

I liked this one for it's 1970's color, and its date, 1976.

This is my birth year, and it's also the decade The House of Goodwill was built, so it feels very appropriate.

My dad always called me the "bicentennial baby."

Plus, with everything going on in our country right now, it's gotten me feeling very patriotic. 

$7 at an antique store.

Though not a Holly Hobbie plate like the others I found, this one from 1973 still felt like one.

I love it's color, it's sweet message and vintage vibe.

$5 at the antique store.

This twin quilt bedspread has the perfect colors for the house.

Since we're going to rent it, I want to have a good stockpile of linens for all the beds.

Whenever I find one like this, in perfect condition, I pick it up.

I think it was $8 at Goodwill.

I found this - apparently never used - great orange and white blanket at Goodwill for $4!

Since I've started crocheting, I really notice these beautiful blanket patterns.

This was probably one of those beautiful blankets that took so much work, it was likely never used, and just sat in a room to be admired (sadly).  The condition is pristine!

I imagine that when someone cleaned out grandma's house, they just donated this to Goodwill. (There were at least three other beautiful, in-perfect-condition crochet blankets there that day.)

But this was the one in the perfect color scheme for The House of Goodwill -

1970's orange!

This blanket falls in the category of "but it's so perfect, I hate to put it in a rental just because it was cheap!"  A part of me wants to keep it beautiful and perfect.  A lot of time went into making this!

But then again, I'm guessing that's how it got to Goodwill.  It was just so beautiful and took so much effort to make, that no one ever wanted to actually use it and possibly mess it up.

But what's the point of living in a museum of beautiful things?  Eventually someone else will just send them to Goodwill - SO - you might as well enjoy those nice things now, right?

I have always struggled with the tendency to hang on to something special/valuable/nice when I have it; to save it for that perfect occasion that never seems to come.  I'm learning to let go of that a little.  To enjoy what I have.  

I remember visiting a neighbor of mine over twenty years ago.  She was a little old lady, and when we sat in her living room, we sat on a pristine (probably 30-year-old) sofa covered in one of those plastic sofa covers.  I also remember all the never-burnt candles on tables that I imagine had been there (unlit) for at least a decade.

And I remember promising myself then, that I would never be an 80-year-old surrounded by unlit candles.  Because, why?  When she passed away a few years later, I have no doubt everything in her living room ended up at Goodwill.

The moral of the story?  That crochet blanket WILL be used.  And I now have the strongest urge to go light a candle somewhere...

Who knew?

This is a post about my birthday, which was back in March. Why the delay? Well, because I finally completed a project that got started then, and I have the pics to prove it.

When my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, the answer was easy.  Flowers?  No.  Dinner out?  No.  What I wanted, more than anything, was for him to give me the gift of his time.  I gave him a list of four small-ish projects that I'd been wanting to get done around the house for a while.  And he agreed!

Turns out my list of "small-ish" projects took my husband almost the whole day.  But you know what?  At the end of the day, he was really happy too, because he had checked some things off the to-do list and he had the satisfaction of accomplishment.

Ok, so to be COMPLETELY honest, the fourth task never got done.  He ran out of time after completing the first three, and he promised me the fourth task (a truly small one - installing a magnetic door closer on an old marble topped cabinet we'd refinished - whose doors forever swing open and won't stay closed) would be completed the next day.

Guess what?  The magnetic closer is still in it's packaging on top of the cabinet.  And now you understand why this was such a great birthday gift...somehow these tasks that get promised to get done end up on the to-do list forever.  Till you have a birthday and a reason to check them off the list, for real.

So what was this project he did?

Well, it turns out one of the "small-ish" (my word) projects wasn't so small.  As it turns out, it took him most of the day to do.  But oh boy, did it change my life!

Here was the problem:

Our house has a small laundry room.  I probably have four or five laundry baskets I keep in it, because I like to sort my dirty laundry in baskets of like clothing - like, white clothes in one basket, sweaty gym clothes in another, towels in another, etc.

There was never enough space for all the baskets, so they'd end up outside on the floor in the hallway, on top of the trash can, awkwardly sitting on top of each other, etc.  There just weren't places to put them.

