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.

Exercise Room

Part of the addition was an extra space adjacent to the den that we had no purpose for until now.  It was a general storage area, but we're trying to move all the rarely used stuff into the attic.  So we turned the space into an exercise room!  Step 1 was lighting, so Chris had to wire in a switch, a socket, and a light source.

Step 2 was flooring - we got this really cool rubbery foam stuff that fit together like a puzzle. 

Now all Chris needs is a punching bag!

Fascia and soffit re-up

The first step of our summer project was replacing all the fascia and soffit on all three levels of the house.  We got our contractor to do this for us since getting up to the third story would have been complicated and dangerous for me and Chris.  We changed the color on our front porch to give the house a fresh look too!

Before:

After:

Shoddy work

We spent an inordinate amount of time fixing some of the crappy work our previous contractor did.  The first was a light in the master closet that was loose and falling off the ceiling.  They basically didn't attach it correctly so Chris had to go into the attic, clear out the blown insulation, and screw everything in securely.

Then the big disaster with the master shower drain.  This had been leaking ever since the addition was completed, but we thought it was cracks in the grout around the shower base.  The problem was continually getting worse, though, so Chris finally opened the ceiling in the kitchen to take a look and the shower drain was not sealed to the shower base!  I mean, there was a quarter inch gap between the two sections so every time we showered, water was dripping down around the drain instead of into the pipe.  Sheesh.  It was a disaster of a plumbing job.  How did this get approved?! 

Anyway, there was major drama trying to redo the pipes because plumbing glue is ridiculous to work with and there were some ceiling joists in the way.  It took a few days, some very late nights, and multiple trips to Home Depot, but we got it nice and fitted. 

We tested it for a few weeks to check for leaks and then our good contractor came back and made it all pretty again.  No problems since!

Irrigation System

I haven't written on the blog for months, but lots has happened!  I was sort of just collecting pictures of all the improvements, but I think we're done with the major work for now.  Here's one of our early spring projects:

The irrigation system is supposed to water the half of the lawn that gets the most sun, so all the rain that falls on the roof is now directed away from the house.  We're also going to connect the gutter from the upper roof to the front lawn, maybe in a slightly different area.  It hasn't actually rained that much this summer so all the grass we reseeded is dying...again...  Poor grass.

TV in the Kitchen

It's true.  We're addicted to TV.  It's basically on all the time, unless we're on the computers.  So we had one CRT in the living room, which is our main TV and one flat screen in the bedroom for morning news and bedtime, and another CRT downstairs in the basement that hasn't been watched in years.  So we decided we'd put a TV in the kitchen so we could watch TV while we eat on the peninsula or while I'm cooking or doing dishes.  This ended up being a three month process because Chris wanted to hide all the cords and make everything look neat and clean.  There was a lot of measuring, holes in the wall, and some redos.  But it's done!  Comcast was really good about it too.  They just transferred our service from the TV in the basement to the kitchen.

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.  :)