Killer Week

My back is just killing me this afternoon. Just thought I'd share that with you folks. I need to make an effort to relax, stop doing stuff, and go to bed earlier. At least for a few days. It was a rough weekend.

The driveway stuff delivery did not come on Saturday as scheduled. They told Mike over the phone that there would be up to 5" pieces of cement in the reclaimed mix - too big for our taste. He cancelled it all and decided to go and look at our options before making a decision. When he came home Saturday night, he had been to the materials yard and decided that crushed blue stone would be a better way to go.

Lucky for us, they deliver on Sunday and the price wasn't that much more. $170 vs $120 for the concrete stuff. Done and delivered before noon on Sunday. What service!

Sunday afternoon, Mike was out of the house and I took it upon myself to paint the white on the porch steps.

Just tilt your head - this one won't turn in iPhoto for me. Grrrr!

 I may have failed to mention that I also wet wiped/dry wiped the basement tile grout on Saturday. Feeling motivated after finishing that job, I cleaned up the drywall mess in the tub and moved in the vanity and the bottom half of the toilet. (I should not have been lifting either.) Then, I put in the recessed light bulbs and trim on all but one recessed light. (Turns out the shower needs an R20 rather then an R16 bulb.)

I also brought more summer stuff on the porch - the cushion for the chaise and all the small plant holder tables. I checked BJ's, since that's where I got all my awesome porch plants at this time last year. But this year, they don't have anything similar. Just small ones. What a disappointment. Now I'll have to go on the hunt for similar ones at a similar price...

Anyway!

Monday, Mike gave the stairs a second coat and spread the stone. Turns out we just barely got not enough. There's a little portion across from the garage addition that will have to go without stone for a bit. Tuesday, Mike brought home a compactor from work and hit the entire stone driveway.

Meanwhile, I've been busy with preparations for Mikey's bday party saturday. Neither of us have been back in the basement, which is regrettable, but unavoidable at the moment.

Today I'm just exhausted and in total pain. I need to take it easy. It's not even Friday yet.

 

PS - Garage Trim. Very late in posting this pic!

In with the Water Out

Wow. That's all I have to say. Our plumber came out Sunday morning as planned and he and Mike hooked up all the drains (bathtub, toilet, sink) in under an hour. Mike spent the rest of Sunday morning and early afternoon cleaning out all the rest of the broken cement, rocks, and dirt from the basement. (Throwing large pieces up and out the window, carrying small bits and dirt up in bucket loads.)

By late Sunday afternoon, he was on his way to the DeepHo to pickup cement. 

By late Sunday evening, all the trenches and pipes within the trenches were sealed and re-cemented beautifully. Not to mention that the entire area was clean and free of cement debris.

Pipe Pattern

The Evacuator

Cat prints immortalized

To repeat, Wow.

Too bad the dump was closed today. (Monday)

Next up, all the copper piping to plumb the water "in." (Since we already have the water "out" covered... literally at this point.) Then tile, electrical, insulation, and drywall. As far as I'm concerned, all that is the easy part. Once the copper is bought and installed, the difficult and expensive part will be officially complete.

What a way to ring in the new year!

Paint & Playground Paradise

The weekend turned out to be much hotter then expected. And I'm not one to complain about the heat - I love it! The trouble is, you can't always be sitting by a pool drinking cool refreshing beverages when it's hot out. Sometimes you have to do hard labor and sweat yourself to death.

It started for me on Saturday. Mike didn't bring home the fuzzy rollers Friday night, but I decided that it would be smart to start cutting in. I could cut in around the largest part of the porch, paint that one section on Sunday, and have the fan installed by Sunday night. That was my original thought. It turned into two hours of pure sweat. Because of course, the porch is covered with furniture and the floor has already been stained. So to do the first section, I had to move the furniture, put down the drop cloth, clean off the bugs with a broom (which is a whole other disgusting story), and drag out and put up the ladder.

Wow, when I type it out like that I really sound like I'm complaining about the most menial of tasks. (Reminds me of someone else I know.) I'm not complaining. I'm stating. There was a lot of prep involved.

I cut in the first section with a brush fairly quickly and decided to move on. I had to move the furniture back, move more furniture out of the way, move the drop cloth and the ladder, clean more bugs, and remove outlet covers. Then I could cut in the next section. And then I just kept going. Move, move, clean, remove, move, paint... again and again until the entire porch was cut. By the last section, I was so sweaty toast. I was forcing myself to keep going, to finish. (Nevermind that I had to clean up afterwards.)

Needless to say, I accomplished much more then I set out to do. But after that hot hot Saturday afternoon experience, I just couldn't bring myself to do it again on Sunday with the roller. Not even in that first area where the ceiling fan is going to go. The mere thought! (That and the fact we were at a house party until 3am Saturday night.)

