Haven’t had time to really work on the garden, and the season is slipping on. May just shoot for a late summer autumn garden now, which I have not done before and might be fun.

We need to finish our reconstruction of the raised beds and trellises along the fence. Teenagers keep jumping over our fence to cross the neighborhood, damaging the fence and now they have broken a slat on S.’s bench. Damn the HOA, I’m going to see if Home Depot sells razor wire and put an end to this rude trespassing.

We did get to Lowe’s for some paint for a room and while there S. got some very pretty marigolds to line the steps leading up to the garden. 5 days ago

We did it up right again this year with a creepy graveyard, a rotting zombie crawling from beneath the garage door, spewing fog and lit by strobes, ghouls poised in the parked cars, and a witch’s brew bubbling at the doorstep full of steam and body parts. All the kids who came to the door said ours was the coolest house on the block. The newest addition was a “chained to the grave” ghoul who liftes up his tombstone and offers dire warnings and cackling laughter.

6 months ago

Let this one slip by…

A couple of months ago we went to a local shop that sells saris and other Indian clothing. We were looking for something to hang in our upstairs office that would compliment the saffron walls and Buddhist-themed photographs. We ended up choosing four very colorful saris which we hung in the archways overlooking the staircase. They are held up with “twist to fit” shower curtain rods. A little more to do in this room, but overall we are very happy with the theme and components. 6 months ago

Okay, this is not really a home improvement, but after talking up Zazzle.com to some friends, I just had to do a little creating and ordering.

I took Teddy Roosevelt’s mug, the iconic, toothy grin, and matched it with his equally iconic phrase of praise. On the reverse side of the mug is an inspirational quote from the Nobel Prize-winning Rough Rider.

I ordered a shirt with the same image on the front but it hasn’t arrived yet. Probably won’t before we head out tomorrow. Nevermind, I’ll be sitting in the Cafe DuMonde Saturday morning, speaking softly and sipping their strongest brew from my new favorite mug. 8 months ago

Since I last logged on to 43things, I’ve done the following:
Hung a pot rack in the kitchen
Stripped the dining room hardwoods
Reorganized the laundry room, including installing a suspended rail for hanging clothes and added a long, narrow table for folding
Cleaned out the studio, which is being put to great use.
Installed industrial shelving in the studio, along with a desktop, scanner, and lighting for photography sessions.
Cleaned out the back bedroom and created a guest room.

I’m really falling in love with my new home. Its rustic and rough around the edges, but there is so much love and heart on this property that I am hopelessly enamored with it all. 8 months ago

S. has long wanted some of those solar-powered lights that line the driveway. We were pricing some other items at Home Depot and she found some driveway lights that were on sale that we could both live with.

We brought them home, assembled them and stuck the along the driveway. The first night none of the lights worked. We figured the solar cells needed a full day’s sunlight to get charged, even though each light has an AA battery. The next night four of the six were light. I played around with the batteries in the two, then the next night four of the six were lit up, but they were different ones. I disassembled and reassemble all six and finally got them all to light up.

Eventually she wants to line the sidewalk with the lights as well, so we will probably end up getting an additional twelve lights to make this happen. 13 months ago

He can make just about anything into a dish that would surprise and delight even the most jaded palate. He’s also fantastic about preserving leftovers for later lunches and meals. One side effect of his love of food is that our freezer and fridge are constantly full of condiments, bins of food, bits and ends of everything, and ingredients. Add on top of that my love of fresh produce, the fact we both love to cook and entertain, and our fridge literally runneth over. The freezer was so full that I couldn’t find anything in there.

Today, I cleaned out and reorganized the freezer. Meats and fish in the drawer, a shelf for starches, a shelf for fruits, one for veggies and one for packaged foods. That alone opened up a TON of space, and allows time spent digging for things to be used for more creative pursuits than fishing a bag of brussel sprouts out of the frozen abyss. It also saves us money. No more buying chicken when there’s already 42 chicken breasts in there. ;) 15 months ago

I’m headed off to the store to get the stain for the dining room floor, and some Kilz to cover the ucky, moldy dingy looking spot on the ceiling in the bedroom. 15 months ago

The carpet in the living room of this house was, well how do I put this delicately? DISGUSTING. It was over a decade old, and has been the backdrop for a million raucous parties, several dogs, and bachelorhood for 8 years. It was pieced together out of remnants, and was generally hideous and smelly. I love my man, and no icky carpet would’ve stopped me from being with him, but honey, honey, honey…that carpet had to go.

So, I went and purchased laminate flooring for under $300 and 3 of my girlfriends came over with powertools, and we knocked it out in a day. Its amazing how much better the house looks and smells. An added benefit is that my sweetheart, who had just become so accustomed to the smell and look of the old carpet he no longer noticed it, LOVES the new floor and is amazed by the improvement. He’s now more excited and willing to make more changes to the house.

