Blinds installed

We finally installed blinds on all our other windows!  It was a very productive Veteran's Day for my husband!  I had to go to school.  :P  We also put the door that leads into the den back on.  It was crowding all the space in the guest bedroom.  It's amazing what you can procrastinate about when it comes to home improvement!

Roof fixed

Our roof issue is resolved...we had aluminum flashing put around the bare corner.  Apparently, it was supposed to be painted, not covered with siding, so our contractor (the one we like) said he would do whichever solution we wanted.  My husband went with aluminum - more permanent than paint and less of a pain than siding.

Missing siding

Chris noticed this a few months ago as well.  We were sort of ignoring it, but now with winter coming and all the rain from Sandy, we figured we should get it fixed.

Bathroom fan

A couple months ago, the cover on our master bathroom fan loosened up and slid down the ceiling a bit.  We finally got around to fixing it last weekend.  Stupid contractors only bracketed one sode of the fan so of course it jiggled off.  :P  Easy fix, and now it'll probably never move cuz Chris put in six wood screws.  :)

Trees

Even though our cherry tree wasn't dead, the landscaper did say it was dying and probably wouldn't last more than a couple years.  So we had him take it out and replaced it with two new ones - a zelkova for shade and a crape myrtle for color.  I've always wanted one of those! 

The crape myrtle is really tiny right now, but they do grow a lot more.  The zelkova (top picture) is just skinny.  Apparently there are a lot of zelkovas in our neighborhood but I'm not good at trees.

Landscaping

We hired a landscaper from Angie's List to fix the problems our other contractor left in the backyard.  This was connected to the county inspection, but it's not like we were planning to leave a giant rock pile in our backyard indefinitely.  Stupid neighbors.  :P  Anyway, the owner of the company came out and did an estimate and they started work the last week of September.  It only took them a couple days to clear out and level the backyard, put down a patio (which will probably be increase in size once our deck goes in next summer), replace the front walkway (my favorite new thing), and reseed the front and back yards.

Goodbye Stucco!

What do you do during a hurricane snow day?  Update your blogs!  :)  I actually did this home improvement project in August.  Someone in our neighborhood filed a complaint with the county that our backyard had a dying tree so when the inspector came, they made a list of EVERYTHING "wrong" with our property while admitting that our tree wasn't actually dying.  Don't get me started.  Anyway, they said the stucco on our porch roof was peeling off so it had to be completed scraped off.  Not sure how peeling stucco affects the county or our neighbors in any way, since you can't see it unless you're standing under it, but whatever.  I've been meaning to scrape it off for a while.  It didn't take too long - rocked out to my mp3 player and tried to avoid getting stucco in my nose.  :)

Goodbye Chicken Wire!

I don't why our previous owners thought this would be a good idea.  Maybe they wanted to fence in a dog or something.  Chicken wire is stupid stuff.  I'm not gonna miss it!  Chris bought a grinder to cut through the wire, but he ended up just using wire clippers and pliers after a couple posts.  The sparks from the grinder were fun though!

Electrical Panel

I'm not sure what to think of our contractor's electrician.  At first I thought he was just a bad speller...

But then Chris tried to find out if he could run the cable cord for our new kitchen TV through the ceiling of our downstairs bathroom and couldn't figure out which switch controlled the electricity anywhere downstairs, they were so incorrectly labeled...

So we did all of them ourselves, with lots of running up and down the stairs...

Meanwhile, after we figured all that out and Chris tried to fix the installation of the bathroom light so it wasn't crooked, we discovered the light fixture was the wrong size for the receptacle and, securely installed, metal was touching metal and our circuit kept grounding.  So now we need a new light.  :P

But our TV is installed, even though there's no cable running to it yet...

It's never-ending, I tell you what!

Screens

My bug protectors are in!  Chris installed all the screens in our new windows and sliding glass door.  The door was tricky cuz we had to unscrew the barrier preventing people from flying out of our kitchen from the second story.  I guess it's a good thing the contractors forgot to take their 12 foot ladder with them!

Drainage, Part 3

We've done so much home improvement this weekend, I don't even know where to start!  Chris actually took a couple days off work cuz he needed a break and wanted to get a lot of big things done.  So we started with drainage...again...

See that huge round cement block?  Footing from our old deck.  It took Chris two hours to maneuver it out!

We made it to the edge of our property, where things sort of drop off, so all the water should drain out of our yard now.  Chris did the ditch for the drainage out from under our foundation by himself.  I was getting devoured by mosquitoes, even with multiple applications of OFF.

