Farm Fresh

Do you watch American Pickers?  I {heart} that show!  After I watch an episode I'm all geared up to approach a random farmer and ask to pillage his barn! Especially after I got a fabulous idea on pinterest.  For those of you who have been in a cave, pinterest is seriously the ultimate website for organizing your craft ideas, home decor ideas, recipe ideas, fashion ideas... you get the idea.  I {heart} that website, too.

Anyway, after seeing the idea for using a door for a garden gate, I knew I had to do this.  But, like many projects, the time from conception to fruition is horribly long.  I scoured craigslist, the Habitat Re-Store, rummage sales, and curb sides looking for a door that would work.  I found a pair of lovely french doors to use - heavy beasts but gorgeous - but upon getting them home was told that they would not work.   So I kept looking when my fabulous friend Lana heard of my predicament and came to my aide.  She let me pick her BARN!

So, last weekend while we were there for a summer party, we stole away and climbed over chicken wire and raspberry bramble to get inside.  {you know those moments where a light shines down from heaven and you hear a choir singing}  You get the picture.  She had doors upon doors upon doors and we flipped through them for quite some time until we found the perfect ones.



A Saturday afternoon of hosing them off, busting the glass out and removing rusty hinges and we were ready to hang them.  The first one went up and I thought I was going to pee my pants I was so in love with it!  Then my wonderful husband got the other one up and I was more in love... but it needed something.  So I picked my own garden stash in the garage and found these iron shelf brackets that we've been storing for the last 5 years and they made the perfect addition to the bracing at the top.

One last final touch.  I wanted to make it personal.  Ever since I was little, I was called "beans" or "Shelly Beans".  Apparently there was a doll named Shelly Beans and voila.  I became Shelly Beans.   So I decided to add a touch of paint to say "beans' Garden" to welcome you as you enter the garden.

I think what I love love love about my garden and gate is that it reminds me of my childhood.  Finding spaces between trees that became doorways to houses.  Tufts of grass that became "pom pom world".  Uprooted trees that became caves and tunnels.  That sense of whimsy and pretend are alive as you step foot through the doors and into my garden paradise.  Hopefully the weeding fairies will find my garden now and bless me with fewer weeds!



I'm so freakin' in love with my new garden gate you may just find me sitting out there staring at it.