Landscape Saturday, Part 3 + Chilewich Mats

I keep wondering what I USED to do on Saturdays before we took on Project Norton. Pretty sure it involved brunching, shopping, museums, and the like – aaah the days...

So this Saturday began with us headed to Home Depot to pick up 15 Arborvitae, on a tip from my Dad that they had the right height in stock for where we wanted to start. We had previously decided to line our property line separating our driveway and our neighbor's driveway with the arborvitae, just for a nice framing of our property line.

Got to Home Depot, packed up the 15 bushes on 2 flat push carts (note: waaay too many to fit into the Prius we drove there), paid, .... and then realized all their trucks were checked out for the day -- UGH. An hour passed while I sat with the bushes and Mike went to Lowe's (on the other side of town) to get a truck.

Yes, I was wondering at this point why we just didn't get these things delivered....

So Mike pulls up to Home Depot in the Lowe's truck

My Dad, always up for a good planting project, meets us at the house

Dad and Mike fought the 2-man augur to get the holes in the ground
(I couldn't even lift this thing!)

And - Arborvitae are in!

You can see them on the left here after the brick wall.

I have to say we're very happy with how they turned out. We spent the rest of the weekend weeding, mulching, watering our new grass, bulbing more mondo grass, etc. Yard is coming along as we wait for our grass to grow...

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The other exciting arrival of the week was some new Chilewich mats. Chilewich is a line of woven vinyl textiles by Sandy Chilewich, which I discovered a couple of years ago in a store on Montana Ave in Santa Monica. Our first purchase was placemats like these in silver. I loved that they almost looked like chain mail, and I'd never seen anything quite like them:

Sandy Chilewich placemats

I realized that she also made floorcoverings, when I bought this interior doormat recently from Crate&Barrel:

I went on the hunt for other Chilewich floorcoverings and found a whole line of larger coverings, in the form of really thin mats, giving off a super-mod look.

From their web site

I didn't foresee us using these in a bedroom or den, but thought they'd be perfect as runners over the ebony floors in our kitchen, and on the tile in our bath. The standard size runner offering at Design Within Reach didn't seem to work well with our space and I ended up finding sisalcarpet.com when I was looking for somewhere who would custom make the sizes I wanted.

Here are the finished mats:

Bamboo pattern in chalk weave in the master bath 

Bamboo pattern in smoke weave in the kitchen – one mat on entrance
and another in the distance between the island and sink

Better picture of the first mat even though it has my fat cat on it
(coincidentally, staring at his kitty door because he gets fed in there)

Really happy with how these look, and surprisingly, they sent ALL the excess cuts of material with the mats. I thought our order had been doubled for a bit but then read on the package that it was the scrap.

Seriously, all excess rolls!

I am racking my brain on what I can do to use this stuff, and thinking I'll see if a tailor can cut it down and bind the edges like the mats I ordered had. If so, I'm thinking a couple more smaller entrance area mats, and maybe even a handful of coasters. Don't say I don't recycle!