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.