House (and other) Stuff

If you've been wondering on the sporadic nature of my posts lately, here's the reason.... in the flesh/brick.....wood. Whatever! What it comes down to is that the house is still a big deal in my life. When you move into a much bigger house, it isn't just a bed of roses..... there are a number of thorns in there as well. Without concentrating on the negative; let me give you an idea what-all has been eating up a lot of my time.

Yep.... that's grass.... as in we didn't have much of it in the back due to the trees that we wanted (and got). So we borrowed a tiller and.... tilled up the yard back there, along with several sprinkler heads. We planted some shade tolerant fescue, replaced sprinkler heads (4, 3 of which were my fault). Plus there was the little aside of digging up 15 (!!!) hedges. My father-in-law had already cut the limbs off, but I got to dig out the rest with a pick-axe..... Hi Ho!!!

I also got to put in some new (aka working) solar path lights. We also did about 5 hours of yard weeding while trying to get rid of the old appliances, lawn mowers and other random non-working items that the previous owners left us during the neighborhood garage sale..... and NO, we did NOT sell the garage. Did I mention that we spent "Labor Day" ripping out the downstairs carpet? It was a lovely time.

On Saturday afternoon, I drove up to IKEA in Frisco and bought some of the "Lack" floating shelves for my son's room, then spent the evening and some of the next day painting and installing a closet system while he was out of town on a camping trip with the Scouts.

Sunday afternoon was mostly taken up with planning a backyard shed for the lawn equipment and picking up a set of unfinished cabinets that will occupy the back wall of the upstairs game/media room. The shed will allow me to get the lawn equipment out of the garage to I can finish up in there since we tend to be the odd folks that expect to park our cars inside. The cabinets (and the book cases that go on top of them) will allow us to finish getting everything else out of the boxes which currently reside in the dining room. Of course, getting the shed done will allow me to set up my tools in the garage to I can finish the "unfinished" cabinets. I don't know why, but my wife seems to take a dim view of my using my power tools to sand wood in the house. There are a few other things in the works as well, including.....

We have one of these Hot Tube/Gazebos out in the back yard which came with the house. We're not hot tube people. We don't know if it works. We don't want to fix it. It won't fit through the gate. I'm in the process of getting a friend to take it off our hands without ripping down our fence!

There is a pile of bathroom lighting fixtures next to the pile of sink fixtures that await installation. Call us obsessive, but we'd prefer to not have the Addams Family style pieces that came with the house. I think, both Home Depot AND Lowes (maybe IKEA too) will have us on their Christmas Card list this year.

Oh, by the way..... yesterday..... Columbus Day was the "Fair Day" for our school district, besides it being the hottest day of the month..... we did our once every 5th year trip to the State Fair of Texas. It was miserable. So miserable, the kids wanted to go home by 2pm! So yeah, we've had our hands full.