Working in the Garden

This week we are finally getting into the 80's-90's for highs and the flowers we planted are wilting. Thankfully today with the help of our children the sprinkler system is back in action. However we are still missing the timer and the 4 way splitter ... I'm sure they are somewhere are here.

2018! Finally

So thank you for allowing me 2 years to update this blog.

I'm finally up to the current year.

Let's see what happened at the beginning of this year:.

Continued progress with the master bathroom.

January 2018 Phillip kept plugging away at electrical and drywall.  Below is a picture of the light switch and the green (moisture resistant) drywall next to the shower/tub area. 

Trust and believe we tried to find a better spot, but as you walk in the bathroom the door opens to the left, so we didn't think putting the lightswitch behind the door was logical.  On the right is the sole heating vent for the bedroom and bathroom, so running electrical thru that wasn't an option either.  So it's directly on the wall across from the door.

The bathroom is still waiting on mud/tape and painting, but all the elements of a functional bathroom are there.  Lights work, plumbing works, floors are safe and it's insulated and warm.  After all that we've been thru with this house... it's all I necessarily need right now anyways.

2017: Fall/Winter also known as Kitchen and Baths

So.  

Mid-July 2017.  I quit my job.  The job wasn't bad. It just wasn't a good fit for me with all the overtime required.  I tried transferring within the company, but after 3 months it wasn't working. I left in good standing and started on the next chapter of my life.  I regret nothing.

That being said.  By Fall 2017 I was sick and tired of my house.  I didn't like the master bathroom.  It didn't function. It didn't have a proper floor. It was in half-progress construction since we demo'd it way back when we bought the house!  So I encouraged my husband to help me make so progress in the areas I really wanted updating.

Below you see me doing tile work.  Simple 57 cent tiles from Lowes.  

I'm not fancy.  The area my house is in wouldn't support super fancy for resell...so it was a win-win.

I got my flooring!!!

While I did the flooring. Phillip got the electrical updated so that I can have lights.  He finished insulating and did the very basic of drywalling.  We still need to finish mud and taping...but so far I'm satisfied.

The other part of my house I wasn't a fan of was the kitchen.  Green counters, greasy brown cabinets.....tiles that could pop off the wall at a moment's notice!  Yeah... this was necessary.

Using the same tiles from the bathroom we re-tiled the backsplash and bought a cheap white countertop from IKEA. We also painted all the cabinets white.   Once again our house is in a working class neighborhood close to the highway.  Laminate and basic porcelain tile is perfectly expected.  So we went for it.

Until Phillip somehow found a different white paint can and now 1 cabinet is completely different color then the other ones.  Note it doesn't help that we had to buy a new cabinet since we also took out the weird peninsula splitting the kitchen in half and the new cabinet doesn't match other cabinets...but now it's also a different color.

We had a good laugh before we eventually found the other can and I.  Let me repeat.  I...fixed the painting mistake and repainted the new cabinet.

As part of the re-design of the kitchen we took out a weird pantry like cabinet and low and behold the wall had a metal plate screwed to the wall that clearly was were a gas range could vent out.  That was ALL I needed to know.  I was QUICK to go to Nebraska Furniture Mart and switch my electric stove we bought when we first bought the house to a new black and stainless steel gas stove.  Phillip and I tiled the back and worked on fixing up the wall to make a nice clean galley kitchen that works for a growing family.

This is the before and "now".  We still need to paint the cabinet over the vent hood and paint the kitchen walls but I feel like the kitchen is now more open.  Less filled with cabinets that didn't work and chopped up the kitchen and it just feels lighter and brighter.

We still have kitchen painting and hardware to finish up along with trimwork and dozens of tiny items, but I can't complain.  Being off of work allowed me the much needed time to do the projects that have been sitting on the to-do list for years.

Probably a bad idea...but what oh well

May 13, 2017

Teaching our boys how to spray paint with old spray paint destined for the trash.

I mean what's the worst that could happen right?


*Please stay tuned for what will likely happen... I'll label it "re-painting because my children tagged my house".

2017: Summer

So we're up to the summer of last year.

Not to bad for getting all these updates to you I should say so myself.