He’s going to do custom mosaic thresholds to finish out the room. I think my next project will be to stain and seal the original hardwoods that are in the dining room. The plan is to do a dark opaque ebony brown stain to cover the dirty sunk in stains on the floor, then seal it with a satiny polyurethane or some type of glaze.

We rent this place for practically nothing, and investing much money in it isn’t advisable, but we have to at least make it livable and home. 16 months ago

I’ve moved into a small country house that me and my love are renting, and although we don’t want to invest a ton of money into something we don’t own, I’ve got to make it a bit more livable. Its been a bachelor pad for the last 8 years, and its in need of new flooring, paint, a serious deep cleaning, landscaping, gardening, weatherproofing, decorating, repairing and the list could go on forever. Instead of cluttering up my goal list with a million home improvement goals, I’m putting them all here. 16 months ago

Work and the holidays have combined to take the focus off various home improvements we had on the calendar. We are replanning for next year to undertake some more serious renovations now that the minor stuff of painting rooms and arranging furniture is mostly done. For Christmas we decided not to buy each other gifts, but to jointly get some things we had both wanted, but had been putting off. We ended up with a Bluray DVD player(on sale), a Keurig coffee maker(20% off), an Ipad 2 for me(most definitely not on sale), and an Iphone 4S for her. I’d been scraping and saving for a year to buy the Ipad, and I hope to utilize it a great deal for both work and recreation. I know it’s over priced, I know it is part of the evil Apple empire. What can I say?... I am easily seduced. We got a couple of other things for the house as well, but nothing exciting.

• Planting blueberry bushes along the side of the house
• Relandscaping the front yard with stone and brick
• Building a retaining wall along the back slope and redesigning the vegetable garden with a green space
• Repainting the front of the house
• Extending the back patio
• Ripping up the living room carpet and replacing it with wood flooring
• Putting a hydroponic greenhouse in the garage
• Replacing our current tub with a jacuzzi bathtub(and still be big enough for two)

There are bound to be other small improvements that have to be addressed as the year progresses. The AC/heater has been working fine, better than last year, but there is still some problem with it that will need to be dealt with at some point. Also, in January, my vehicle will be paid off and I’m going to put some money into getting it fixed up with brakes, suspension, and a few other things. We have a full load for the coming year, and we are not sure we will get it all done. But we are doing a lot of planning, looking, and prioritizing. 16 months ago

The debate is still on as to whether or not this qualifies as a home improvement.

While out today and spending time together for the first Saturday in six weeks, my wife and I came across a restaurant that had closed and was selling off all their equipment. I convinced her that we should drop in, just for a look around. The place was pretty well cleaned out, except for a 21 foot granite-topped bar, the walk-in cooler and freezer, and a huge gas powered flat-top griddle. There were also two sink sets, one was a four compartment sink set about 12 feet long, and the other was a single sink with a drainboard. I reminded S. how we’ve talked about putting a large, deep sink in the garage for special projects of mine. We’ve talked about a conventional laundry sink but I said this would serve much better. She was slow to convince but when the guy selling the equipment quoted us $75 dollars she agreed (a sink like this would normally cost $300 or more and they are built to last post-apocalyse). It was easy to detatch from the water lines, but as it was it would not fit in our vehicle. The guy said we could pay for it, he would put a sold sticker on it and we could come back with tools to take off the legs. Hmmm, he struck me as a bit creepy and untrustworthy to being paying upfront for something then leaving it in his care. I scrounged around the Jeep for some tools and found what I needed to take the legs off. When I came back in, sure enough, the scoundrel was trying to sell the sink to someone else. He looked at me innocently and said “Oh, did you want that?” Motherfuuuuuuu-ny. Very funny.

I took the legs off and wiped all the grime off I could. It fit in the back of the Jeep very nicely. I paid the guy and got a receipt and took off before who knows the bank or the cops or whoever showed up.

The sink is in the garage now, in a holding pattern until I can figure out how to run water to it and work out the drainage question. Once properly installed it will be an improvement, I am convinced. 19 months ago

An important guest is coming to visit our house on Thursday. S. and I are both working next week, so we’ve begun the job of really straightening and deep cleaning the house this weekend. We have broken the house down into zones and have a schedule to tackle each zone each day, right up until Wednesday.

For reasons I won’t go into I missed the chance to really spring clean, and except for the regular and emergency duties of house-cleaning, I haven’t really gotten on my knees with a bucket and brush since last year. I think S. saw our guest’s visit as a chance to motivate me so she drew out a very detailed list. I went to the store and bought assorted heavy duty cleaners, lime-away, sponges, brushes and gloves. I scoured the bathrooms and finally got the shower stall completely cleared of old soaps and all the trip shining. The sinks are now bare and sanitized, light bulbs changed and fixtures dusted. Apparently dust gets everywhere, even in the bathroom closet. Floors are swept and mopped, I even went back with a sponge into the crevices and all along the baseboards.

