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!)