😉


So on to the what happened in the summer.  We'll remember in the last post I showed those nice pictures of my kids helping me plant the garden in the side yard?

Yeah.... I couldn't keep up with in very well.  See picture below of what it looked like by June.

There are still some good veggies in there somewhere, but it took a MASSIVE effort to clear and clean it all up and I'm pretty sure we didn't get nearly as much produce as we could if all the weeds weren't stealing water and precious sunlight.

In our defense, we were working full time jobs, both Phillip and I had decided to go back to school part time to finish our Master's degrees. The kids were on Summer Break so nights and weekends after work and schooling was spent making memories....It just didn't leave a lot of time in the hot 90 degree weather to do what I needed to do.

Live, learn, hope for better results in the future.  BUT we did get some other major projects done.

Painting the exterior.  The top portion of our house had peeling and fading paint.  It was like that when we purchased the house and it had remain that way because we were so focused on other projects.  July 2017 we rented this nifty tool that allowed us to easily and safely reach those top areas of the house and paint them a nice crisp white.  Our house is looking lovelier and nicer each year I may say so myself.

Of course, my husbands' side project was a bit of a distraction as well.  We tried our hand at bee keeping.  Those who know about bees can see from this picture that they are "bearding"....or otherwise known as "leaving the area 'cause these people don't know what they are doing and we're going to die if we stay".  YAY experiments were we buy something that can just fly away.

Feel free to make jokes about money flying out the window.  We won't take it personally.  We made the same jokes. 

2017: Spring Fling

Spring is in the air.

Time to get my ever growing children to work feeding themselves.  (Note: we don't do child labor...but they do have to contribute something).


It's also time to make the house look nice.  I got these big planters on clearance in 2016 during the fall.  They really make the house pop with the color.  I refuse to paint my front door for that color pop so these are nice subs.

With spring flowers...comes spring showers.  SO MANY TREE LIMBS!!!!  There were so many tree limbs that fell between winter and all the spring storms that we had the kids help collect them and have a good old bonfire.

P.S. the boys really enjoyed it.

2017: The funeral of the water heater

So now we begin a new year.  YAY

And with a new year we start many more new projects.

First is replacing this old as dirt water heater.
Jan. 24, 2017.  Our water heater died.
It had a nice funeral to the scrapper.
I think we got less than $30 for it.
It had a nice long life, but we're ever so grateful for the new one we picked up at Lowe's.

General updates

Today is March 27, 2018.

Where have you been? You may be asking.  To which I respond... don't ask questions like that.
I'm joking...but not really.  Life happens and this blog is just a fun entertainment.

So let's begin the updates.  It's been 2 years...so this is going to be in multiple blog posts.  Please be patient...or don't. (I'm not here to judge what you spend your time on).

2016
When I last updated you in 2016 we were putting a good amount of our focus on the basement.  When we purchased the house it was an unfinished basement.  We added insulation and mitigated the water intrusions as much as possible.  The basement was used for storage for the most part until 2016 when I decided to put my computer desk downstairs to use a summer office.  The basement stays very cool and it would have helped with the financial costs of A/C. 

The last blog posts shows the pictures of what the partially finished basement looked like...and to be honest it didn't change much.  By October though...it became too cold in the basement as the season's changed.  We decided to block off the basement from the garage to keep the air flow minimized. So we took the french doors that were in our master bedroom and put them in to the doorway for the garage.

We of course had to close up the hole in the master bedroom

Our master bedroom was also very cold sometimes.  We have since insulated the wall in the master and drywalled.  The room is much better insulated both in our bedroom and now also in the basement.

end of year update part 2

So here's the 2nd half of my updates

June (continued)

So it's summer.  Summer is hot.   I now work from home 3 times a week or more.
I can't keep the A/C running all the time or it take away the cost/benefit of not traveling into work all the time.  So with that in mind Phillip start updating the basement in order that I have 2 office areas.  A small corner desk in the living room and a larger desk downstairs.

.... Here's the rule:

I'm going to switch back and forth during the seasons.  It's colder in the basement so anytime it's over 80 degrees I'm headed downstairs.  It's warmer upstairs so anytime outside temps are below 70 degrees I'm going downstairs.