But don't think that we ended up lazing about on Sunday. The day was as jam packed as it was sweltering. Mike loaded up the playground dude's tractor parts (yeah, it ended up being unworthy of fixing), tools, and a chainsaw. A  couple hours later he was back with the playground, drenched in sweat. He and his friend Marcus discovered that it was cemented into the ground... cemented as in 4' sonotubes into the ground kind-of cemented. And you thought it weird that he was bringing a chainsaw! They broke a truck jack trying to remove the thing and ended up having to cut it off its foundation.

While the boys were wrestling with the playground, Mikey and I were home with Timmy and Richard, who came over and wrapped the last side-stair post and installed the last railing on the side stair. After that, they were both wiped and called it a day. Timmy said he might have a stair-thingie at his shop that would fit for our front steps.... So he wanted to check that out before he started out front anyway.

It wasn't but a few minutes after they left that Mike and Marcus pulled in with the playground. We spent the remainder of the afternoon putting it together.

I had originally thought of facing the set towards the garage on the left side of the backyard. That plan had me worried because of all the poison ivy in that area, but with trees on the right hand side, I saw little other option. Mike suggested turning it the other way, facing the hillside, so it could go on the right hand side of the yard. I've got to hand it to him - it was the perfect spot.

But much like previous playground owners before us, we found it to be too unstable to just stand there in the yard. We'd have to cement it in. And luckily for us, we just happened to have four extra bags of concrete! The perfect amount for the four holes we dug around the tower portion.

 

After we poured the cement, we put on the slide and installed the two new swings we bought. (The third spot will be for an infant swing.) It looked good - really good. The slide is a little short... and weak from years of weather and use. We'll probably have to increase the angle and purchase a new slide. All in good time. I measured for the canopy and it looks like it will fit perfectly! Although we'll have to fashion a new ladder - the old one is not safe.

Now, in regards to the poison ivy on the other side of the lawn. Sunday night, Mike just mowed it all down. And the lawn looks AWESOME.

I know it's pretty hard to tell from this picture... but the area on the left by the septic vent? It looks awesome. Unfortunately, there's still poison ivy over there by that old Jeep thing. (The red thing by the tree in the picture.) And poison ivy is also climbing up the tree.

How do I know it's poison ivy? I looked it up on this website: http://www.poison-ivy.org/. The entire time, we just thought most of it was regular ivy, because it wasn't shiny and the leaves weren't reddish, as we had always been taught. Boy were we mistaken. The leaves don't have to be reddish or shiny. They can climb, creep, and even grow into a shrub! And the bad news is, there's no full proof way to get rid of it.

Mike is going to physically pull out the ivy by the Jeep. We have a whole bunch of it on our rock wall too, just to the right of this picture, out of frame. For areas where you don't want ANYTHING to grow, you can use a mixture of dish washing soap and vinegar. I'm going to try it on the rocks this weekend if time permits. I wouldn't mind that garbage of plants dying off. You can't even see the rocks!

And thus concludes our program. Thanks for reading.

Back to Normal!

Ok, so the weekend is back. Time to ask myself what's happening? Are we too sick to move? Are we rushing from one event to another? Is there some sort of holiday? Some vacation to go on? A birthday party to attend? A Minute Clinic to waste the day at?

This past weekend, the answers were surprisingly - No, we're feelin good. No events. No holidays. No vacay. No party. Nowhere to go, errands to run, nothing, naught, nada, zip, zilch, zoop. All quiet on the home front.... Weird!

So, Mike and I held our breath, fearing the next event and/or disaster, and scheduled Timmy to come over Sunday to work on the porch. Sunday morning, Mike mowed the lawn. Everything was still surprisingly normal. Timmy came over and got right to work.

He added another post to our side staircase. Then, he built a wooden form for our last step, which would be made of cement. Mike went to HomeDeep, got the concrete, mixed it, and poured it into the form. Last step - done.

Then, Timmy got to our last two railings, which had been sitting on the side of the house in their boxes since May. One full rail went up on the main part of the porch. The last of the porch rails! Half of the second rail circled the side stairway. The last of the straight rails!

The only thing that remains to be done on the side stairway is the actual angled stair railing - which we have in stock, still in the box of course. The guys ran out of time on Sunday and will have to install this one another day. Timmy also gave us a short list for the front stairway. (Sweet! I love short lists!) The next couple weeks are back to events and occasions, but since I can't afford any new materials anyway, I don't much mind.

Maybe in that time, we can find a moment or two to tackle our back hill, where mini locust trees are sprouting all over the place. We need to weed whack in a desperate way. Also, the back yard grass, though still growing well, needs fertilizer.

