Now you see it, now you don't
posted by peppermint at 8:10 PM
Things have been pretty fricken (on a sticken) quiet on our blog, and you have my sincerest apologies for that. I'd love to say it's because we reached the point in our home remodeling process where we get to lounge around in a backyard hammock drinking fruity drinks and reading trashy romance novels. (Or I guess, in Tom's case at least, a COMPLETELY MANLY tale of forbidden passion between a Bajoran officer and a member of the Starfleet crew aboard the USS Defiant.) The real story is that most of the projects we've been tackling around the ol' casa aren't immediate gratification projects that we can photograph and say "Look at what we did this weekend!" like some of the previous projects.
For instance, I have been spending a lot of back-breaking hours working on the lawn. It turns out that scowling at the yard through the living room windows while muttering under my breath about what a patchy, weed-infested plot of hell on Earth it was shaping up to be didn't have any effect on it. I actually had to haul my carcass out there and work on it. Tom has allergies (lucky bastard...) so the lawn is all mine. It's quite a change for me because I've never been the one responsible for the lawn care before, BUT I'm pretty anal retentive about it and instead of nagging someone endlessly about taking care of the lawn now I just have to nag myself. I mow and trim it every 2-3 days, I fertilized it about 4 weeks ago, and today I dropped 40lbs of pelletized lime on parts of it because despite all my TLC there are still sections of the lawn that are ... to be completely honest .. really pissing me off.
Lawn care is probably not the best project for my ego, because while I realize that the fruits of my labor won't become apparent until weeks/months/years from now, it doesn't stop me from standing out in the backyard sometimes resisting the urge to yell 'GROW DAMMIT!!" at the sections that continue to try every last bit of my patience.
Also today I had to spread 40lbs of topsoil around by the back patio and gate area because while it may have seemed as though the POs dogs did all their urinating on the carpeting inside (as evidenced here) they also did manage to make it outside often enough to kill large patches of grass - which only adds further weight to my already hefty belief that dogs suck. Even better, turns out one (or both) of them was a digger, and I had grown sick of the wheels of the lawnmower getting caught in their little efforts to tunnel to China so I filled them all today and threw down grass seed on them.
The lawn looks about 200% better than it did when we moved in, but it's still my pet project and I won't rest until it looks like something out of a Scott's commercial.
Also I happen to own the mother of all weed trimmers and today I cleared out all the underbrush below Tom's Tree so that tomorrow at work I can order a hammock chair to hang from one of the beefiest branches. My mom has two such chairs that hang under a giant spruce tree in her yard and last summer my six-year-old could most often be found lounging in it for hours while reading a book, playing Gameboy, or just belting out strange tunes at the top of his lungs then laughing hysterically every time he managed to change the original words to some sort of bodily function. Our neighbors are so going to love us!
As for Tom, he works around the clock on projects everywhere, all day, non-stop. I couldn't even begin to rattle of a list of all the things he's been spending his time on because honestly a lot of the time I just walk into a room and something has been completely changed, cleaned, moved, painted or taken apart. Like last night while I was taking a shower he moved a large, mirrored hall tree from the basement up into the hallway by the bedroom and I walked by it four times going to and from our bedroom and still didn't notice it had been brought upstairs until he said "Did you want this thing on this wall or the other one?"
One thing thing I can confidently say that he has completed, though, is the installation of the ceramic cook top we picked up over Mother's Day.
I already posted about the removal of the original cook top. The new one was, of course, ever-so-slightly smaller than the original and it was also completely squared off at the corners instead of rounded like its 1959 counterpart, so some sawing and shimming was required. Also Tom had to make the wiring "safe" as opposed to "a fire hazard". As for the gaping hole in the backsplash (hardly noticeable, eh?) we figured we'd just take all the tile down, fix the sheetrock, then install a new backsplash. This weekend we managed to find a great deal on an over-the-range microwave and on my mother's suggestion we're going to remove the top 2-3 spans of tile that the microwave is going to cover and use those tiles to patch the existing backsplash.
Voila!
Or ... the more likely scenario is that we'll break every single tile trying to remove it and wind up having to install an entirely new backsplash anyway.
We also got my computer set up on the home network early this week after some pretty aggravating arguments with a D-link USB Wireless Adapter that I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy. The only way we got it to work was by returning it to the store and buying a Linksys USB wireless adapter. Hah! Hopefully the revival of my desktop computer means I'll update the blog more often because it's really the central nerve center of most of what I do, and my laptop is just sort of a semi-empty vessel that I use for work. Having to rely on it for the past couple of weeks has been frustrating on most days because it's not nearly the powerhouse that my desktop computer is and was prone to crashing and/or locking up when I was editing graphics.
We also managed to wrestle Tom's dream desk, a half-ton (I swear) behemoth of a tanker desk, into the basement so that he could get his computer set up, which officially puts all four of our household computers back into use, pulling down our requisite number of kilowatt hours each week in order to keep the electric company flush with cash.
