During the summer months of 2020, I was MIA and didn’t get to publish any blog posts. We were pretty bummed out about not being able to travel abroad during the summer months. After cancelling our trip to Guatemala and not hopping on the plane for so long, along with many cancelled events and more people getting sick, this summer was not what we expected it to be. However, we were very fortunate for still having our jobs and good health during these difficult times. So when the Corona limitations gave us this extended stay-cation, we decided to make good use of it!
Several summer weekends were spent working on our garden, remodeling our home and upgrading and minimalizing! A few were spent with my parents, back home in Houston and in their spacious backyard. And then again a few more were spent picking up extra work since we had no where to go! I’ve posted about all the extra things we got to do this year on my Instagram stories…but if you missed it, here ya go!
Baby banana tree 
buckets of lemons
1 My parent’s backyard and our very own backyard are two of my happy places! Luckily, hubby loves gardening as much as I do! We grew many vegetables, fruits and herbs such as okra, papaya, carrots, beans, curry leaves, baby banana, aloe vera, yucca, mint, rosemary, all kinds of peppers and so many lemons! We also worked on growing a few inside plants and flowers!
2 We extended my dad’s trellis (called “panthal” in my native language), as well as increased the area we use for gardening in our own backyard. We learned how to make more use of the space we have in terms of growing plants. We also did this with our indoor house plants!
3 Hubby and I installed a rain water catcher! We connected our gutter to a 50 gallon container and attached a pipe at the bottom of it. So whenever we need to water our garden now, we just open up the pipe and use rain water.
Plus points: Rain water is better for the soil and vegetables. It saves us a good amount on our water bill each month during the summer months.
Indoors
4 Something we were able to do in our house during the very hot summer days was upgrading our kitchen and bathroom. We took off all our cabinet doors, painted them and added handles to it. We also painted our bathroom cabinets and added fancy handles, which really gave the bathroom an upgraded look.
5 While we were painting our cabinets, we thought why not paint some walls to. So we ended up painting our game room a dark red to match our pool table, giving it a more put together look. While I was on this painting spree, I also used some left over paint and painted a closet that really needed it.
Check out my sister in law’s video below to get a sneak peek of my parent’s backyard, the huge lemon tree, the okra vines and more! When life gave us lemons, we made lemonade, literally.
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