Trees

Well, I can always count on Jennifer to give me a hard time if I go too long without making a post, so thanks to her, here's the latest.

Yesterday we had a crew of tree-service people here from about 8:15 - 5:45 to take down 8 trees. Our backyard is so wooded that we barely get any light in the back rooms at all, particularly the kitchen. we're planning to eventually cut down quite a few more, and transform the backyard from woods to lawn-with-large-shade-trees-scattered-about. These 8 though, are too close to the house, leaning toward the house, hanging over the house, etc. for Jeff to take them down, hence the tree service. Yesterday they got 4 trees totally down and all the limbs and about half the trunks off of 2 more. They're coming back today to finish up. They hauled a truckload of wood out with them when they left, but here's how our yard looks:




The other project we have going on now is the screened porch. We were really happy to have a screened porch when we moved in, but of course, like the rest of the house, we couldn't be happy with it as is. The 14 year old pressure treated lumber had never been stained/ painted, and was kind of mildewed and very dirty. The screens themselves were aluminum and bent/ torn in places, the doors were rotted at the bottom. etc. So Jeff took out all the screens, pressure washed the whole thing, and we're in the process of priming it right now. I took all 10 million nails out of the little 1x1 strips that hold the screens in :o) Once it's painted, we'll put new nylon screens and new doors. Another thing we decided to do while we have it taken apart was to rearrange the doorway. It used to have double doors out to the deck way to the left as you walk out onto the porch from the kitchen, but we're planning to have the grill just to the RIGHT as you walk out, so Jeff took a portion of the rail from the right and used it to fill in part of the existing doorway, and built a new doorway to the right. So now we have 2 single doorways instead of one double and we're really happy with the new traffic pattern. That description probably makes no sense, but in this picture you can see the old doorway is to the right (cause i'm facing the house :oP) and the new one is to the left. The grill will be against the house at the very left edge of the photo:



Also, we're very excited about painting the ceiling blue :oD here's the first coat (couldn't wait to try out the color):



Well, I think I still owe nasty carpet pictures.... we'll see if I ever get to that!

Baby Pictures

my new nephew, Logan Matthew Clark, born May 27, 2007

Back Online!

My compupter has been packed away in its component parts for 13 days... I think that's an all time record. But now, after 2 visits by the cable guys, a new coaxial cable all the way around the house and deck, and an hour crawling around the floor running wires and plugging things in, I am back online. So much has been happening that I think i'm just going to post a bunch of little posts... one about each project we've tackled to far. First though, I have to find my card reader so I can get some pictures up.... ::sigh::

I lifted 2 tons today

Yes, with my own two arms.

No, no pulleys.

Well, no. Not all at once.

I never really thought about how much 1836 square feet of solid oak flooring WEIGHS until last night when Jeff and I suddenly had to come up with somewhere to store it and a means of getting it there... by 9:30 this morning.

Most people who read my blog know that we're buying a house in 2 weeks and that we plan to do some major work to it as soon as we move in. You may not have heard that we bought enough wood flooring last weekend to do the entire house except for the 2 full baths and one bedroom. It seemed a little like putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, but the price was unbelievable... less than carpet... and they said they were happy to hold it for 3 weeks until we closed on the house and had a place to store it.

Well, fast forward to last night when we got a call from the store manager who sold us the floor saying that a deal for someone to buy the chain had fallen through and the store was closing, his job had ended that night, but he still had a key and could get us in to pick up our flooring the next morning, provided the security company that had just been hired didn't put the store into lockdown mode before then. He didn't seem to think we'd have much of a chance of getting our hands on it after then-- the store claims no responsibility for merchandise not picked up at point of sale. Oh, and we'd paid by check. It had already been cashed.

So, what's the cheapest way to transport all this wood to wherever we're going to keep it? Will it fit in a u-haul pickup, or would we be better off with the cargo van? wait a minute, how much does oak weigh? 48 lb/ cubic foot... let's see... 1500 square feet x 5/8" thick = 78 cu. ft....... um, 3750 lbs. Yeah. No 3/4 ton pickup for us. Nope, the Home Depot truck can't carry 2 tons either. And the 10 foot u-haul box truck costs 89 cents/ mile in addition to the rental fee, and the flooring is like 20 miles from us. Oh yeah, and WHERE are we going to PUT this stuff???