Upcoming in August! The porch gets done! Once it's over with, we'll strip the siding off the left side of the house, install the octagonal window, and finally use up the rest of our in-stock siding. Do or die time. Summer's hourglass is quickly filling into fall....

Nothin Like a Rust Basket for Easter

Welcome to Easter Sunday!

Mike brought me home a lovely rust basket yesterday... the 1/2 a trans am I mentioned earlier in the week.


And despite my reservations about messing up the yard just two weeks after we finished cleaning it, I'm pretty happy with this thing. I mean, Mike was out there for less then an hour when "Vrooommmmm" the engine fired right up - no problem, ran perfect, leaked nothing. All he's got to do (all - yeah, that's a loaded word) is pull the engine and anything else worth salvaging - then junk the rest.

Today? I doubt it.

Today's more about his garage - or, I should say, the back of the garage where we poured a cement slab nearly 3 years ago. At that time it made a great dance floor for our backyard wedding. But its real purpose was yet to come - garage addition.


Well, thanks to the sale of one of our welders, Mike is now able to fulfill his add-on dreams and build the durn thing. (And it's a 'thank you' from me for all his hard work to get the house ready for that appraisal too.)

So today, his mason friend Tom is coming over to raise that foundation a bit with cement blocks, thus avoiding wood to ground contact. (Because that's just never good.)

Meanwhile, our neighbor Dana will be burning our combined brush from those trees Mike took down near the line of our two properties. We gave most of the logs to Dana for his wood stove, so he was more than happy to offer to tend the burn for us.

Not quite your traditional Easter celebration, but very much us.

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How's Everything Since the Stimulus?!

I can't say that the stimulus saved my life... just my week. And it possibly saved this weekend too - since I'll be able to get my hands on some materials.

But first let me rewind back to last weekend. This has been such a crazy week that I've barely had time to breath out, let alone blog anything! Saturday we were even so busy that we didn't manage to start the footings until 4 or 5 in the afternoon! At at that point we were so wiped - it was really hard work.

We had to get it done, though. We had rented the cement mixer for the weekend only.

So we got out the hose and the cement and started just mixing away. The actual pouring into the sonotubes turned out to be a little difficult too. Mostly because we've had so much rain that the sonotubes were moist and the cardboard layers kept peeling off of the edges. Not so much to compromise the structural integrity of the tube - just enough to be a pain in the butt while pouring in cement.


Mike tilted the mixer as I kneeled down by the hole with a piece of plywood that I used to direct the pouring cement into the hole. The system worked relatively well. And, it turned out we had nearly the exact correct amount of cement. We only had two bags left over. Very cool. I love a day that I don't have to run back to the DeepHo for some stupid thing.

After each tube was full, we put a bracket into the cement at the exact tube center. These will later hold the posts of the porch. We had a problem with the footing nearest to the house. Somehow, it had gotten off center! I don't know whether we were just off on our calculations initially, or whether all the rain settled the soil in some weird way - the world may never know. But on that one we had to offset the bracket so that it would line up with the other footings. I was pretty nervous about that, but Mike assured me that we'd be able to make it work.

We finished the footings around nightfall and just crapped out. Sunday morning was even more hectic and the weather was terrible! But we managed to make it to the blessing of the bikes anyway, and then enjoyed lunch with some friends over at The All American... soaked mind you. By the time we made it home from that we totally just wanted to poop out. And we did!

That was our last weekend.

And if you were thinking we'd start building the porch this weekend - well, you'd be absolutely... WRONG. Nope - we still have some other stuff to catch up on first - plus, the weather's going to be terrible. Again. But no worries, cause we've got so much stuff to get a jump on.

Number A - We've got a scrap metal run to make on Saturday morning - and then, hopefully, a dump run.

Number B - We need to install that new dryer vent, especially with all this rain heading our way.

Number C - (Cause I like numbering my letters.) We have to nail up the exterior window trim we cut and painted like a million years ago.

Number D - We have to pull back the siding on the front of the house, fix any rot, and install plywood in prep for the new siding.

Number E - If I get any time to myself, I need to scrape and repaint some peeling areas of the current window trim.

Number F - We need to get up into the attic and figure out where the mudroom track light wire goes so we can get that fixed and/or hooked up.

Number G - We NEED need need need need to reinstall the french doors. Yes, we just got the glass fixed and all that - but the thing is, we need to caulk the whole thing and install some flashing at the bottom. That's been missing from the start and if nothing else but this gets done this weekend - I will be a happy happy camper because I've been complaining about this since the beginning.

So I think that's plenty enough to keep us busy this weekend, if the rain holds off.