The small laundry room had one corner that was basically non-functional.  Because our cat's litter box is on the floor (a good place for it), the rest of the corner was rendered essentially useless, since we couldn't put a table or something else in the space.

So my husband offered to build me shelves over the litter box.

I won't say that this is the most aesthetically pleasing project - I wanted shelves that could be adjusted to fit different baskets so they aren't the most beautiful - but this is a laundry room.  And now it's 100% more functional.

I forgot to take a "before" pic of just the wall and the litter box, so these two pics are from after he installed the shelf rails, but you get the idea of what it was:

Before, this was just a litter box underneath wasted wall space.

So why did it just get done?  Well, my husband installed everything in March, but the boards still needed to be painted.  Painting is always my contribution, so it was waiting on me.  Last week when my husband and son were gone for the week, I managed to locate the wall paint and (finally!) get those boards painted!

It always feels SO great to get a project completed, doesn't it?

And here's the finished product!

There are actually four shelves, and now everything fits and is off of the floor.

(And out of the hallway...)

It is amazing how great it feels to get a space organized!  Which of course begs the question: why didn't we do this eighteen years ago?  (Or even ten?)

I often think that by the time we get this house perfectly put together, it will be time to move.

But then again, if I didn't have house projects to work on, what would I be doing?

I have a feeling that my birthday request will not be changing for the rest of my life.  This birthday gift - of these projects getting done - brought me more happiness than anything else I could think of.

Yet again, if I could time travel back to ten-year-old me and tell myself that for my forty-fifth birthday I'd be getting an organized laundry room and it would fill me with joy - I'm sure I would have questioned everything about my life.

And yet, it DID fill my heart with joy.

Who knew?

A patio garden harvest

A few years ago my neighbors Jim and Jeanne came by and surprised me with a gift of strawberry plants.  I had never planted strawberries before, and wasn't sure where to put them in my yard.  I decided to try them in a container, so I went to Tractor Supply to look to look for a good one.

I looked around, and ended up buying two of these round galvanized tubs.  They've worked out perfectly and become two of my favorite patio containers.  (I planted irises in the other one.)

The tub is large, lightweight, and rust-proof.  I bought four wheels and my husband attached them to the bottom (you can't see them in the pic), so these planters can be easily moved into sunny areas or rolled out of the way if needed.  He also drilled drainage holes in the bottom.

I had some foam from an old mattress that I'd saved in my shed, and I cut the foam up and put a layer of it on the bottom of the planter to fill space without adding weight and also to help retain water.

So I put the strawberry plants in the container, and they began to grow.  I saw the first berries beginning to ripen.  Then one day, I was sitting outside and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my (dumb) dog suspiciously hanging around the planter.  What was he doing?  He was standing next to the container, surreptitiously tilting his head over the side and eating the berries.

Needless to say, the berry crop the first year wasn't much.  But I couldn't blame the plants.

That's what the net in the photo is for.  I needed a dog block.  I went to Lowe's to look for some kind of netting material to buy, and as I was walking around the fencing department, I noticed all these black nets on the floor underneath the building materials.  The building materials had come wrapped in the netting, which was just left on the floor once the materials were sold, to be thrown away.  It was just "useless" packaging that had been left behind. 

It was perfect!  And it was free. It's always great when you find exactly what you're looking for, AND it's free. 🙂

I had my husband put four screws in the sides of the planter, and I just pull the net taut over the screw (as seen below).  Voila!  Dog blocked.  (It also keeps rodents and any other animals out.)

I lost a few berries to rot from lying in the dirt; so I ordered the green plastic circular plant rests you can see the pictures.  The berries grow on top of the plastic and it keeps the air circulating below them.

As you can see, it was a good harvest this year!  These are the first berries I picked.  I just leave the container out on the patio all year long, and the so far the strawberry plants have gotten bigger and more robust each season.

It's true, everything tastes better when you grow it yourself!

When I was checking out at Tractor Supply, the cashier was asking what I was going to do with the galvanized tub and the wheels.  When I told her I was going to make rolling planters, she thought I was brilliant.

She told me it was a great idea, and she thought that she should make one too.

I wonder if she ever did?