Shelby had a big day 
We've been in the house now for about a month and a half, and Shelby's been enjoying the backyard. We got a 25' lead for her and she just chills on the porch. She occasionally wanders into the yard, but that isn't too often.
We decided to experiment a little today. We took Shelby's lead off and let her wander around the yard. For a little insurance, I put her shock collar on her. She loves being out in the yard without being tied to anything. We were outside with her three times today and she is pooped now. She hasn't moved in the last hour.
Audra took some video of us playing in the backyard.
Check it out here (11.3 MB)
Working at the house
We have been soooo busy over the last couple weeks that I really don't remember where I left off with the updates.
We are officially in the house and out of the townhouse.
Brad and
Dave were awesome enough to come and help out with the move. Audra, Patty, and Maria we to the house to clean up a little while Dave, Brad, Tony, and I packed the truck. We ended up getting the truck packed in about an hour and a half and then were on the way to Lancaster. It only ended up taking about 40 minutes to unload the truck, which rocked.
We had a little while to get the townhouse cleaned out, but we ended up waiting until the last moment. It took two solid evenings but we got it done. Our landlord said that we left the place beautiful and we got all of our security deposit back. Nice.
We've just been doing a bunch of organizing lately. It's slow going, but we'll get it done. Tony and Patty came down this weekend and helped us with a ton of stuff. Patty and Audra started tearing through boxes and finding homes for all of our stuff. Patty is crazy fast with that. Tony and I spent our time out in the yard. The previous owners of our house didn't really pay too much attention to the outside, so we had a decent amount of cleanup to perform. I picked up a bunch of sticks and raked the top portion of the yard while Tony removed some grass plants that we had by the garage. I also removed an old tree stump while the trimmed the bush out front. After all was said and done, we filled 9 55 gallon trash bags with crap from the yard.
Tony and Audra went down the Stauffers and bought a bunch of plants for the outside. We now have a dogwood variant and a couple nice little bushes. Tony was explaining them all to me, but it went right over my head. Horticulture is one thing in which I've never really been interested. Luckily for me, I have a father in law that loves digging around flower mounds.
Tony and Patty came back today to finish planting the bushes and unpacking some more. We went to breakfast at Dennys and then stopped at Lowes. I'm really surprised that they don't know my name there yet. Anyhoo, Tony got us a bunch of mulch, a seed spreader, grass seed and fertilizer. This is on top of the gardening hardware that he bought us yesterday. Audra and I picked up some tiki torches and something else. What was it? Oh yeah--NEW GRILL. If you moo or oink, you'd better run from me. I love this grill. It's a Charbroil with 4 burners, a side burner, and 50,000 BTUs of bovine torching power. Oh yeah.
Audra and I tore up a batch of mega-burgers tonight. I'm still in my dinner coma a little, so I think I'm going to chill out with the pooch and watch some tube. I posted some new pictures on my
Picasa and Facebook pages. Until later, peace out.
Home Fixing: Days 5 - Present
As you've noticed, the updates have stopped as we got closer to the moving date. I'll update again soon. Seriously.
Posted on April 23, 2008 in section Family | View Comments
Home fixing: Days 3 & 4
And what a fun filled weekend this has been. Audra and I went up to the house yesterday morning so we could take delivery of our fancy new fridge. It's funny how appliances don't look as big in the store. The two gents showed up around 10 to drop it off and had to pretty much take it apart to get it in the kitchen. Apparently our door frames are 30 inches, and the fridge was 31 inches with the hinges attached.
After the fridge arrived, we got to work priming the bedroom. That room looked like the
Grape Ape exploded in it. My parents rolled in as I was finishing the fourth wall. We proceeded to give them the nickel tour and then we went out to grab some lunch. After getting back from lunch and saying bye to the 'rents, we got back to work. Audra taped one of the bedrooms that we're going to use as an office and I started painting the ceiling in the Ape room. I finished that and then helped Audra prime the upstairs bedroom and then we were out of there around 9pm. It was a really long day.
Then came today. Audra's mom and sister came over to help paint. They knocked out the bedroom painting and then attacked the other bedroom. After that, the ladies taped the shelfs in the dining room while I prepped the living room and painted the ceiling. We were lazy and called it a day around 5:30.
We already decided that we're not doing anything related to moving tomorrow night. Audra has been packing at night, and I've been up at the house almost every night since we bought the place. I have class on Tuesday so it looks like I won't be working at the house until Wednesday.
Here's a before and after of our bedroom.
Home fixing: Day 2
I spent a couple hours at the house tonight working in the kitchen. After consulting Ted, Brad, and the peeps at Lowes, I came up with a plan of attack for the plaster chasm. I put a hole patch in the middle and then used a mesh tape to cover the entire hole. Then I put a layer of spackle on it to hold it all in place. Hopefully 24 hours will be long enough for it to dry, as I'm planning on going back up tomorrow night to work on it some more. I toop a picture of the patch job with my phone, so the quality is lacking.
