Little projects

Before:

After:

Since I am barred from doing work at the office this week due to construction, I tried to work at home today. Unfortunately, I didn't get much done in regard to work but I did paint the woodwork in the entryway and stairway. That's something, right? It's not a huge change but before it was this dingy cream and now it's a nice, crisp white.

The official beverage of the Bangor Foursquare

If I haven't shared this with you yet, Santa brought Thom a brewkit last December and he has been furiously brewing away ever since we moved in. He named his first homemade creation (i.e., he created the recipe, toasted the grains, etc.) after our house. It's pretty tasty, if I do say so myself. He even designed the label. Groovy!

Painting done

Hooray! The painting is complete on the north side of the house as well as the garage (which I did) so we can get our whopping $300 back from escrow. Of course, this doesn't nearly cover what we paid the painters but it will be nice to have all the FHA mortgage stipulations taken care of and done with. Maybe I'll use the $300 to buy paint for the cabinets in the kitchen and a new light.

I'm also including a photo of some flowers that just bloomed on the side of the garage. I figure I better take as many photos as I can before some loser comes by and picks those too.

Progress on north side of house

It has FINALLY stopped raining so we can get our house painted - at least the one side. They primed about a third of it today and it's starting to look less like a crack house and more like a nice house. Progress!

The kitchen plot thickens

Thom and I did a little investigative work this morning in the kitchen to get a bit of a better idea of what we'll be dealing with. We found, in particular, some interesting carpentry work (see above) behind the wall that joins the powder room to the kitchen. They didn't quite knock it out but rather built out, and apparently not well. Sigh.

I think we'll have to knock down the existing soffets in the kitchen above the cabinets. I'm nervous about the large space up above and how it will look but having 15" soffets I think will look even funnier. Double sigh.

I think the first step will be taking down the existing ceiling and lights and then dealing with the wiring in the ceiling and trying to reroute it. I'm quickly getting over my phobia of electrical work as this doesn't seem terribly difficult to just move the junction box and shift around a few wires, but we'll see. I probably just hexed myself saying that.

I'm excited to get started on it but I'm disappointed by how much work it's going to be compared to with what I anticipated. Lesson learned, right?

Never use the phrase, "We'll only have to..."

I still haven't yet recovered what I'm now calling the Peony Tragedy but decided to check up on our next project anyway. Our friends Paul and Leslie wonderfully volunteered to help us hang drywall on the ceiling in our kitchen. Loyal readers may remember that we have one of those beautiful styrofoam dropped ceilings with the requisite and equally beautiful fluorescent light boxes in the kitchen.

I should now recognize that when I say anything that begins with, "We'll only have to..." or "It will only take..." that I'm just asking for it. Well, I thought we'd "only have to" take down the ceiling and disconnect the lights from what I figured would be two separate ceiling electrical boxes. Yep, I was very wrong.

As you can see from the photos above, it's a gigantic mess up there. While the ceiling should be relatively easy to remove, they did a terrible job of rigging the lights - wiring punched directly through the plaster on the walls - and one box with multiple wires running all over the place (including outside to our mud porch). The powder room adjacent to the kitchen that they added at some point was never finished all the way to the ceiling so there is a gap above the wall. I don't know what all of this is going to entail but I know it won't be anything that involves the word "only."

Mean people suck

I was about ready to go out today and take a picture of my two new beautiful peonies that just bloomed. Well, I should have because they're now gone. Some meanie came by and picked them right off the bush. I am very upset and have left them a nice little note. I've seen one guy, in particular, doing this kind of thing throughout the neighborhood so I wonder if he's the culprit. Jerk wad.