Yardwork, part deux

We had a nice sunny, breezy day to get some yardwork done, and finally had the chance to break out the new riding mower!  The lawn is mowed, the poor neglected perennial bed is about half cleared out, and a volunteer pine tree in a bad place has been cut down.  We still have to finish clearing out the rest of the bed (mostly involving fighting with an awful mixture of multiflora rose and wintercreeper), kill the few sprouts of poison ivy we've seen popping up here and there, and somehow figure out how to scrape up all of the crushed rock and sand from the old pool base so we can restore the grass there.  That's just the back yard - in the front, we have to do some revamping of the existing gardens, and we also need to figure out our sump pump discharge that is still flooding into the street (despite extensive discussion with the basement waterproofing company, we don't have a good solution yet).

Who wants black-eyed susans or hostas?  We're sort of drowning in both at the moment, and would be happy to rehome a few...

Spring is here!

In the spring, a young homeowner's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of... yardwork.

Even though we never had much of a winter to speak of, spring is most definitely here, and with it has come the realization that while we may have accomplished a lot inside, we have a LOT to do outside. Also, most of it is going to require equipment we don't have yet. We have just acquired a lawnmower of the tiny-tractor variety, which is probably overkill for our reasonably-sized suburban lawn, but my other half pointed out, very reasonably, that between his bad knee and my bad back, neither of us is probably going to be up to dealing with a push mower. (There was a distinct undertone of "but I WAAAAAAAANT one," which didn't bother me any because tractors are awesome, and also did you know you can buy an attachment for it that turns it into a ride-on snowblower? It's true!)

I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable gardener, but I freely admit that I know nothing at all about lawn care. Back home, I had my little herb garden and a rose bed or two, and the lawn was just the big green expanse between the interesting bits. Every so often, Mom or Pa would mow it, and white clover would pop up in the summer to attract honeybees. Now that I have my own lawn, I'm realizing there's a bit more to it than just the occasional mowing, so I'll have to read up on the subject and find out exactly what we need to do to keep it looking nice. I'm not looking for golf course perfection - I find a few weeds charming, especially the little violets that show up in a lot of lawns around here. However, the big pile of rocks and sand left over from the previous owners' pool base is definitely going to have to go.

Checking In

Hey everyone! Did you miss us?

Sorry it's been so long since we've posted, but as you might imagine, things got pretty crazy for us with the move and all. As you may also imagine, the work here is still not complete. Baseboards and thresholds need to be installed in the living room, some painting needs to be finished, and the two extra bedrooms upstairs haven't even been touched, save for one that I pulled the carpet out of, and nearly immediately regretted. It seems that the previous owner, knowing that carpet was being put down in that room, felt that it was fine to not use any sort of drop cloth while painting the room. The floor is just about fully covered in paint, which is sad, because it's all over beautiful hardwood. We'll have to get someone in to refinish the floors (any suggestions?).

We did get lucky though, and a friend was able to give us a couch, arm chair, and coffee table, so we actually have enough furniture that the den doesn't look barren. In February, we went to a home show at the Seaport World Trade Center, and were foolish enough to actually talk to the exhibitors, and have been fielding phone calls and meeting with contractors ever since. We did decide to replace a couple of windows, which will be done by Newpro. They were kind of expensive, but after seeing some of the other windows on the market, I can see why. Theirs is much higher quality than anything else we saw. We wanted to see how much it would cost to do the whole house, and nearly died when the guy said $30,000. We liked the product though, so we decided that we'd do it a couple windows at a time, and bought two for the dining room. Those windows should be installed by the end of the month.

We also have been getting quotes for driveway replacement, which has been interesting. One company quoted us $4,100 and another wants $3,945 for the same job. Now that I look at it, that's really not much of a difference. If anyone can think of any paving companies that can do a 1,080 square foot driveway for less than those two, I'd be interested to hear who they are!

That's all for now...and I promise that there will be pictures of completed work, you know, just as soon as the work is actually finished, and the place doesn't look like a bomb went off!

Projects Completed

The kitchen is finally complete! That's one major project ticked off the list...

BEFORE	AFTER

In addition to the kitchen, we've also managed to finish putting up the garage door openers, so we now have two fully functional and automatic garage doors. Now let me tell you all about the debacle of putting these damn things up...

