The House Makeover Continues

We haven't had an opportunity to do a whole lot of work on the house this summer. It's mostly been small details that we've been picking up on the odd weekends. Even squeaky doors, sticky windows and the like can be time consumers, even if no one but you knows the work's been done. We've contented ourselves with the occasional finished door threshold, quieting noisy fans, installing new vents and finally hanging some things on the walls. We did, however, finally manage to start on the outside of the house and hired a professional painter to paint the exterior. Of course, there's no contractor visit that doesn't warrant more construction work, so I tore off some really bad exterior trim and replaced it with new redwood. (Which was promptly painted over, sniff) Chalk it up to my continuing obsession to not use crummy materials or something. That wound up being a fairly large full day project.

When I stopped working to take a phone call from Cathy, I sat down for a moment. As I spoke to her, I noticed a spot of dirt on my shoulder from the corner of my eye. I hung up the phone and turned to brush it off - then I finally noticed that the spot had a pair of blinking eyes, was breathing and staring at me. I walked the spot (I called him Herman, in honor of a turtle from a science fiction novel I just finished) back to the front yard and let him go in our now empty front bed. He and his relatives spend a lot of time hanging out in the sun on our front sidewalk. I think I disturbed the all day tanning salon when I started coming home for lunch and walking through the prime spot.

Herman, Ride-Hopping Lizard

We also spent a weekend removing the last of the "haunted house" landscaping. The front beds are now a blank slate ready for some work, which Cathy is spending plenty of time thinking about. One of these days, I anticipate she'll be done thinking and we'll be off to a nursery to pick up some green things to stick in the ground. More projects still in the offing for the months ahead: got to finish the floor of the main bathroom, tiling and installing a threshold. I finally got my first table saw as well (Hoo-yah!) so I've now got a strong reason to finally hook up the dust vacuum system to the tools in the garage. Everything else remaining is still under negotiation! :)

New paint. Old house.