Check out all the wood we had, ready for a nice cold winter. Well it was pretty mild, rained less than half of what it normally does. We were able to ride our bikes pretty much the whole winter long and only burned half this wood. We're pretty set up for next year (2007) now! Thanks so much to Ag for stacking it all while we were busy working on the front garden/driveway. Sorry this post is so late, it was all drafted up here and never posted.
Well this was a long time ago! but I cleaned the chimneys myself this last summer. It was a pain cutting a round brush to fit in our oval chimney insert. But now it's done it'll be a doddle to do every year and we can be safe knowing we have a clean chimney and save a bunch of money doing it ourselves. The chimney for the studio apartment was much easier even if it was two stories in the air.
The past two weekends we've been hard at work with tons of help from the In-Laws and my mom landscaping the small patch of yard in front of the pool. This area has always been consumed by weeds which isn't really a great first impression when you drive up to the house. With our baby's arrival, I've been really pushing to simplify yardwork. So instead of Hubby having to weed whack this section of the yard, we've planted drought and deer resistant plants and installed a drip irrigation system. It will be awhile before the amount of time this project has consumed will actually pay off since it only took him about 30 minutes to whack the weeds in this section versus the 2 three day weekends that were just used. However, at least the yard looks much more presentable. Now if the plants can survive the deers, moles, and gophers, we'll really be making progress!
The water heater in the garage has been off for 6 months and when that happens the water normally smells pretty sulfur-y and we want to steam clean the carpets and the last thing we wanted was them to be even worse afterwards. So I set out to clean the water heater. Last time I just threw some bleach in the water inlet and ran it through, it seemed to help. This time I was going to put some vinegar in there for hopefully a more mild approach. However I had one of those element removing tools that I had never managed to get working on the old water heater in the house causing me to just cave in and install a new one. So I drilled some bigger holes in the tool closer to the hex part of the wrench and it worked a treat. I didn't like what I saw inside. Each element was pretty caked but what was worse when I stuck my finger in the bottom element hole I could feel what felt like gravel ewww.... What followed was a lot of flushing water through, rocking the water heater and poking at it with various spokes and long screwdrivers and you can see the pile of gunk that came out. It was all scaly flakes and took ages to come out. That pile's not even all of it. Think about that next time you think about using hot water to clean your teeth or for cooking (ugh!). If you haven't flushed out your hot water tank, perhaps now would be a good time?
I should be a general contractor, seriously, it's only taken me 4 years to finally finish the medicine cabinet in the bathroom! This has been quite a contentious issue in the house for quite some time, after the contractor we hired to remodel the bathroom kind of stiffed us and left us half finished we got everything done but the medicine cabinet which I was sure I could do myself. Well it's finally done and while not perfect I'm pretty happy with the outcome.
It's been two years since we did the landscaping by the pool and boy did the hard work pay off. Whilst quite a few of the plants have been attacked by huge rabbits, moles, and gophers with big, giant pointy teeth and a vicious streak a mile wide, the garden for the most part is thriving. I'm sure the 60 inches of rain we got this year has a lot to do with how well it's growing. I'm very thankful for all of Mom's, Hubby's and Hubby's parent's help with the garden over the past two years. It's very nice to sit by the pool and enjoy all the beautiful flowers, butterflies, bees, birds, and lizards who also enjoy being in the garden by the pool.
The garage is finished! We got our slidelok cabinets installed yesterday and the floor was finished last week. I'm very happy with how it all turned out, now I just need to put back everything that's been moved out. It'll never look as nice again :(
It was a very, very busy weekend. Saturday I assembled some IKEA furniture. I'm getting really good at it now. Here's some top tips, use glue. Take a kitchen towel and cut it into 1" strips and use these to clean up the excess glue that seeps out. Assemble it on the cardboard that it comes in. Since you're gluing stuff, be very very careful will the instructions and don't take a break until you're sure you have everything right.
The rest of Saturday and almost all of Sunday I worked on emptying out the garage, we're getting the floor epoxied this week, in preparation for the cabinets coming in a few weeks. It's going to look great! I've never seen the garage empty, since there was a tenant when I moved in and we bought the house while we were renting it. It's amazing how much stuff we have in there (too much leftover wood from other projects) and hopefully the cabinets will help us keep it organized. I cleaned the curbs since we didn't want them pressure washing it and damaging our new walls.
Ginger Cat's immense ass finally killed the $30 wal-mart tower of fun we had in the bay window. There was a huge crash and there it was on the ground and Ginger Cat was all wide eyed and freaked out. We went out the next night looking for a replacement and found one that was really nice and not as expensive as the $400 tree like structures they were selling.
I put up 30ft of curtain this weekend. Finally our living room and den has curtains. To try and keep the heat in we got velvet curtains and they all look great. They cover both the windows and the doors and are nicely out of the way when they're open. I really don't like the curtain rods you get at the store (the ones where one rod slides inside another rod) and custom made curtain rods are super expensive so I made my own out of 1/2" iron pipe. It cost $100 for 5 rods one of which was 12ft long. I cleaned, metal etched and then spray painted them black and they look great! I'm super happy with how they turned out.