I'm discovering that I'm way too anal for this house. While in the kitchen tonight, I saw a few gaps between the cabinets and the wall and had to address them. Then I saw another crack in the ceiling and had to get that. I cleaned up my mess and was about to leave when I noticed another crack, so I opened everything up again and fixed that.
I see one of two things happening with this house.
- I'm going to continue being a perfectionist in a 50 year old house to the point where any project is going to take forever to complete.
- I'm going to stop caring about the little details and do quick jobs on everything.
I hope the latter of the two isn't the case. I try to take pride in my work, but I'm also dealing with tasks of which I have zero experience. So either my house is going to look phenominal in a couple years, or it's going to be a patched together crap heap. I'm leaning toward to former as of right now, though.
Home fixing: Day 1
Today's plan was to go to the house and start on a couple little projects. After a quick stop at Lowes, it was time to get to work. The previous owners used wall anchors for everything, so I wanted to get those out to start prepping the rooms for paint. Some of them came out quite easily while others were so stubborn that I just cut the top off with a razor blade. Then came the spackle. I'll smooth them out later. I'll also address the giant chunk of plaster that fell off the wall in the kitchen. I pressed against it and it splintered into a bunch of chunks. I guess I'm going to have to learn how to fix that, too.
I figured that while I was at Lowes, I might as well pick up a new front door lock kit. Shlage has some nice stuff, so I went with them. Thanks to the gift cert from our realtor, the kit only costs me $6. Oh yeah. I had a little bit of trouble with the catch plate on account of the wood being so old, but I think I figured it out.
I also started removing tile from the basement floor. I'm not positive that it contains asbestos, but I would discount it. I took the safe road and wore a dust mask and broke as few of the tiles as possible. Thanks to a flood a few years ago, the glue wasn't holding on at all.
I never got to the pipe insulation, but I figured that spring is eoming and I have some time to take care of that.
On a totally unrelated note, Shelby has been getting sassier every day. Her big thing now is to jump up on our laps when we're sitting at the dining room table. She gives a small warning by putting her paw on our leg, but jumps up as soon as you look at her. She sat on my lap this morning for about 10 minutes before I left for the house. She looked comfy, so I opened Photobooth and took a couple pics.
We're officially homeowners
Well, we did it. We bought our first house, and it wasn't nearly as painful as I expected. I'm pretty sure that we signed more documents when we made the initial offer than we did today. There are some scary numbers in those documents. The one that showed the amount we will actually pay over the life of the loan is astounding. Oh well.
We had the final walkthrough around 9:15 and everything was fine. We tested all of the faucets, toilets, and few other things. Everything seems to be in working order. The house in general needs a little work, but we'll get to that later. After the walkthrough, we were off to the realtor's office. The gentleman running the show was impressive. He had piles of papers and was bouncing back and forth from us to the previous owner. I expected the mood to be a little more tense, but it was really laid back. All in all, the process took 31 minutes. Not bad.
Now comes time for all the work. First up on the list is painting. Audra and I went to Home Depot yesterday and spent a ton of money on paint. Let me tell you, Audra had the kid behind the paint counter working for his money. All told, we got 11 gallons of paint, 2 gallons of primer, and a big bucket of ceiling paint. I know that we're probably going to need more, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The checkout guy was the hero of the day. Audra mentioned that she didn't want him to tell us the total and just swipe the credit card. Apparently he took pity on that statement and gave us 10% off the entire order. Rock on, sir.
So now starts the process of spackling and priming. It's going to suck. The walls are plaster, so there are a ton of little cracks all over the place. I'm going to do my best to get them all, but I can make no promises. Even before starting that work, Audra is picking out more paint. We decided to paint the living room after going back to the house after settlement. She recently got a new area rug and it trying to coordinate wall colors. She put all of the swatches on the rug and told me to pick one. I still maintain that all of the swatches were in fact identical. She claims that they weren't, but I think the picture to the right proves otherwise.
Well now that we're homeowners, I guess it's time to start laying out the projects. They are, in no particular order (and no particular timeframe):
- Prep walls, prime and paint
- Carpet and paint basement, fix basement ceiling
- Replace kitchen countertop and floor
- Fence in backyard
- Buy lawnmower and fatty-bobatty grill
So the plan right now is to start prepping the walls for paint, put pipe insulation on a couple water pipes that are above the garage door, and possibly change out the doorknobs and deadbolts. Our realtor gave us a $50 gift certificate to Lowes, which I thought was really nice. They probably have stacks of those things somewhere that they give to all of their buyers. That should pay for half of the locks, so it's still a nice surprise.
I'm starting to do that stuff tomorrow, and hopefully the house will have heat. The oil tank is really close to empty, so I hope I can get one or two more days of heat out of it. We're getting a delivery sometime this week, but that's not going to help me tomorrow. The spackle I have works best in temperatures above 50 degrees, and I might be pushing it.
Oddly enough, my sister is also settling on a house today. Here's to a life of debt.
Posted on March 31, 2008 in section Family | View Comments
