August 2011
14 posts
8 tags
Spending, Saving, and Proceeding
There’s been a fair bit of the spending lately but I’m happy to report that we’re going to be saving on our energy bill, saving (gaining) space in our small ~840 sq. ft house, and be ready for new projects; that is, after we finish the pesky final touches on our just completed ones— let’s not get bogged down in the painful details of holes in the walls and replacing...
10 tags
Siding project: soffit
As far as the blog is concerned, I’ve basically skipped the siding project. But fortunately in actual life, the project is coming to a close and the biggest remaining hurdle was how to replace the old soffit. I’m not sure my solution is actually called soffit; a professional might say it is “wrapping” the rafters of the roof trusses. To me they’re one and the same...
7 tags
Exterior paint color quandary
We’ve had three sample patches of paint on the front and back of our house for a couple of weeks now. For a while I thought I was fine with choosing one of them, but then I decided I needed to see some other options. I painted them onto the house today. They look so different in the bright sunlight vs. the shade.
Matt’s first reaction to the two bright ones was “beautiful...
13 tags
Plumbing, panel, paint
We are all over the map right now. Today the tankless water heater AND the Mantis fireplace insert were installed. Actually, finally, completely installed and in operation! Well, the fireplace isn’t much in operation because it’s summer, but it could be. We had to check a whole bunch of things off our list before that could happen. It took a while to get it all done, but we did...
5 tags
Homemade popsicles: dos and don'ts
We have been scarfing down popsicles all summer. Store bought ones (we love FrutStix) and homemade ones. I heard some buzz on the internet recently about one ingredient ice cream, and though I haven’t tried the recipe yet, it seemed natural that if you can make ice cream from bananas and nothing else, they would make a good popsicle too. Matt is a bit of a banana fiend; it is his #1 item...
7 tags
Swedish furniture with a side of meatballs
On Saturday we went to Ikea. We were shopping for several major things:
a sofa bed for guests (we got rid of our non-foldable futon bed in our guest room/office/storage room because we decided that it was taking up too much room for something that is used maybe 2% of the time) - highest priority because we have a guest coming to stay in a couple weeks
new furniture for the living room, though...
6 tags
5 tags
Front garden
I’m not even going to refer to the area in front of our house as a yard anymore. It does have some grass (for now), but Matt has essentially transformed the yard into a garden. We have some crazy garlic/onion/? seed pods that I think are pretty cool looking.
Raspberries - sooo delicious. Several nice harvests over the past few weeks.
Pretty flowers, I don’t know their...
8 tags
Hearth tiling project recap
As if you haven’t heard enough about my hearth tiling project! This may be of interest if you are embarking on a similar project of your own, or you are just abnormally interested in other people’s home improvement adventures (you are not alone, maybe we can start a support group).
Maybe the one perk of DIYing on the weekends only (as opposed to every day, which is what I would...
4 tags
WatchSonny spends a lot of time watching birds and squirrels, and even more time waiting for them to appear. For hours each day, he parks himself at one of several favorite spots in the yard. At first glance, he appears to be not doing anything, but if you look close, you can see his eyes scanning, nostrils sniffing, and ears perking to the slightest movement. He’s very calm, focused, and...
5 tags
Appreciating a functional home
How quickly I forget to appreciate things like a functional kitchen, bathroom, electricity, windows, and all of the other wonderful things that make up our home. Even though only part of our kitchen was out of commission (just the sink and dishwasher - we still had our stove, refrigerator, microwave, most of our cabinets, and even our washer/dryer which live in the kitchen) for the last 5 days...
8 tags
Computer upgrade
I’ve been on a bit of an upgrade kick lately. Usually our DIY focus is on the house but the other day I decided that it was time to upgrade to Windows 7 and that I want to run two monitors. To go there, I needed a new graphics card. Why 7? Basically, I want to go to 7 so that I can try out the new Microsoft Movie Maker’s capability to edit my mp4 formatted Flip camera videos (the...
9 tags
Busy bees
We have been very busy lately, so much that I don’t have time to write about everything. So I’m just going to throw some photos at you, and you can make some educated guesses about what we’ve been up to. OK, I will give you some clues: soffits, entertaining 4 dogs, plumbing, drywall mudding.
Before:
After:
I made this from the arms of a Snuggie and an old tennis ball:
...
5 tags