I attacked the kitchen by scrubbing and cleaning every surface and scouring a year’s worth of baked on grease out of the oven. By the time I was finished the inside was pristine and new again, and I had that scratchy oven-cleaner-fume cough.

I swept a dog’s worth of hair up from the floor, but no more than I normally sweep up, despite it being summer. I mopped with concentration of Pine Sol that would be sure to kill any lingering bacteria and made the lower half of the house smell like a chemical pine factory.

By the time we are done the house will sparkle as well as when we first moved in. It was never terribly cluttered or messy, just that “dust in the crevices” stuff that adds up after a while. It gives me a good feeling to clean it out. And it made a nice improvement. 22 months ago

With a sweltering heatwave washing over us this week,it was not a good time for both A/C units to go out. In truth, they’ve been somewhat on the decline for a few weeks, in fact the unit that controls the downstairs air has never really worked properly, but it has never really caused an issue until we started hitting the 90+ degrees with 80% humidity.

I called a local A/C maintainence and repair company and had them come out and examine our units. Like the house, they are only 5 years old, but they are “builder grade”. Never the less, they are the proper sizes for the house. The tech came out and determined we were low on freon (duh). He said that there must be leaks somewhere, probably in the evaporator coils. The coils were frozen up from being run with low freon, so he could not get any more freon to pump in the system. Normally they charge $80/per unit to defrost the coils. I asked if they would defrost on their own, given time, and he said yes. Then he told me we should consider … replacing our complete A/C system. Yes, we went from a system low on freon to one that needs to be replaced en totale that fast. The reasons he gave me were as follows:

$159 charge for service visit
$80/pound for freon
$250 per unit for leak detection (yes, I know I can buy a leak detector for about $150)
As much as $1,300 each to replace the evaporator coils, if that is where the leak is.
Freon is phasing out, and soon we won’t be able to recharge a system that is “builder grade” and almost certainly is going to crash again.
Thousands of $$ in wasted electricity from a poorly operating system.

Those are the things he could name off quickly. Fortunately he could call a “comfort specialist” and have him come over and explain all the benefits of having my current system ripped out and a new one installed, not the least of which would be respite from the broiling heat. Since we had to wait for the system to thaw anyway (no, I did not let him thaw my system for $160) I let him set up an appointment for that evening.

The guy that came over at 6pm walked around and measured our ducts and went into the attic. His prognosis was predicatbly grim. Our system was a mismash of generic pieces, and one was leaking water. I told him they were thawing but he said it was indicitive of a cracked evaporator coil drainpan. “What causes that?” we asked. “Oh, it could be anything, there’s no way to predict or know what causes it.”

I mean, tornadoes and earthquakes and volcanos can’t be predicted, but failure of a critical piece of air conditioning equipment?

At the nitty-gritty he gave us a quote for a system that cost $7,500, all installation included. Joyfully we were qualified for financing if we wanted to go that route. It would be a new puron system, with 10 year warranty on all parts and 2 years on labor (we currently have none on our system now). We told him this was something we would have to discuss.

While we are discussing it, S. suggests we get Myron to come over and look at the system and see what he thinks. Why Myron, I want to know. “Well, he works on A/C’s all the time,” she tells me. “So why didn’t we call him first?” I ask.

...

That is what a pregnant pause sounds like. We get Myron on the phone and tell him what we are experiencing. When we tell him the name of the company that came out and looked at the system, we get a long, quiet,

...

He agrees to come over that evening, and we spend about two hours checking out the system and recharging the freon. Turns out the reason we had trouble with our downstairs unit was because we had a burned out capaciter on the compressor. Once charged and filled, we fired up the system and what do you know… we had cold air on both levels. Myron agrees we have a leak, but thinks it is unlikely both coils failed. He suspects faulty welding, but he has to come back another time to do a leak search. He also helps me figure out why my backyard spigit hasn’t been working. We go to settle up at the end of the evening and he gives me the grand total:

$0

So far through this weekend we’ve been holding a steady 75 degrees and it has been kewel.

Having a company come over and try to take advantage of our desperation in the overheated environment… not kewel. 23 months ago

I ordered a rain barrel kit online, and converted our old 60 gallon garbage can into a receptacle. A funnel-type device diverts water from the gutter spout into the can, with a faucet attatchment near the bottom to attatch a hose to. I have to fiddle with the elevation a little more, putting the can up on some cinder blocks.

With this I was able to accomplish 3 things: I made use of the old garbage can that the company never came and picked up when the county switched services (they snooze, they lose!), I’m able to collect free rainwater for my garden, up to 55-60 gallons, and I’ve made our house just a little more green and environmentally friendly.

My only slight concern is whether the can will hold that much water without bursting. That’s almost 500 pounds of water when it is full, and will probably get quite warm in the sun, being a black plastic container. I’m considering strapping it with some metal bands, but I’m going to wait to see what happens once it gets some water in it.

Now, we just need some rain. Naturally, there is non predicted for the entire coming week. 2 years ago