Recently: Home Projects
Lo has been kicking ass and taking names with projects around the house. One of the porch light stopped working and he fixed it. He stripped the paint from the desk that we are going to use as a changer/dresser in the nursery and stained our outdoor benches and Boof’s window seat during the weeks it was too rainy to work outside. After three weeks of rain he was finally able to stain the deck and it looks so good now! He also mulched some of the flower beds and moved some plants around (we have to finish planting others before he finishes those).
Look at how much better the deck looked when he was 1/2 done! I need to take a pic now that it’s done (and dried). 
He also took a tile workshop and laminate wood flooring workshop at Home Depot AND helped our neighbors put up a fence in their backyard. All the stuff he’s been doing are things I couldn’t really help with because they involved chemicals or heavy lifting (and he insists that I don’t do those things), so I’ve been trying to get things done inside the house.
We finally bought flooring for our main living area/kitchen/dining room/hallway downstairs. After much consideration, we decided on laminate wood flooring in a medium brown. It’ll be in the kitchen, so we ruled out hardwood. We were having trouble finding a finish on engineered hardwood that we liked and couldn’t determine if it was worth the extra cost. We have a light maple laminate in the kitchen/hall now and it’s held up well and we like it, but there was no way to blend/transition that color to go with a darker color that we’d want in the other areas, so we are replacing it all. The front living room and dining room have light carpet and though we got it cleaned before we moved in, old stains just kept coming to the surface and we can’t handle it anymore. The flooring comes in next week so we’ll have to tear up the carpet and laminate, put down the underlayment, lay the floor, add a quarter-round/shoe moulding, and then re-paint all of the trim and moulding. Yeah…that’s all. Easy enough, right?! And then I’ll be on the search for rugs. We are hoping that we’ll like the wall color enough after the new flooring that we won’t “need” to paint it for now. It’s a mustard yellow color that’s okay, but we don’t love it.
And then there are plenty of other little home projects to do…paint birch trees in the nursery, paint the desk/dresser for the nursery, sand/paint the glider rocker, replace the wire shelves with wood shelves in nursery (this may get skipped – it’s not a big deal), recover the window seat, make freezer meals for after the baby, wash 100 loads of clothes for the baby (I’ve already bought a ton of used baby clothing and will need to prep the cloth diapers too), babyproof and anchor furniture, clean gutters and install gutter guards, paint the wood trim on the outside of house, paint/rehang basement railing, install security bars on our basement windows, and trim the crap out the bushes around the house (finally bought an electric trimmer).
I feel like I’m forgetting some projects…and we literally have 2-3 free weekends until mid-September. Talk about pressure!!! And we haven’t seen some of our friends for literally months and we miss them!
Oh, and our vaccum cleaner isn’t working that well anymore after 1 year (may be covered by warranty) and our basement humidifier stopped working right after the 1 year warranty and we had to spend $200 today to replace it because it’s been so humid and we don’t want it to get (more) damp down there.
On the plus side, my garden and lettuce table started doing amazingly well with the 3 weeks of rain that we had. Then we weren’t good about watering it once the heat started and the plants lost some of their luster (most plants have perked back up since watering has resumed). I’m going to have to start remembering to water now that it’s not going to rain much. I used our first zucchini and some lettuce, we have green beans ready, we ate all of the radishes, have tons of little tomatoes, peppers are growing, have a small cantaloupe, and my broccoli are finally starting to get heads. Chard and green onions are also ready. Here’s the table:
So that’s “all” that we have going on around here. This is how we’ll be spending our last few months of “freedom” for the next 20 years or so, lol! It’ll be worth it in the end (these next few months and the 20 following years, of course).