Door Adjustment

It's sort of hard to explain what the problem was to begin with, but the door leading from our den to the new storage area above the garage was installed wrong.  They reused the door that used to go to the closet in our master bedroom, but they didn't take the moulding off the frame before putting it in its new location.  So the door stuck out about a quarter inch.  Instead of doing the easy thing and installing the door without moulding, they plastered the drywall out so it looked like the wall was flush with the door.  Anyway, this was a problem so we spent last weekend fixing it and then we painted the rest of the den wall and now everything's all pretty!

Drainage, Part 2

We dug out a drainage channel in front of the storage unit and connected it to the pipe we hooked up last week.  This one was a lot harder because we had to make it deeper so it would lay in front of the cement footing and there were all these GIGANTIC rocks in the way.

But it works real well, tested by a HUGE storm that raced through the Mid-Atlantic two days ago.  All the excess water settled away from the house at the exit of the drain pipe!  Our house was essentially unaffected by the event, but some of our friends weren't so lucky and were out of power for a 100 degree weekend.  No huge catastrophes or injuries for anyone I know, thankfully.

Drainage issues

When they installed the parging stuff around our new foundation, the pipes don't lead downhill, so all the water it's supposed to be taking away from the foundation just pools around the door to our storage area.  This has bothered my husband for months, so we finally took it apart last weekend.  It was really difficult given the amount of rock they had strewn all over our yard before planting grass on top of it.  (Looking at it now, we can't believe we let them do this, but we so desperately wanted them to be done.) 

It took lots of pickaxing and shoveling and now we have a rock pile just as big as the one they spread everywhere!  But we also have nice downsloping drainage and a very pretty retaining wall. 

We're not quite finished - we are going to put another pipe right in front of the storage door that connects to the main drain along the side of the house.  There's also another drainage pipe on the right side of the door that leads under the foundation.  It was also angled upwards, so we dug under that and we're going to extend that drain pipe away from the house as well.

It's practically kudzu!

It's not really...we just have these ivy vines that go EVERYWHERE.  They used to be all over the back of our house (the people who lived here before us had trellises up and the ivy spread like crazy), which was cool and annoying.  It was cool cuz we actually had a robin build its nest there once, but it was really annoying to take down - it was wrapped under our siding, around our cable cord, and burrowed into our yard.  We removed all that a while ago, but we also had some in our front yard.  No idea where it came from, really.  But it was growing up the side of our porch and we spent a couple hours removing it, a bunch of other "jungle plants," and a quarry of rocks.  It looks sort of barren now, but imagine a nice big piney tree in the corner!  

Coolest blinds ever!

Cordless window blinds are the coolest thing ever invented!  I showed them to my husband last week and he was fascinated.  We bought one for every upstairs window we have.  :)  They're so easy and the light blockage is incredible.  The white ones softens the light let in while keeping the room bright in the daytime, and the dark one keeps the den pitch black, even in broad daylight.

Cleaning the garage

Our garage has been a disaster area ever since the addition started.  We couldn't find ANYTHING!  Stuff was thrown all over the place, we're pretty sure some of our tools are missing, and there was no space to do any work.  After a few solid weeks of cleaning and organizing and a few hundred dollars at Home Depot, here's what we have now!

New doorknob (I did it all by myself!),

Bikes on hooks,
tools in fancy dancy new toolbench,
bottles of chemicals, paints, and garden stuff on nifty metal shelves,
lawn tools on tracking thing...

We could fit our car in the garage now!

Painted Turtle

That's the name of the new paint in our den!  Earlier we took out the carpet and put in hardwood floor, but we had to finish the walls before I could put my new desk together.  I had been using the dining room table as my desk, but I was having a party, so I needed somewhere to put all my stuff.  Hence, a day of sanding, painting, and moulding!  This also got the giant IKEA box holding my desk out of the living room.  Nothing like guests to motivate a bout of house work!  :)

It's not quite done yet, as usual.  The door that leads into the storage area needs to be redone.  It sticks out too much because they translocated our old closet door to this room, but didn't remove the old moulding.  So we're leaving it for a later date.  In this picture you can see that the old paint is a lighter green than the new paint.  The darker green looks really good with the floor color.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

We actually did this before the whole shower leak thing, but I've been a little behind in clearing pictures off my camera.  It's surprisingly difficult to buy plants.  We went to the nursery a couple weeks ago to find some evergreens to plant in front of our house.  We used to have these gigantic bushy things that collapsed under three feet of snow during Snowmageddon a couple years ago.  We removed those and built a very nice brick retaining wall but didn't have anything to retain.  :)

My husband wanted evergreens and I wanted something triangular that would grow about four feet.  We saw some really nice dwarf spruces, but they apparently don't do well unless they have access to full sun, which we don't have in our front yard because of our big maple tree.  We were getting pretty conflicting messages from the nursery people, so we came home to do some research.  (One of the reasons we should invest in a SmartPhone, I guess.) 

