Insulation and Flooring

I'm still not sure how this came about.  Chris started improving the insulation in the ceiling of the storage area, which is under the floor of our new kitchen.

Halfway through, he noticed one of the floor joists was cracked and not installed correctly.  Sigh.  Doesn't anybody check this stuff?  We spent two weeks trying to install a new joist next to the one that was cracked.  It actually worked!  

Meanwhile, we still don't have good insulation.  Chris wants the spray foam stuff, but we haven't found anyone who can do it yet.  

Garage Organization

Our garage is in a constant state of disaster.  We don't even have that much stuff, but it always seems to be messy!  In an effort to organize, Chris set up a little work station.  It's really quite brilliant!  Now all we have to do is make sure we put everything away where it belongs!

Tree trimming

We hired some people to trim down the giant maple in our front yard.  Chris was concerned about high winds knocking it down and I was sort of sick of all the leaf raking.  :)  The guys climbed all over the tree and really cut it down to size.  They cut some of the large branches near the roof of our house as well.  I was really worried Chris would be angry at how much they cut, but he was fine with it.  Whew!

Bats!

No, seriously, we had a bat fly into our house!  I was sitting in the living room watching TV and this thing flew by my head.  I thought it was a bird, but Chris saw it fly and it was definitely a bat.  We named him Wilbur.  :)  He was super scared and of course, I had no idea what to do so we checked it out online and followed some of their suggestions.  None of those ideas worked and when we tried to trap him in a pillowcase, he was REALLY not happy.

Eventually he flew upstairs and that's when I got worried - I didn't want him in the bedroom!  He flew into the guest bedroom and we shut the door so he was contained.  Chris got a shoebox and sat in the room until Wilbur got too tired to fly.  Then he trapped him in the box and brought him outside.

After we let Wilbur go, Chris started doing research on bats and discovered that they carry rabies.  Oops.  Then he got all worried that Wilbur may have had rabies, so we had to get him the whole rabies series!  Poor Chris.  Meanwhile, we see "Wilburs" around all the time when we're outside.  Hooray!

Built-in Bookshelf

In our attempts to organize the basement and make our den more serviceable, Chris built me a bookshelf in the den closet!  I got to paint.  He stained the wood and everything!  It's super sturdy and now it has all our school books.  It sort of helped with the reorganization.  I am now storing all our sports stuff in the bookcase that held the school books.  :)

Deck Done!

We had a little hitch passing inspection the first time because the stair railings were too far apart and little kids could fall through.  But we stuck in a leftover fence structure and that worked!  We ordered deck furniture from Amazon and it looks quite good.  One of the chairs was broken and I contacted the vendor and she was super-responsive and sent us a brand new one.

Trex

We decided to go with Trex material for our deck instead of just wood since I'm horrible at upkeep.  The Trex was a little more expensive, but given the fact that I would probably need to replace the entire deck again if we had regular wood, it's really cost saving.  :)  The reddish-brown color was Chris' choice and I chose white railings to go with it.

Deck framing

The framing went up pretty quickly.  The guy who did our inspection was really impressed with the support structures under the deck.

Ceiling Fan!

Our second floor gets super hot in the summer even with our air conditioning running.  So Chris promised me a ceiling fan to help circulate the air in the bedroom so I wouldn't have to sleep downstairs on the couch.  :)  It works GREAT!  I love it!

Still redoing shoddy work

Almost a year after the new addition was finished, we are still fixing things they didn't do correctly.  This one was an outlet in the area of our original kitchen.  It was a double socket that wasn't anchored in properly and was really a hazard to little kids.  So Chris made it a much more stable single socket.

New Deck!

I'm a year behind in actually cataloging our home improvement progress, but we got a new deck last summer!  Getting our plans approved with the county for a permit was all sorts of dramatic.  No two people in that building will tell you the same thing.  It's so frustrating.  But we finally got all the paperwork approved and rehired our favorite contractor to build it.  Construction started in May, 2013 with brand new footings.

The footings are GIGANTIC.  Our deck is going nowhere!  There was a little drama with one of the footings near our new addition foundation.  They jackhammered into the foundation to make the footing and Chris was terrified that they sent cracks into the new foundation.  We called our architect friend, who wasn't too concerned, but told us to contact an engineer to confirm that there was no damage.  The engineer had absolutely no concerns, so work continued!

We added a concrete retaining wall and pad outside our new storage area while we were at it.  As you can see, they had to take apart some of our fairly new patio because those footings weren't big enough.  We also had them dig a drainage ditch along the other side of our backyard to decrease the amount of swampiness that occurred after rain.