What do turtles and window boxes have in common?

Well not much, I’m sure! I’ve been outside a lot this summer working on the exterior of our house and have had the fun to witness several turtles in our yard laying eggs.

I do however feel I work at a turtle’s pace… compared to a decade or two ago…

Slowly, but surely we are getting the renovation on our house done.

In the fable ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, the hare decided to take a rest, thus the slow but determined tortoise won the race. Well, not only do I move slow, like the tortoise, I take lots of rests like the hare! LOL!

Especially this week, in the heat of summer, as I’ve been painting the back of the house… in the full southern exposure. I work a little, refresh a little, work a little and continue to refresh, too easy to over-do it and get really overheated. I just hate it though when I’ve been sweating away and my husband happens to ‘pop’ home in the middle of my ‘refreshing’ time. Jeesh! I think he thinks that’s what I’ve been doing all day.

Speaking of tortoises… well, turtles that is… (I don’t think tortoises and turtles are the same exactly, right?)

It’s been fun watching them lay eggs in our yard.

I’ve seen several Painted Turtles and one big Snapping Turtle too! (I was a little leary of that one though) If you’ve never seen a turtle lay eggs, I was able to get a video of the Painted Turtle just as the eggs were getting laid.

(you can hear my husband scraping the siding preparing for paint in the background… as I busied myself recording a turtle. hahaha… Well he had the last laugh, due to his knee surgery soon after this was recorded, he’s been off the ‘painting front’ and I’ve been doing it solo! humph!)

We live on the corner with ponds on two sides of our house… hence all the turtles!

Here’s the view from our front porch:

At the top of that pond is a railroad bridge. One day a few weeks ago, my granddaughter and I decided to walk around the pond, (on the street, of course!) and go over that railway bridge to see what our house looked like from there.

Kind of a pretty view from both sides of the pond.

We’re the (mostly) white one on the left…

But before we painted the house and built a front porch this is what the exterior garage wall windows looked like:

It really was ugly!

We took down the posts and railings, replaced the door, re-did the window layout to have 3 smaller windows centered on the wall…

then painted it!

We wanted the light from outdoors for the garage, but not the view into the garage. I’m not crazy about the look of small short windows mounted high on the wall, typically seen on garage walls. To me, it looks a little awkward… especially on this main front view of our house. So my answer isn’t really mine at all…

I found great inspiration from this house that just happens to be on the coast in Maine:

Their house is a pale blue-grey color so the trim and window boxes are all white. Since our house is all white with black sashes on the windows, I did black window boxes. Hmmm… looking at this inspiration picture again, I just noticed that they have brackets under their window boxes… hmmm… that looks nice too…

This inspiration house picture is from a post a couple years ago. I posted about this lovely coastal house and many more that all have terrific inspiration. You can see all those other houses here on this post: Coastal Maine and New England Houses.

The windows and elongated trim with inset panels were installed and painted on our house. (In reality, several months passed between when the windows were installed and I actually was able to paint them! For quite a while our house was a hodge-podge of color!

Which brings us to me finally getting to install the window boxes!!

I found some really nice window boxes here: black fiberglass window boxes. I found them on HomeDepot.com and like most things on that site, they had free shipping! (plus if I need to return something, I can take it back to my local store and avoid any return shipping costs. Love that!) I chose fiberglass for the durability, easy mounting, and low maintenance. They come with special self-water and drainage holes too.

For mounting, the window boxes come with these simple, but very strong, mounting cleats:

The cleats are simply screwed to the wall with the supplied bolts and the window box just slides down over the top. Securely hanging, but easily removed for cleaning and re-potting etc.

The inset panel on our windows was just a tiny bit too small for the standard 36″ wide window box… (like 1/2″ too narrow! oops!)

Not to worry… a couple of shims mounted to the wall with screws will bump out the cleats to the perfect depth.

After drilling a starter hole in the proper placement for the window box cleat, I used a ratchet wrench to screw the bolt in.

I made sure the cleat was hanging right side up and tightened up the bolt.

The window boxes just slide onto the cleat…

a perfect fit!

Since these window boxes are in total shade on the covered north side of the house, I think I’ll just do faux plants… mixed with some real birch branches I harvested from a downed tree this spring.

The front of the house is 99.9% done being painted… The west side is 100% done… The east side is 75% done… and this week I’m working on the south side. Still plenty to do that’s for sure.

Well my ‘refreshing time’ is over for now, back out to the sun and heat.

One last picture from our walk on the railroad bridge, the tracks at sunset:

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This post is linked up at: Between Naps on the Porch