Today I bought supplies so I can paint the living room and dining room this week. My goal is to be done by Friday. My 30th birthday is this coming Sunday and since no one was going along with my original plan to curl up in the fetal position and cry for the entire weekend, we have decided that I will go out and drink large volumes of alcohol on Saturday night so that I can spend my 30th birthday curled up in the fetal position in front of my toilet instead. For those of you keeping track, this means you only have 5 shopping days left to buy me the present of my dreams.
For instance, I have been spending a lot of back-breaking hours working on the lawn. It turns out that scowling at the yard through the living room windows while muttering under my breath about what a patchy, weed-infested plot of hell on Earth it was shaping up to be didn't have any effect on it. I actually had to haul my carcass out there and work on it. Tom has allergies (lucky bastard...) so the lawn is all mine. It's quite a change for me because I've never been the one responsible for the lawn care before, BUT I'm pretty anal retentive about it and instead of nagging someone endlessly about taking care of the lawn now I just have to nag myself. I mow and trim it every 2-3 days, I fertilized it about 4 weeks ago, and today I dropped 40lbs of pelletized lime on parts of it because despite all my TLC there are still sections of the lawn that are ... to be completely honest .. really pissing me off.
Lawn care is probably not the best project for my ego, because while I realize that the fruits of my labor won't become apparent until weeks/months/years from now, it doesn't stop me from standing out in the backyard sometimes resisting the urge to yell 'GROW DAMMIT!!" at the sections that continue to try every last bit of my patience.
Also today I had to spread 40lbs of topsoil around by the back patio and gate area because while it may have seemed as though the POs dogs did all their urinating on the carpeting inside (as evidenced here) they also did manage to make it outside often enough to kill large patches of grass - which only adds further weight to my already hefty belief that dogs suck. Even better, turns out one (or both) of them was a digger, and I had grown sick of the wheels of the lawnmower getting caught in their little efforts to tunnel to China so I filled them all today and threw down grass seed on them.
The lawn looks about 200% better than it did when we moved in, but it's still my pet project and I won't rest until it looks like something out of a Scott's commercial.
Also I happen to own the mother of all weed trimmers and today I cleared out all the underbrush below Tom's Tree so that tomorrow at work I can order a hammock chair to hang from one of the beefiest branches. My mom has two such chairs that hang under a giant spruce tree in her yard and last summer my six-year-old could most often be found lounging in it for hours while reading a book, playing Gameboy, or just belting out strange tunes at the top of his lungs then laughing hysterically every time he managed to change the original words to some sort of bodily function. Our neighbors are so going to love us!
As for Tom, he works around the clock on projects everywhere, all day, non-stop. I couldn't even begin to rattle of a list of all the things he's been spending his time on because honestly a lot of the time I just walk into a room and something has been completely changed, cleaned, moved, painted or taken apart. Like last night while I was taking a shower he moved a large, mirrored hall tree from the basement up into the hallway by the bedroom and I walked by it four times going to and from our bedroom and still didn't notice it had been brought upstairs until he said "Did you want this thing on this wall or the other one?"
One thing thing I can confidently say that he has completed, though, is the installation of the ceramic cook top we picked up over Mother's Day.
I already posted about the removal of the original cook top. The new one was, of course, ever-so-slightly smaller than the original and it was also completely squared off at the corners instead of rounded like its 1959 counterpart, so some sawing and shimming was required. Also Tom had to make the wiring "safe" as opposed to "a fire hazard". As for the gaping hole in the backsplash (hardly noticeable, eh?) we figured we'd just take all the tile down, fix the sheetrock, then install a new backsplash. This weekend we managed to find a great deal on an over-the-range microwave and on my mother's suggestion we're going to remove the top 2-3 spans of tile that the microwave is going to cover and use those tiles to patch the existing backsplash.
Voila!
Or ... the more likely scenario is that we'll break every single tile trying to remove it and wind up having to install an entirely new backsplash anyway.
We also got my computer set up on the home network early this week after some pretty aggravating arguments with a D-link USB Wireless Adapter that I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy. The only way we got it to work was by returning it to the store and buying a Linksys USB wireless adapter. Hah! Hopefully the revival of my desktop computer means I'll update the blog more often because it's really the central nerve center of most of what I do, and my laptop is just sort of a semi-empty vessel that I use for work. Having to rely on it for the past couple of weeks has been frustrating on most days because it's not nearly the powerhouse that my desktop computer is and was prone to crashing and/or locking up when I was editing graphics.
We also managed to wrestle Tom's dream desk, a half-ton (I swear) behemoth of a tanker desk, into the basement so that he could get his computer set up, which officially puts all four of our household computers back into use, pulling down our requisite number of kilowatt hours each week in order to keep the electric company flush with cash.
Today I bought supplies so I can paint the living room and dining room this week. My goal is to be done by Friday. My 30th birthday is this coming Sunday and since no one was going along with my original plan to curl up in the fetal position and cry for the entire weekend, we have decided that I will go out and drink large volumes of alcohol on Saturday night so that I can spend my 30th birthday curled up in the fetal position in front of my toilet instead. For those of you keeping track, this means you only have 5 shopping days left to buy me the present of my dreams.
Labels: homeimprovement
1 Comments:
That's what happens when you buy D-Link.
Old Hag! Mwahaha.
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