Well, to make a long story short we found a storage place, Uncle Bob's, where they have a 12' box truck that they'll let you use free of charge if you rent a storage unit. Amazingly, not only do they have climate-controlled storage, but they also rent month to month, they rent from the first of the month to the first of the month, and if you sign up on May 12th, yes, you can rent only till June 1st if you want. And if you found them on the internet you get 1/2 off your first month. I think this place was MADE for us. We got truck rental and a 5'x10' climate controlled storage unit for 2 weeks for $39 including the $15 administration fee.

Now we get to the lifting 2 tons part. When we got to Pineville, the now unemployed store manager was waiting with 2 pallets of material and a forklift. He also threw in all the rest of that flooring that was in stock for another $100, bringing the total to 1836 sq feet.... and 4590 lbs. (The truck was a Ford E-350 and both of us, believing the -350 to mean that the max payload was 3500 lbs, were extremely stressed out the whole time we were driving around with 1000 lbs more than that in the back. I looked up the truck's specs later, and depending on the wheelbase it actually can carry from 4600-6600 lbs, but that didn't help our stress level at the time.) Getting it onto the truck was no problem. Getting if off, on the other hand, had to be done 1 box at a time: 136 33-lb boxes of wood flooring. When 33 lbs is about 1/3 your weight this is no easy task, but if Jeff had had to climb into the truck to get every box, it would have taken 3 times as long, and he'd have been even more tired at the end. So I stood in the back of the truck and moved each box to the back, where Jeff picked it up and carried it into the storage unit. 33 lbs at a time, I lifted 2 TONS of flooring and carried them a few feet, and put them down again. A few months ago I did 3 two-arm curls with one of Jeff's 33-lb dumbells, and I was sore for 2 days. I'm very worried about not being able to move tomorrow, but we'll see how it goes.

Pictures!

Well, we went over to the new house for a couple hours this afternoon to watch our home inspector inspect, and, as promised, I took a bunch of photos so everyone can see this house I've been talking your ears off about. Most of the photos are exterior, in part because it's hard to get interior shots that show more than a corner or a door, and in part becuase the outside of this house is so much more interesting. There will be a bonus at the end of this post for anyone who's really interested in the inside :o)

(click on any photo to see it larger)

First the front:


close up of the porch:


If you turn around and look back toward the street you see one of our favorite features- the long, slightly curved driveway :o)


We never even saw this before we made the offer, but inside the garage is this huge array of cabinets and a built-in workbench. Jeff was drooling:


Above the garage there's a huge amount of storage (just needs a floor.) You can see the doors in the outside photo as well:


Heading inside, step into the Living Room and see the lovely "Octagonal Tray Ceiling" (mentioned in the listing as one of the house's features.) Isn't this one of the silliest things you've ever seen?


Here are 2 pictures of the kitchen. I took two in order to show the whole thing. The kitchen needs some help. I just don't understand having a house with 4 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths, and 4 feet of counter space!



Out the back of the house and you see the real reason this place was such a find. There are 5 decks out back (if you count level changes as going from one deck to another) one of them a really nice, LARGE screened in one. And one holding a (non-functioning) hot tub. This photo doesn't really do it justice, but it was the best I could do (click on it to see it bigger):


Right next to the deck is a little stream that runs roughly along the property line:


And, finally, the vision. We stopped by Sunday after church, (since the house is between church and our apartment,) knocked on the door, and introduced ourselves. The people were very nice, showed us around a little, and, most importantly GAVE US THE ORIGINAL DRAWINGS TO THE HOUSE! So I've been feverishly drafting them up and working out how we'd like to remodel the inside to make the floor plan work better, and add some space to the living room. The plan is pretty dysfunctional right now, but by adding a bump off one side and reconfiguring the interior walls, we can make it A LOT nicer.

(if you want to see an aerial photo of the lot, check out Jeff's post)

Splat!

One of the worst things about living in the south, I've discovered, is the bugs. Roaches to be specific. So far this year we've only had a couple in the apartment, but tonight there was a huge one- a good inch-and-a-half plus. But tonight, rather than try to catch the thing under a container, and then slide a cardboard underneath and transport it to the toilet, all the while worrying that it will manage to slip out, Jeff has this great idea to SHOOT it- with a rubber band gun that is:

The bug actually took 3 hits- the first one knocked it off the wall, and i think took off a couple legs, the second slowed him down as he ran frantically in circles, and the third one literally shredded him:

Pretty effective.

JOB!

Yay!! Jeff got the job with Union County he interviewed for on Wednesday! The best thing is that even though it was a long time coming, this is really the best job he applied for the entire time he's been searching. To read all about it, look at his post on the Blah Blah Blog.