November 2011
6 posts
7 tags
October 2011
4 posts
7 tags
Electrical work means encountering spiders
We’ve sort of been on hiatus for a few weeks, cozying up in our living room with the snuggle dogs. Matt’s been busy at work. We haven’t had a lot to report lately. This weekend I did get a little bit back into the home improvement game.
I’ve been starting to change out our electrical outlets for tamper resistant ones as required by recently-updated code, as I was...
3 tags
4 tags
Settling in for winter
We got a lot done this summer. We did a bunch of plumbing and electrical work before having the new natural gas fireplace insert (slash furnace for our house) and tankless water heater installed. I tiled the hearth. Matt finished up the siding on the house and put in new soffits. We opened some more interior walls and closed some of them. We rearranged our living room. We hired painters to...
9 tags
Heating Oil Tank Removal and Cleanup
On occasion I think to myself, “I would not like to get in a wrestling match with dude X.” A couple hours after Pat and Matt showed up to remove the oil tank, I thought, “I would not like to get in a shoveling competition with Pat.” Not to mention, I wrestling with them probably wouldn’t be too much fun either. And this coming from a guy who loves to dig. That...
6 tags
September 2011
11 posts
6 tags
That darn oil tank
In my post about our newly painted house, did you happen to notice the mess in our front yard? Allow me to point it out in case you missed it. You were probably focused on how great the house itself is looking these days.
It would be more noticeable if the orange fencing was upright and surrounding the gaping hole in our front yard like it’s supposed to be, but it had to come down so...
8 tags
Procrastination wins and losses (or, tape residue...
I have always been a procrastinator. In middle school and high school, I just barely caught the school bus in the morning. Every. single. day. And the only reason I actually did catch the bus was because for some strange reason, the kids would all stand on one corner while waiting for the bus and then when they saw the bus coming down the street they would cross to the other side where the bus...
5 tags
Fall harvest casserole
I found this recipe in a recent issue of Whole Living magazine. I tore it out because I knew we had squash that needed to be eaten and the recipe looked pretty simple. I can’t find it on Whole Living’s website, but it is online here. We were out of onions, which is unusual for us, but we had a lot of leeks from the garden so I substituted those. With tomatoes and potatoes from...
6 tags
The house is painted!
After some back and forth about whether to DIY this one, we decided to hire someone to paint the house. Matt seriously considered renting a sprayer and doing it himself (with some help from me), but we have been very busy lately and we knew it would be much quicker to have a pro paint it. We are happy with that decision. After getting several quotes, we chose a company that was highly...
2 tags
5 tags
Dogs on the hunt: working on recalls
We always say that Max and Sonny are both wonderful, and as a pair they are fantastic, but we’d be in trouble if we had two Maxes or two Sonnys. They have complimentary strengths and weaknesses.
Take our trips to the dog park for example. We go about as often as we can, usually 3 times a week. When we’re getting ready to leave the house, Sonny is fairly calm and quiet. Max’s...
6 tags
Fall harvest
The grass may be dead and brown, but Matt has been nursing his home and P-patch garden plots along, and we have some lovely fall produce.
Leeks, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, potatoes, and meets. We eat the beets (cooked, then chilled in the fridge) in salads. Matt made a delicious leek and potato soup. We need to make some zucchini bread, and I’d also like to try a simple...
6 tags
Fixed the sticky deadbolt
One of the very first things we did after we moved into our house a little over two years ago was installed a new front door (one of our earliest posts!). The deadbolt and handle set is a Schlage R-series. Over the past few months, inserting the key into the deadbolt has gotten more and more difficult. It worked to lock or unlock the door, but each time we put the key in or pulled it out, it...
11 tags
Living room before and "after"
These photos might be nominally referred to as “before and after,” but “after” is not an accurate description of where we are. Let’s go with “in progress.”
Fireplace Before:
Fireplace in progress:
Other living room Before:
Living room in progress:
Apologies for the bad lighting and overall messiness. If you can overlook those, I...
1 tag
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...