Anyway, long story short, there aren't very many trees that fulfill the requirements of our space, but luckily, the holly bush is one of them!  So I sang Christmas songs in my head the whole time we planted them.  "Have a holly jolly Christmas..."  "The holly and the ivy..."  (We hate ivy, though.) 


Since holly berries won't come out until winter, we spruced up the area with a couple flower things I liked from Home Depot.  No idea what they're called, but they're colorful!

Fixed!

Our subcontractor came over yesterday and confirmed that the crack in the tile was causing the leak into the kitchen.  There were apparently two reasons for this.  One, the grout was a non-flexible kind of grout and two, the cement board was only nailed to the wood underneath instead of screwed in, which allowed for more flexing of the tile.  So he regrouted the cracked areas, screwed in the cement board, and even repainted the kitchen ceiling!  (I know that shouldn't be a surprise, but I wasn't expecting it at all.  What does that say about the low expectations we have for contractors?  That's why we like this guy so much!)

Water is not always good

So we discovered a leak.  There's a water stain with mold on the ceiling of our new kitchen.

The most likely culprit for this leak is the new bathroom.  After a bit of investigation, we discovered a crack in the tile of the shower ledge.

We're not sure why this crack is here, but it seems to be getting bigger.  The subcontractor is coming Saturday to take a look at it and hopefully fix it.  We are crossing our fingers that it's not such a big problem that we have to take down the shower walls and remove tile and cement board.  My husband is afraid that the water has leaked behind the cement board and has swollen the wood underneath, which would probably mean that the whole area has to be redone.  Grrrr...

The Saga Continues

Ha!  According to my husband, it was just a matter of time.  After going to the bathroom one day, I stepped in a puddle of water.  Huh.  Pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen.  Dragged my husband over to our brand new bathroom and after glancing at the issue, he started banging his head against the wall.  :)  Anyway, long story short, we called our contractor, who sent the subcontractor we like, and he fixed it.  Basically, everything was done wrong.  The toilet wasn't settled evenly on the wax ring, the floor wasn't level, and the toilet wasn't bolted down properly.  Geez Louise.  Anyway, it's all good now.  It got leveled, bolted, and sealed in properly.  Whew!

Day 188 - 2/2/12

We passed!  We're done!!

Day 183 - 1/28/12

We took on a little home improvement project and redid the floor in our den all by ourselves!

Day 181 - 1/26/12

I swear, my general contractor is so irresponsible.  My class was interrupted today by another teacher who told me my phone was ringing once every 20 minutes or so.  She didn't know if it was important, so I went to check it out.  It turns out the final inspection was scheduled for today, but nobody told me so we locked up the house before we went to work!  So now the inspection is cancelled and rescheduled for sometime next week.  Sigh.  I'm not even mad - everything in my house works and this inspection is really a formality.  But seriously, after the last inspection snafu, wouldn't you think the contractor would be making sure all his t's were crossed and i's dotted?

Day 180 - 1/25/12

Passed WSSC inspection - one more to go!

Day 177 - 1/22/12

Happy Chinese New Year!  We had our first official house party since the work finished.  My husband cleaned my entire basement!  It was crazy.  He ran up and down the stairs about a hundred times moving things into the garage, our new storage area, etc.

We tested our smoke alarms by accident...  :)  I tried to start a fire in the basement fireplace, but something was up either with the flue or the wood and it got really smoky.  The basement smoke alarm went off, which set off the smoke alarms everywhere else in the house.  We opened up a couple windows and cleared things out, but it made for an interesting beginning to the festivities. 

My kitchen got a major workout - my mom taught me how to make lo mein (Chinese noodles) over the phone and it worked out really well!  We had dumplings, Korean beef (compliments of our friends), cookies and other Asian desserts (the good ones), oranges (cuz they're lucky), and Asian fruit salad with lychee and Mandarin oranges.  I discovered that steaming things is actually ridiculously easy.  :)

Set up the little round table in our "breakfast nook" and taught everyone how to play mah jong.  We had one person who knew how already, two people who knew the Jewish way of playing, and a couple of newbies.  So fun!