New Cordless Roman Shades in the Breezeway

We have not touched the breezeway since we moved in over 3 years ago.  The shades that came with the house worked (kinda) so we just left it.  Well, one ended up breaking awhile back and they really were crappy and very dated.  Window treatments aren't cheap, but I had $200 in gift cards to Bed, Bath & Beyond.  So I've been looking at new ones for awhile and I finally bit the bullet and went for it.  It could be better, but a lot of painting is required and the paneling would have to go.  So for now, this is all the updating I am doing for now.

All the tools you should need: tape measure, small level, pencil, phillips screwdriver and drill

New Shades: Insola Chatham Cordless Roman Shade in White

The god-awful shades from the 70's, plastic pieces woven with yarn, in brown and orange

I had 5 windows to change but it was super easy!

Once I had the marks where I wanted the brackets, I drilled a starter hole
then screwed in the top screw.  Once I got it mostly snug, I set the level
and tightened it up.  Then put in the bottom screw :-)

The shade just slides in on the hooks while the 'arm' is in this position

Then you slide the 'arm' to the left and it locks it in

Sooooo much better!

It's Finally Spring!

I think spring is finally going to stick around!  And for me, well that means time to home-wreck the great outdoors :-)

I didn't get mulch last year for my flower beds in the front of the house, so I desperately needed it this year.  However, the bed in front of the house didn't really have a sufficient barrier to keep my mulch in, so most of it would wash/blow away in bad weather.

This year, I suggested that we get some landscaping blocks to help contain new mulch and give it a little more curb appeal.  I had a couple days within a week of each other to get started, it was quite the job that's for sure.

Finally finished today (5/1), looks gorgeous!

Really the pictures say it all, no real instructions here.  They are a little out of order because I am too frustrated with how hard it is to manage pictures on this blog.  So sorry, you will have to deal with them out of order.

Getting started with new stones around the tree.  I planted a bunch of tulip bulbs back in 2011, they are all red when they bloom

Circle complete, took me 2 more stones than I had anticipated though

Front flower bed before picture, only has plastic edging crap

Only got this far after doing the tree, before I had to go to class

Ripping out the plastic edging was a gigantic PITA, held in with long stakes 4" down

Almost done with the stones

No project would be complete without a problem

Spend about an hour with a hammer and flat-head screwdriver.  That sucked.

They are mostly straight......lol

Around the tree, completed with mulch

Magnolia tree in full blossom, and red tulips, plus doggie

Stones all done!  Just needs mulch :-)

Halfway with the new mulch

ALL DONE!!!!

  

Vinyl Siding for our Garage

Well, I thought I would put a Home-Wrecker post in the middle of all my food posts, so I'll put in the garage siding project we did in September!

Our garage was getting pretty bad, I was literally peeling off paint in pieces as big as my hand.  The 'nails' were starting to rust and show through the paint as well.  Our first thought, was to save money and scrape/sand/paint the whole.damn.thing.  Yes, we were seriously considering this.  And then we talked to my dad and he assured us it really wouldn't be all that bad to just put vinyl siding on the garage for now.

We eventually want to do the whole house, but really can't afford that right now.  Between our house and garage, there were 4 different types of siding on it.  Yep, 4!  Wood siding on garage, cement board stuff on the back door area, small area of vinyl siding on the front of the garage around the door, and the whole house is aluminum siding with a faux stone facade on the front.  Needless to say, we want to continue pulling this house into the 2000's.

So we took measurements, I drew a diagram of the sides/front/back, wrote down how many outside corners, inside corners, J-channel, starter strips etc we would need, and off to get prices!  Dad convinced us we could do the garage ourselves and could do it in a weekend.  My husband was skeptical and didn't want to mess anything up by doing something wrong, but in the end, we convinced him to do it ourselves!  I brought home some samples and a price quote from a local place and we both thought about going with a green.  Currently, the color scheme was/is brown/white, so we wanted to liven it up a bit.  We decided on Mastic Mill Creek in Scottish Thistle color.  I went back to the store, and placed the order after we double checked our numbers.  It was delivered a few days later!

Along with this project, we decided to replace the 2 windows on the sides as well.  They were literally falling apart with the rest of the garage, so we picked out some nice vinyl slider windows from a local bargain place for home remodeling.  Approximately $70 each, couldn't get a better deal than that.   We did have to frame in the new windows because of the sizes, but no big deal according to Dad!

So, one weekend, my dad came out to rip out the windows and put the new ones in and assess the rest of the project.  That morning, it was pouring rain, I was really bummed, but I had to go to work and hoped that the rain would let up for my dad and my husband to get some work done.  They got both windows in and half of the East side sided. Then, the next weekend was the big weekend.  He and my mom came out and brought the family dog too!

Getting started was a little slow, had to get the corner pieces, J-channel and starter strips on which takes the most time, have to make sure they are level otherwise it will not work out well in the end.  Once all that is in place, the siding actually goes up pretty quickly.  The tricky part came when we got to the back side of the garage, the peak.  Now, we have 2 garage doors, one on the front and one on the back, so the back side took longer to make sure that the right and left of the door was even going all the way up.

