This is totally unrelated to house stuff, but Patrick and I were preparing deviled eggs for Thanksgiving dinner and came across a “twin egg”!! Never seen that before. So…somehow that means HAPPY THANKSGIVING! I hope everyone was able to spend some quality fun time with loved ones over yummy food!
P.S. Nolan, if you’re reading this, I think this egg is dedicated to you! :)
I’m sure everyone has their stories about neighbors. I know we have our fair share – I think one day I’ll have to publish my book “Diary of a Mad White Woman,” haha. Anyway, the other morning we woke up and opened the blinds only to find our neighbor’s boy had tagged his grandparents house, shed, lawnmower, herbie curbie – the list goes on. We were like “Ohhhhh shit, someone’s going to get in sooooo much trouble!” There was no denying it either since he wrote his name. Patrick joked that even he was smart enough to write his sister’s name on the wall when he was doing this stuff as a kid. ;-) (He said the handwriting still gave him away, oops.) Since the neighbors don’t always come walk on that side of the house we gave them a warning when we saw them (hey, they were going to see it sooner or later anyway, right?). Needless to say, once he got home from school that afternoon he spent the rest of the day scrubbing away his “art work.” Hey, maybe he’ll be the next big graffiti artist, right?
Speaking of neighbors. Some nights ago Patrick and I had just gone to bed. Patrick was already more asleep than me, but I was also half dozed off when I heard a noise that woke me up. Then I heard another noise – kind of like a “crack”. I asked Patrick “Did you year that?” He hadn’t because he was asleep, but now I had woken him up. It wasn’t that old house shifting kind of creaking that I’m used to. This was different. We both listened if there’d be another noise. Next thing we know we hear this giant crashing sound. I think we both just about leapt out of bed! We had no idea what it was – did our neighbor’s house just collapse?! We peaked out the window. Nothing. Patrick put on some shoes and walked outside around the side of the house. Nothing. So we went back to bed joking that maybe we were hallucinating. (Sniffing too much of that chemical paint remover? Haha.) The next morning we woke up and saw our “hallucination” – a tree had fallen on our neighbors shed! Eek! There are two trees (one of them made up of two large limbs) that were leaning towards ours/our neighbor’s sheds. We had been fearing that one of them could possibly fall on our shed (especially since a rather large limb had fallen from it when we first bought the house), but interestingly enough this was the other tree that had lost its twin limb. A good portion had even made it to our side and was leaning on our shed, though thankfully (for us) the neighbor’s shed had broken the fall. We’ve been so busy we weren’t sure when we were going to get to removing it from our shed, so we were excited when the neighbors knocked on the door this morning to ask if they could come in our yard to remove it. *phew* Relief!
Not sure how well you can tell from the photo where the tree fell…hopefully you get the picture. Oh, and those other piles are not related to this case. We’re just stock piling our wood droppings, haha.
Every homeowner will know these projects- the miscellaneous projects that aren’t big or too difficult, but there’s about a million of them and you just need to 1) remember that the project is outstanding, and 2) have the time and energy to take the 5-10 minutes to carry them out. They’re small enough where they don’t really interfere with your everyday life, but just annoying enough to get annoyed about.
Well we finally tackled one of these miscellaneous mini-projects – the drawer dividers! Back when we were looking for them it took us a minute to find suitable drawer dividers that would fit the size of our drawer. There were some that were plastic and could be extended to whatever size the drawer was, but we weren’t too crazy about those. Leave it up to Ikea to get what you need we spotted some decent ones that happened to match our drawer color pretty closely. And when combining three of them they filled the drawer space pretty well. Only when we got them we couldn’t be bothered to cut the dividers to match our needs…so ever since we got them however many months (years?) ago the cutlery compartments looked fine, but the back space was totally wasted and the extra items we had in the drawer were sticking up and got caught just about every time you opened it. Well they will not get stuck any more! We took the 5 minutes to cut the divider into a better size and voila everything is great.
Yay for miscellaneous annoying project getting completed.
Before:
After:
We’ve been working on a pretty exciting project lately…our front path! Although we still have a ways to go as far as the exterior of the house goes I think the path has been one aesthetically unpleasing sight that really pulled the rest of the house down in curb appeal. The path seemed to consist of more grass/weed patches than concrete! It has really been quite an embarrassment. Well thankfully we finally got started on changing that!
Back in May we posted about luck coming our way when we ran into acquaintances who were participating in the Inman Park Tour of Homes where they had built a wine cellar out of old bricks (from an early 1900s building that was torn down somewhere along Peachtree Street) and were generous enough to give us their leftovers. Just what we had been hoping for!! They had been sitting in our back yard since then and we had been waiting for the street and sidewalk construction to be done before we’d get started on our walkway. (Because we knew they were going to raise the sidewalks to put in curbs so there was no point in guessing how high to build our walkway until the new sidewalk would be done.) We were debating about hiring the same guys that repointed our brick to build the path, but then ended up deciding that we’d give it a try ourselves.
Since half of the path was already in crumbles it wasn’t too hard to pull it up. When we talked to our brick repointing guy he was determined to use cement in some way or another. We were determined not to. So we got some metal edging pieces to hold the bricks in place instead. Here are some photos of how far we’ve made it. We’re not done all the way, but I wanted to share how far we’ve gotten because I think it looks 100 times better already (even not being done, haha).
Our “lovely” crumbled path:
Tearing out the concrete:
Putting down gravel so there will be good drainage:
Landscaping fabric to (hopefully) prevent weeds from growing:
Putting down sand:
We’ve laid out some of the bricks and are sweeping sand between the cracks to keep the bricks from shifting around:
Our progress up until now:
Despite back-to-back wedding weekends we were able to get some more work done around the house. We’ve tried to get back to working more regularly on the dining room again. Mainly on weekdays for an hour or two after work and dinner. (We worked on it some more today and since I feel like I’m done for the day I thought I’d blog about the progress instead.) That translates to somewhere around three to five layers removed due to the time you have to wait between each chemical application. For now you can see the change because we were able to work on a large surface, but before long I won’t have any interesting photos to show since the miniature details won’t be noticeable on camera! (Just tedious work that doesn’t feel very accomplishing since it’s so hard to tell the difference!) The changes are looking pretty nice though. Ever so slowly the room is changing. At least we’re getting it down to a color and smoothness that’s pretty nice – but I’m scared of the process after that where we’ll presumably have to sand everything down (including all those tedious details!), which is going to be sooooo much more work.
Our friend came by the other day and commented “Shouldn’t you be done with this room by now?” I could have killed him, ha! So either we’re just incredibly slow and incompetent at doing this, or else he greatly underestimates the time it takes to remove all this paint and stain (which is the answer I’m rooting for).
Patrick is working on the area where we hadn’t unscrewed the hinges.
The hinge area now looks like the rest of the bay window seat.
Different stages of the removal process. On the “cleaner” area we first used the heat gun, then the chemical paint remover and plastic scraper, then the chemical stain remover and “scrubbed down” with Brillo pads. The other area has only had paint removed with the heat gun – and perhaps already a coat of paint remover.
Here we’ve gone through all three steps on the seating surface.
