It's Great To Be Home

Our Flip: They Can Take The Heat

You know that saying, if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen? Well, the same thing applies to the backyard at our flip.

That puppy gets H-O-T in the Texas heat, so heat and sun-tolerant plants were a must when we were thinking about landscaping around the pool.

We also had a really cool existing, unidentified palm-like tree that we wanted to work around:

With our requirements for hot ‘n hardy plants that fit in with our funky palm tree, coming up with a tropical, oasis-like landscaping scheme was a no-brainer.

Now that you’ve heard all about how we transformed the backyard, I thought I’d give you the scoop on which plants we picked, and why. Here we go!!

These plants below form the main focal point of the backyard. By choosing plants of varying heights, we were able to break up the large expanse of fence behind the pool, and add some texture and visual interest to keep your eye moving from plant to plant so that you don’t miss a single one of those beauties.

While we wanted the majority of the plants to be green to form kind of a backdrop for the gorgeous pool, I couldn’t resist a few fun pops of color with those giant hibiscus – they had me from hello!

Each one of these tropical plants is tolerant of full-sun (a necessity in this backyard) and lots of heat. The few days a year that Dallas gets below freezing, all the new owner will need to do to keep these plants happy is cover them with a sheet – easy!

We also added a little planting vignette over by the new fence that was constructed to hide the pool equipment from view. Our goal was simply to break up the fence a little bit (a common theme, it seems) and add a little pop of color in another corner of the yard.

So now you know all the nitty gritty about those fun tropical plants hanging out by the pool! The word on the street is that the pool will be ready to swim in this weekend – yippee!! Now, here’s my big question to you guys – does anybody know what the heck that unidentified palm-like tree is over by the pool? I wanna know!!

This post is shared with Hooked on Houses.

Cold Shower? Not Anymore

With one water heater and almost 2,700 square feet spread out over only one level, you can imagine that anyone waiting for a toasty hot shower in our house had a pretty long, cold wait. Until now.

Enter the recirculating pump. What is a recirculating pump, you might ask? Well, it’s a cool little device that a plumber or an ambitious DIYer can connect to your water heater to provide hot water to all of your fixtures, practically instantaneously. Check out an example of a recirculating pump right here. While we briefly thought about installing a tankless water heater instead, we quickly realized that recirculation pumps are about 1/3 the cost of tankless water heaters – decision made!

Not only does a recirculating pump keep you from freezing while you wait for a hot shower, but it can also save you buckets of money in utility bills – if you do it right, as we learned the hard way. At our house, we installed a second hot water heater AND a recirculating pump, guaranteeing that we’d never again take a cold shower. However, we were shocked when we got our first, gasp-inducing gas and electric bills – how could this be?? Once we actually thought about it, the high bills made a lot of sense – the gas bill was high because the hot water heaters were constantly heating water, and the electric bill was big due to the recirculation of water throughout the house. But now that we had the culprit behind the high bills figured out, how could we fix it? Well, the hubs had the brilliant idea of installing a timer on the recirculating pump, limiting the time that the recirculation pump was operating to those times that we would actually be showering (with different settings for weekdays v. weekend). Pretty cool, right?? Now we have hot water when we need it AND cheapo gas and electric bills!

Got any great tips for keeping your bills down? Stay tuned for more water heater fun…