Well, it has been a while since we've updated the blog, hasn't it. A lot has happened since the last post, most notably being that K and I finally went ahead and tied the knot back in October! As you might imagine, not a whole lot of work has happened on the house, what with all the wedding planning and such.

But...this is not to say that *NOTHING* has been done, if not construction related. I had the chance to decorate the house for Christmas for the first time ever, and definitely came away from the experience with a number of lessons learned:

1. I need a taller ladder!!! Our 16 footer just ain't getting the job done...
2. Find a better way to anchor the lights to the gutters/house. Using the plastic hooks just didn't seem secure enough, and I wasn't able to attach the lights vertically going up the side of the house.
3. I need at least 1 or 2 more strands of lights to really get it done the way I want. Driving down the street seeing the lights on our house was just kind of disappointing. It just looked kind of half-assed.
4. Lights are freaking expensive! Of course, I had to go and get the most expensive sort of lights (LED)...
5. Finally, MUST...HAVE...MORE...DECORATIONS!!! I strive to be the guy on the street that everyone looks at and says "Isn't that a little over the top?"

Beyond the decorating though, we have done a couple other minor projects. The partially finished basement has been partially unfinished. What the hell does that mean, you say? Well, I'm glad you asked. You might remember from a previous post that the basement walls were hideous "wood" paneling. Words cannot describe just how bad it was. Suffice to say, it is no more. After a night of therapeutic demolition, the room is back down to studs. The exterior wall had already been demolished by the basement waterproofing company (with our OK) so that they could install the perimeter drain track.

Now that I think of it, I don't know if we ever posted about the waterproofing experience. It kind of sucked, but I'm not entirely sure that it was the companies fault. We think there is an underground stream running under our house, which means that there's always some amount of water in the pump cistern. It never got above the level of the floor, even when the pump wasn't on. The thing is that I'm not sure that the company was aware of this, and the discharge from the pump was, well, a lot. Who am I kidding, it was like we took the stream, and gave it a path above ground. The front lawn where it ejected was a friggin' swamp. I almost lost my riding mower while tending to manly lawn duties. It was like the lightning sand in "The Princess Bride" except there were no ROUS's (that I could see anyway).

Other than that, they had to do some demo inside the house, which included taking out the framing of the exterior wall to get at the concrete, as well as destroying the first three steps of the stairs coming up from the basement. So, one of my projects was to re-build those steps, including essentially fashioning new stringers from scratch, which I married up to the original ones using construction glue and screws. Plus, I got to play with pneumatic tools again in putting down the stair treads and risers.

So, yeah....basement is partially unfinished. We still need to pull out some of the 2x4 boards in the wall framing, because the jackass who "finished" the basement originally framed the wall studs something like 24" on center rather than 16" as it should be, and then just went in after and added the boards. This would have been fine if all the electrical hadn't already been run. So rather than pull out the electrical, drill holes in the new boards, and run the electrical again...you know...properly, they decided to notch out the boards and just screw 'em in, then put the paneling up. Needless to say, this is a potential electrocution hazard, since if anyone decided to screw into the stud, they might end up going through the wire instead, since it's right behind the wall rather than through the center of the stud. Once we get around to finishing the basement, that will be the first order of business to fix.

Lastly, we finally got around to buying and installing a new handle and deadbolt on the front door. The process was actually fairly simple, and the finished product looks so much better! I'll post pictures when I have a chance.

Ok, I've now created a post that is entirely too long, and I'm sure a good portion of you stopped reading somewhere around halfway through...if you've gotten this far, congratulations, and thank you! I'll try to be better about updating in the future.