Remember how I was complaining about the fact that if there was supposed to be a part required for assembly, that it should in fact be included with the hardware in the box? Yeah, well it seems that the parts I needed WERE indeed included, and I was just to dumb to notice. So, after two weeks of trying to procure the correct screws (which I thought I was missing) in order to attach the chain spreader, without much luck mind you, I finally got fed up and decided to call the company for guidance. As I was waiting on hold, I figured I'd go through the boxes and bags of hardware that came with the opener. When I grabbed the bag that the chain spreader had come in, what to my wondering eyes did appear, BUT THE TWO FREAKING SCREWS THAT I WAS LOOKING FOR OVER A WEEK AND A HALF FOR! They were in the corner of the bag, sealed off from the rest of it. I hung up the phone immediately (and not before uttering some not very kind, yet extraordinarily colorful words to myself for actually being so stupid) and got down to the business of completing the assembly of the first opener. Suffice to say, things went very quickly after that. My brother and I set about building the support structure for the header that would be where the front of the track would mount. After several hours, what seemed like hundreds of nails, countless cuts of wood, and more than a couple of hammer smashed fingers with accompanying colorful language, the structure was built and in place. Quite the milestone! Except, it was too tall...we had to tear the whole thing down, and start over. We finally managed to get it to the correct height (using more swearing and nails) and test it out. Lo and behold, the thing actually worked! I was stoked! It looked like two blind and drunk monkeys had completed the operation, but who cares!

The second one went much more smoothly. My friend John came down to help me out with it, and since he's an engineer, I figured I would put that skill to good use in building a better anchor point for the header on this one, while I assembled the opener. He did an excellent job, but we still ran into a minor problem. This time, the anchoring point was too low. The garage door was not clearing the track. We had to tear that whole thing apart and rebuild two or three inches higher, which actually went much smoother still than the first one. Eventually, we got it up and the door did clear the track. Over the past couple of days, I went about running the wiring for the safety systems (IR beams that stop the door closing if the beam is broken by someone walking through the door). Again, this looks like complete amateur work, but it works, so who cares? I'm just excited to have two fully functional openers now!

In other projects, when we pulled up the carpet in the breezeway, we noticed that in the little "hallway" between the kitchen and the family room, the floor was not what you would call *level* - there was about a 1/2 inch difference in height between the kitchen and family room, which presented a problem for laying the tile in that area. We decided to try self leveling underlayment in order to even it out. That was our project for last night. I had built a sort of cage to contain the self leveler out of some old MDF that we had to pull up in the family room due to mold. There were a few containment failures, but nothing that appeared really major. It seems like it is working, but I'll have to see when I go back over today.

That's about it for now. We still have a couple of major projects left to complete (tiling, hardwoods, upstairs bathroom - which I'm picking up the building permit for today), but things are coming along nicely. More pictures to come as projects are completed!

Work in Progress...

Much butt has been kicked over the past few days. The kitchen and adjoining hallway have been fully painted. The family room has been essentially completely painted. Today, a friend came down and helped with the kitchen floor. We pulled up the underlayment that had the adhesive and felt backing from the old vinyl floor stuck to it, which revealed yet another layer of linoleum. We made yet another trip to Home Depot to pick up several sheets of luan underlayment to replace what we had just pulled up. Thus far, we've gotten a good amount of the floor replaced, hopefully we can get it finished tomorrow. It's important that we get it finished before the end of the week since the refrigerator is being delivered this weekend. Hopefully we can get some "after" pictures up this weekend!

Before Pictures of the New House

Here are the "Before" pictures, as promised!

House - Old

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year all! We've been in possession of the house for 5 days now, and much work has already begun. Home Depot has become almost like a third home for us (since the first home is the apartment, and second is the house currently). I've never seen money disappear so quickly before in my life!

So just to keep you all informed, so far the following has been started:

1. Garage door openers have been unpacked and partially assembled. For the record, if the assembly required a certain screw, wouldn't you think it would be included with the assembly hardware? Needless to say, a trip to Home Depot was required to procure the appropriate screws.
   
2. Ceiling in the family room has been painted. Now a determination has to be made regarding what to do about the existing track lighting in that room. It's heinous.
   
3. Vinyl flooring in the kitchen has been pulled up. This project is turning out to be our first surprise. The adhesive and felt backing on the vinyl did not come up with the rest of the floor, and upon our inquiring at Home Depot whether there was a solvent that would take that up, we learned that we will never fully get it all off the floor, which will cause problems when putting down the new vinyl tiles. What we're going to have to do is lay another thin layer of plywood over the existing sub-floor. I have a friend coming tomorrow to help me get that done, so the major project for today is to get the kitchen and adjoining hallway painted.
   
4. In order to at least like we got something accomplished, we've nearly completed painting the half bath. There's one section of the wall above the sink that still needs to be painted because we had to spackle yesterday. Today will be sanding and painting, then the light fixture will be changed out as well as the faucet. It's going to look KILLER when done!
   

We have taken before pictures of every room in the house, but I haven't had a chance to upload them yet. I'll try to get them up here as soon as possible, as well as an after picture of the half bath.

Much to do today, so we're off to go put in our work at the house. Wish us luck!