Here's a picture of the progress:

I know it's a bit difficult to tell, but  if you remember from our 1st video tour there is an area of the basement that was sectioned off to be a room.  It had studs and  lights already.  We've already added insulation a few years ago throughout the basement now we are putting up the drywall and Phillip has added additional plugs.

There is a long "L" corner table in the middle of the room that I purchased for $5 dollars at a garage sale.  I'm using an old kitchen chair as my desk chair.  Phillip donated his old college fridge for my water and I have a few planks of the kitchen flooring we did earlier in the year down on the floor so I'm not just walking on bare concrete.

As of December...it's still a unfinished.

end of year update part 1

So I've realized I've allowed life to get in the way and we haven't posted in a since May!!!! YIKES!!!!  That's not cool.  So I wanted to make sure to do an update on what has been going on.  Let me go ahead and spoil the ending for you.... it hasn't been much.


May 2016.

So at the end of May we realized that it was probably a good idea to get a 2nd dog.  Our current dog named Peppercorn was still showing signs of grieving after my husband's childhood dog passed away a few  months ago.  So we load up our truck and go down to the Petsmart in Olathe, KS and adopt this pretty 20lb dog here:

The Petsmart in Olathe, KS has coordinated with many local shelters to offer weekend adoption events.  Here is a link to one shelter if you're interested in adopting as well: http://heartofamericahs.org/events/adopt-a-pet/

We've decided to name her Cinnamon.  Continuing the seasoning named animals we have in our house.  (ROFL).  She is well mannered and house broken.  The poor girl looks like she recently weaned a litter of puppies and then was promptly abandoned.  She's a great addition to the family.

Also at the end of May we came across some wonderful weather.

1.  It was beautiful. 
2.  It was warm.
3.   It was mostly dry.

When you have that type of combination...you got to do something outdoorsy.  In our case our outdoorsy means OUTSIDE D.I.Y. time!!!  Woot Woot.
We invested in a paint sprayer and got to work.

Here are pictures of me working on the guesthouse and house addition:

Before you start...yes I know it wasn't professionally looking how we did this.  We had gotten a few quotes for painting from professionals.  The quotes were well in the $2,000+ ball park.  At the time we knew the house needed to be painted before we had to battle too much wood rot, but we wasn't willing to drain our savings to do it.  We got a good sale on a professional painter.  I think it's a Graco brand for around $200 dollars and a $30 bucket of commercial grade white paint.  We borrowed our father's scaffolding and just went at it.

I'm going to make you wait in suspense to see the finished product though.  Because I'm mean like that.  (ok..just see part 2 of the end of year update)

June:


So in June I finally joined the ranks of Instagram and instantly became addicted with Legos tables.
Here is a below picture collage of me and my sons working together to create a wonderful toy using old unused furniture around the house.

A little bit later that month my son's wonderful, super athletic-ness....yes I know that's not a word.... But anyways boys being boys they were playing with hard balls in their bedroom when they broken the ceiling fan.  Off to Lowe's we went and here's a picture of me installing said ceiling fan...again.

Real Life Angry Birds

So our oldest likes angry birds on the phone but I really want to get them out the house so ... lets play angry birds in REAL LIFE! It was fun. We purchased some balls in different sizes and colors and used a exercise band as the sling shot.

Okay the slingshot was a bit harder maybe we will save that for when they are older. So we let them just throw the balls. They had a blast.

Raised Beds

We finally finished the raised beds.

We decided to use a drip irriagtion system. I eventually want to get a timer and maybe hook it up to a rasberry pi 

It was really easy to put together. 

all and all I really like it. i'm sure i could've made one out of pvc just as easy but i think this was easy to control the amount of water spraying versus expermiting with different hole sizes and estimating the headloss through the various orifices.

Exterior painting

Gloria's dream is finally coming true. She gets to paint the exterior of the house. I took pictures :D

Our father in law let us borrow his scaffolding.

Beekeeping

yesterday we brought our bees home! We purchased from a supplier in Chilicothe Missouri.

Ignore the food on the seats that just to keep them distracted ... not really i'm a slob. Gloria had fun joking tha the bees would get loose in the truck while I was driving home. But nothing happened. Because I got home late after sundown. As soon as it was above 60 degrees F  I placed the bees in the hive.