Springfield Beach House

We'll be taking a week off of IG to spend some time together in sunny Florida! We hope you get to spend time and unplug with your friends or family. We have been looking forward to this trip for a long time so we can really dial in and spend time with the girls, unplug (at least a bit!) from work and enjoy some fun in the sun!

Florida, here we come!

Do you like to eat? Us too! Do you like to cook? OMG, US TOO! We have a few fave cookbooks at the house for you to use during your time in our amaaaaaazing kitchen. We tried to keep it simple, but really, does Ottolenghi ever do anything simple? These are a few classics that we really love to use at home so we wanted to share these with you in the hopes that it inspires some amazing vacation kitchen moments.

What cookbooks do you love? Any suggestions that we're missing?

I didn't get a chance to snap a good shot of these stunners (other than the last pic of one being unloaded from the truck). We'll have six of these beautiful Quaking Aspens in our new and improves back yard. These super fast-growing lovelies will be located near our new patio (which we hope will be coming in Fall 2022!), and they will provide some beautiful green leaves that "quake" when they blow in the breeze.

We have these trees at our own home and love them so much we wanted them here too! These Aspens have beautiful silver bark, really cool round leaves and turn a gorgeous yellow color in the fall.

Are you as much as a fan as I am? I think I may just order more.

These moppy fellas I picked for their color and bushiness. They're slow growers, but the chartreuse color is awesome and will be a good contrast to our darker green evergreens.

These are called Golden Mops, from the cypress family. We'll see how quickly they can get bigger, but for the time being they'll be a really fun accent piece and provide some color contrast in the yard. The last pic is what they'll look like in a few years (hopefully!).

Do you like these as much as I do?

The crying tree I posted last Thursday is a Weeping Alaskan Cedar. Here are some shots of them when they're mature. Pretty cool, right? This will be a "feature tree" and we hope is grows big and tall and does lots of weeping. But for now it's just an itty bitty guy near the middle of the yard.

Do you like this, or just me?

Happy birthday to our fearless leader, Sarah! She turns the big 4-0 today! Sarah keeps all the things running smoothly here at the beach house and was integral to making all of this happen - the yard, the house, the everything! - with her crazy schemes and dreams.

Happy birthday, Sarah (wherever you may be on your surprise birthday trip)?

We have one accent tree that I'm super excited about. I'm not sure why I had to have this one, but I've seen a few of them and just think they're really unique and kind of fun. This one will be at about the halfway point in the yard and hopefully you can spot it this summer if you come stay with us. Any guesses as to what this one is?

Hint: it's crying!

It was quite an ordeal to get some of our plants on-site. was awesome to work with for their seamless ordering and deep inventory, as was their driver Bobby who got us all the things we needed. He got a full-size semi onto our tiny little roads, but couldn't quite make the turn down our itty bitty street. Enter the forklift and lots of extra hands and we got it done with the help of our awesome landscaping crew!

So excited to see how this turns out!

The peeling bark from last Thursday's post might have been a dead giveaway. We'll have three River Birch / Betula Nigra trees in the NE quadrant of our yard, near the existing magnolia tree.

I can't wait to see how these things grow and add dimension and color to our yard! They are stunners!

The evergreen trees from last Tuesday are Thuja / Green Giants. These things grow fast - over 3 feet a year (per the internet, which only has the most accurate information). We're hoping these 20 green giants will give us some really nice privacy along our southern lot line, and blend in with some existing arborvitae.

Of course these aren't our actual trees, (ours are the much smaller ones in the mud pit with the terrible quality pic 😂 ) but here's hoping they look like this pretty soon!

What do you think?

This one might be kind of easy for some people, but here goes:
Three of these beauties will make an appearance in the NE quadrant of the yard. Unlike the trees from Tuesday, these are deciduous and will lose their leaves in the winter. The bark is the biggest giveaway and these are a 4-trunk variety.

I'm super excited for these!

Any guesses?

Big things are happening! You know how they say it has to get worse before it gets better? I think we're there. The yard is torn to shreds, basically a mud pit. But in the next few days, we'll have new trees (and some shrubs) planted along the border of our yard. Let's play a fun guessing game and see if you can guess what we're planting.

First up: 20 of these bad boys! They're fast-growing and going to give us *a lot* of privacy and greenery. They're in the evergreen family and will keep their needles year-round. And they can get BIG! Upwards of 60' in some cases!

Any guesses?