where I talk with my inside voice
Josie has been wanting to paint a mural on her bedroom wall for a while now, and she finally bought the acrylic paint that she needed and moved all of her furniture out of the way. Her room was torn up for a couple of weeks, but it’s complete now and she did such a good job! I’m proud of...
We just couldn’t take the look of the hardwood floors anymore so the time had come to refinish the living room and dining room. We ended up going with a company called CleanRecoat, because they offer a service that doesn’t require sanding. So it takes half as long, and costs half as much. The floors look great, so I’m very...
The pandemic has had an impact on everything, including furniture production, apparently. In early January, we ordered a new loveseat and two recliners to update the look in the living room. The loveseat was finally delivered this week and we are expecting the recliners in early April. I’ll post a photo when the room is complete.
We’ve not had good luck with the Whirlpool dishwasher we bought in May 2018. We had the plastic bracket that holds the upper basket break shortly after we bought it (which was a fairly inexpensive fix), last year the spinning water sprayer on the bottom of the upper basket filled up with food particles and would no longer spin, and...
We had our oven go out last Friday and managed to get a repairman scheduled for Monday (before Thanksgiving) to come look at it. He tested the temperature sensor and concluded that it was our control board that needed replacing. A quick search revealed that they don’t make that part anymore, so it cost me $109 to find out that...
If I have to stay home, due to the pandemic, I should at least be productive around the house. Thankfully, between Amazon and curbside pick-up at Lowes, I can still get the materials I need to work on a few things I’ve been planning for a while. I installed some permanent landscape lights near the house and at the base...
Last year, the poison ivy was a bit out of control in our yard, and Dixie wanted to move the garden away from the back fence so that we didn’t have so many vines growing through it into the garden. So we spent the weekend creating a new bed, by moving the rear bed to the front – leap-frogging the...
We finished framing the chicken run this weekend – Noah and Josie both helped me. Aurora looks on wondering when she can move in. Soon, my fine feathered friend. Soon.
Noah and Josie took the chicks outside for the first time today. I think it was a lot for them to process – they just stood in a small huddle the entire time. We also completed stage 1 of the coop construction. A couple more weeks and we can evict them from the basement.
Josie’s castle / play table is almost done. In just a couple of hours this morning I was able to get a coat of primer on everything and assemble it in her room. She can’t wait to start playing with it, but I think I may need to take it back apart in order to finish painting it. I attached...
If I haven’t mentioned it before, I really like Sketchup. Yesterday I spent less than an hour designing a new play table for my daughter Josie, and tonight I spent about an hour cutting out the pieces. Talk about rapid prototyping! If it’s not obvious from the image, this table will sit in the corner of her room and be...
In almost every project around our house, we invariably reach the point where this phrase is uttered. It happens so often that it’s a running joke. Today, Father’s Day, was no exception. It began with us simply wanting to swap out the hangers in both of the kids’ closets. Noah’s clothes have gotten big enough that they don’t stay on...
It’s been a month of fits and starts, but our new patio is finally coming together, and yesterday offered a break in the ridiculous St. Louis heat, so we were able to enjoy it a bit. We bought the furniture set at Sam’s, but we almost didn’t get it. We saw it there on a Friday evening, and we liked...
We bought this Cambridge model swingset from Sam’s last season on clearance and finally got around to assembling the beast this past weekend. If you buy one, you can plan on it taking a good 20 hours to assemble if you have only two people. I would recommend that you follow the instructions and take the time to sort and...
You never know how much crap you own until you have to pack it up and move it somewhere. The old homestead was starting to get a bit crowded and we needed some room to expand, so we started house-hunting back in July thinking we would just look casually for a while (maybe a year) before we got serious. Wouldn’t...
