Monica Kochelee

My hubby loves stainless steel.  When we moved into this house almost two years ago now, we needed to buy all new kitchen appliances.  We went to the local appliance store together and my hubby went all “gaga” over the stainless steel appliances.  We ended up buying a new stainless steel dishwasher, range, and refrigerator.  Later on when my toaster oven and microwave oven died we replaced them with stainless steel, too!  My hubby probably loves stainless steel so much because it reminds him of the shiny parts on the machines he loves to tinker with.  I know he likes to put chrome everywhere he can on his machines!  He’s big into shiny metal!

I like shiny metal jewelry too, so I guess I have to think of the stainless steel appliances as jewelry for the house!  Now that we’ve been here a while, my hubby has been thinking about adding a few “decorative touches” to the house.  He found a website, www.thestainlesssteelstore.com, that sells stainless steel accessories made by bloomus, and he has made up a wish list of things he wants to buy.  Some of these items are for our house; some of them are for gifts for his relatives that he wants to buy.  So far he has on his wish list some Blomus stainless steel mailboxes, Blomus stainless steel fireplace accessories, and stainless steel bird feeders.

I think that one of the nicest ways a person can spruce up a house is by putting up a really nice mailbox.  When we first moved here, our mailbox was old and beat up and rusty.  It looked horrible!  I have been telling my hubby ever since we moved that I want a new mailbox, but I have not seen any that I like at the local stores.

I finally found a great website www.mailboxixchange.com by the Mailboxixchange Company that has a HUGE selection of the greatest mailboxes I’ve ever seen!  I never imagined there were so many different types of mailboxes out there!  They sell over 2500 different kinds of mailboxes! 

Some look really antique, some look like birdhouses, some look very modern.  Some look very “country gentleman” and some look very “citified.”  They sell quite a few security/locking mailboxes, too.

This site not only sells mailboxes, but they also sell mailbox posts, curbside decor (which includes several nice bird feeders,) and mailbox plaques and numbers.  They sell commercial mailboxes as well as residential mailboxes.  I think I’d like to buy one of the mailboxes that looks like a birdhouse and do some decorative painting on it.  That would be adorable!

My British cousin (the one I write about from time to time) has sent me an email to tell me about her new garden addition - a lay z spa.  She is so excited to have a spa tub right outside her slider doors off of her bedroom, in her cottage garden.  I’d be excited too!  I’d love to have one when our finances allow!

The spa that she bought is an inflatable spa that is easy to deflate and bring in the house during the winter.  It has 80 individual micro jets to massage the bathers, and it has digital temperature control, will heat the water up to 40 degrees Celsius (which is 104 Fahrenheit.)

I’ve been noticing a lot of flowers on vines the past couple of weeks, and just looked them up on google - they are wisteria flowers.  Very pretty!  I can’t remember ever seeing wisterias bloom in real life.  Being relatively new to the area, I’m not familiar with all of the flowers that bloom here.  I can tell you that I never saw wisterias in bloom like this in Maine!

This afternoon I was looking out my front window and happened to see my next door neighbor kicking leaves from his front lawn onto my front lawn!  I couldn’t believe my eyes!  I called my hubby over to see for himself what was happening!  He couldn’t believe it either!  This neighbor has his house up for sale; if it wasn’t up for sale, I think I’d confront him on this.  He has no right to kick leaves from his yard into ours!