One project down

I have many plans for this week. The primary purpose of this "vacation" is to spend a week at home with the boys. I want them to have a break from day care before school begins. They love day care, so I don't think they really cared if they got a week at home, but here we are. Since I am here, I intend to complete some of the little projects that have fallen by the wayside. I now present the kitchen wall. Please ignore the wall to the left. John just took the paneling off the bottom half of it about two weeks ago. It will probably look like that for a while. Back to the finished wall. John took the paneling off a little over a month ago. He got it textured and primed and then it just sat there waiting to be completed. John started painting the door Sunday. Yesterday I found the motivation to finish the door and paint the trim. Today I painted the wall. I have included a picture from Jacob's birthday to show what the wall looked like. I am very happy with the end result even if it did take a while to complete. Now I just need to tidy the fridge and all will be right.

No middle ground

Due to the thunder we heard rumbling in the distance, the kids and I vacated the pool and headed inside. Jacob spent some time working on his various projects. May I present "Mario World". The kids decided to take a break from projects and we sat down to play a game of Uno. As soon as we began our game the rain began to fall. This is not a gentle rain. I think it would fall into the gully washer category. We need the rain, but I wish it would fall a little more gently. It is going to wash away all the grass seed we put out on Sunday. I am thinking we might need more gutters on the back of the house. At least with all the rain we can see where we need to put the drainage for the new landscaping. There is a silver lining.

Facebook

John and I caved to peer pressure and signed up for Facebook. So far, I really don't get it. Maybe I am just missing something. At least I will have something to show for my vacation. What did you do on vacation? I spent way to many hours trying to understand the Facebook mania. That and painting. I'm cool like that.

The never ending baseboards

We have been wanting to get the baseboards in the bedrooms for just over two weeks now, but the motivation to get it done has been lacking. It might actually happen this week. John spent some time painting today. Once we get the ones he painted installed we can paint some more. Someday all the rooms in our house will once again have baseboards. I am hopeful that day is near. In addition to the baseboards we are installing new doors on the kids closets and in the laundry room. It will be a relief to have these little projects done. We need to be focusing more on our outdoor projects for now. Speaking of which, John had a run in with our not so friendly backyard pests today. He got two yellow jacket stings on his leg. He was mowing near the house and disturbed a nest. Now we have two nests that need to be treated. John is currently devising a plan. It involves four inch drain pipe, boiling water, and laundry soap. I'll keep you posted.

Yellow Jackets aren't cool

After a relaxing swim, John and I decided to spend the afternoon working around the back yard. John was working on some electrical wiring for the light in the pool, and I was working on leveling the ground where we ripped out the deck. As you can see from the picture above, I was making progress loosening the dirt so it would be easier to level with the rake. All was going well until I disturbed a yellow jacket nest. They were not happy with me. I managed to escape with only three stings, but we killed 5 that made it into the house with me.The picture above is of the colony entrance. After I came inside to treat my wounds and rest, John put hot coals on it. There are lots of bees swarming around it trying to find a way in. I am not sure how we go about treating the nest now since everything I have read says you have to get the poison into the nest opening. I have also read that if they aren't posing a threat you should leave them alone and they will die out in the fall. I am not sure we can wait that long since they are pretty close to the house and swarming rather aggressively. We may be making a trip to Home Depot tonight. John needs more PVC glue anyway since he is redoing some of the pool plumbing. The things we do for fun.

74 is pretty awesome

It was a whopping 74 degrees this morning. It felt great. You could actually be outside without feeling like you were melting. The fire today was quite large, but it burned down quickly. Joshua and I went to the end of the drive to get the paper and you could see the fire over the house. This should be our last fire for a while. We have ripped out all the back deck, so demolition is complete. This weekend, we hope to get some small inside projects done. Specifically, we need to get all the new doors and baseboards painted and installed. We are trying to finish up all our petty projects before school starts in three weeks. The summer has gone by so fast. I will be on vacation next week so the kids and I can prepare for school. We need to clean out closets and shop for school clothes. We also need to embark on the school supply scavenger hunt. Last year I waited until the week before school started and many supplies were sold out. I hope to avoid that headache this year. Have a great weekend!

Another week gone by

I looked at the blog and saw that it has been a week since our last update, but I am not sure where the time has gone. Sitting back we see some progress but in the midst of it we seem to get overwhelmed. We are going to have to start making specific goals and working on them so we can check them off. This weekend we removed the last of the old decking in the back yard, so all demolition is now complete. We now have to borrow a tiller to break up some of the hard ground and level it the best we can. Once it is fairly level we are going to put out grass seed to help hold the soil and to make it less of a muddy mess when it rains. We hope to bring in several loads of topsoil and possibly sod next year, but we will see about that. We also now have a second gate at the end of our fence, so all we have to do is the 24 remaining sections of fence, but that also will wait for now as we work on more pressing issues.

On the inside we hung a new door for Jacob's closet. We still need to replace Joshua's and the one that leads to the laundry room. We have the doors but need to paint them and install the new hardware so they match the rest of the house. I am pretty sure that will be on the top of the list. Now that we have the carpet installed we need to get baseboards down. We have 200' of them in the garage that we bought last week, we just need to paint and install them. The other project outstanding is the kitchen walls where we took out the siding last week. The walls have been patched and sanded and are just needing textured and painted. We are trying to decide if we are going to paint them a new color now or just match the hall.

It really isn't that many projects right now, just several fairly large ones that will take some time. Hopefully we can knock out a good chunk this weekend.

On an unrelated note, we got to see a surprise in our grill the past couple of weeks. We saw a bird keep flying in and out of the bottom of it. After a few days it would fly in with something in its mouth and we would hear a loud "cheeping" noise. This weekend we saw the baby birds venture out of the nest and hop around the patio a bit. I am not sure if they are gone yet, but we haven't been out to watch them in a couple of days. It is fun to sit back and watch this little bit of nature happening right in front of you.