Once we got to the peak we all had a job.  Dad and I were on 2 separate ladders, my husband was making the angle cuts and mom was supervising and getting any tools needed etc. 

To this day though, we have not finished the front of the garage.  It is a tiny bit problematic because of the inside corner meeting the rest of the house (that we can't afford to put siding on yet).  So, the J-channel is up around the garage door, but that's about it.  We also need my father-in-law to come out and work on some electrical, the main power line comes in right in the front of the garage so it's in the way for new siding anyways.  

But for now, enjoy the pictures!  I love it so much, cannot wait until we can do the rest of the house though!  

(sorry so long, I get long-winded sometimes!)

Also, for reference, the whole project cost less than $1,000.  :-)

North side/Back of garage before any work done

West side before any work

South side/front of garage

East side before any work

East side with new window and half new siding!

Left side of the front of garage,
that pipe is the electrical line
feeding the garage

Started the west side

North side prepped for trim pieces and siding

West side half done

Pooped puppy hanging out in the shade

This pooped puppy was under-foot.... :-)

North side/Back of garage, no it's not uneven,
just more was up on the left side than the right

East side completed

West side completed

We did put up some composite/pvc type trim around
the door, but after I took this picture

 

Fixing the Kitchen Ceiling

Well, it took about 2 weeks to be able to silicone the hole on the outside of the house, but since Saturday was such a beautiful day here (low 50's for the day), we got  a lot of outdoor projects wrapped up.

Now I have to fix the inside of the house.  Monday afternoon, I got out my gigantic bucket of mud, got my container of drywall supplies and lugged them upstairs from the basement.  As I was opening the bucket of mud, I was praying that it wasn't moldy since we did get it a while ago when we were doing the basement and also when we had the intention of re-doing the 3rd bedroom (that's a whole other post!)

So bucket of mud still good, not dried out the least bit.  Grabbed my mud knives and loaded up!  Now, unfortunately, since it got so wet, the side of the beam had a big crack in it, and it kind of shifted.  Not much I could do about that without tearing it down, so I just gently kept adding mud to it to square it off.  I think I did a decent job!

I also had to fill the hole, so I grabbed some insulation and stuffed it up there.  I put a nice glob of mud up there too.  I did my best to keep the whole area smooth to lessen my sanding, but I still need to sand it down and put another coat of mud up.

No pictures for this post, none really came out that great and there isn't much to show anyways.

Rats are smart....very very smart!

We finally caught #3 Sunday night!  It only took rearranging/resetting the whole area for that to happen though.

Apparently, our little rodent friends figured out pretty quickly that we were out to get them and learned how to jump over the bricks and trap to avoid being caught and eventually see their demise.  (You may recall in my last update, one of these buggers got their foot stuck on the sticky trap and chewed off the corner of the sticky trap.)

We weren't really sure there were still any left, so I went out and bought some sand to put down to see if there were tracks.  Saturday we reset it and rearranged the area with the sand and I patted it down to make it smooth.  

Sunday morning, H thought that it looked a little disturbed by the hole, but I wasn't totally convinced, thinking I might have missed a little part when I smoothed the rest.  Still, we rearranged it again into this lovely set-up.

We had leftover bricks and blocks from digging up things around the yard and H had the brilliant idea to make them have to go through the hole in the block which would lead directly into the trap.  We are getting ruthless now.  I want these filthy things gone.

Sure enough, I went to take our dog out around 11pm Sunday night and good thing I remembered to shine the flashlight outside the door first because we caught that little monster!

HMHW-3, Rodents-1  

Hurricane Sandy Left Us a Present!

We were hardly touched by the hurricane, but it did get windy and it has rained a lot the past few days, and since the hurricane goes in a counter-clockwise direction, the rain was hitting the east side of our house, which it normally does not.  Well, Tuesday late afternoon, I looked up in the kitchen and saw this upside-down hump on my ceiling!  OH NO! 

I panicked for a minute while trying to figure out what my plan of action was going to be.  My husband didn't hear me, so I had to walk through the living room to get his attention.  I ran downstairs to get the Rubbermaid dish bin that we have, grabbed a pair of scissors, stood on the chair, and punctured the hump while my H held the bin.  Well, now that the immediate threat of it exploding is over, time to figure out where it came from.  Never-mind that all the stuff on the table got wet, and my table too.  I can tell that it got damaged because where the water was it is rougher than the rest of the table when I run my hand over it.  BUMMER!  I don't know how we didn't see it sooner because it had to have been dripping long enough to soak boxes and sit on my table to ruin it.  

This originally was a nice hump until I popped it

I peeled all the loose/wet paint away

So up to the attic/crawl space we go.  (In a traditional Cape Cod style house, there really is no attic, more like storage in the eaves of the roof).  We had to pull out 2 full trunks of stuff and a few more boxes.  Did a little hunting around, trying to get our bearings and figure out where we should be looking in relation to the kitchen.  Well we found some wet insulation, but not really a clear source of the water.  We decide to go outside because the spot that it happened was about 1 foot from our window, dead center.

We get out the ladder and H gets up on the roof of the carport, the window looks good and sealed, the carport doesn't go 'into' the house, just butted up against it, but the flashing was loose (rusty nails lifted a bit), well just at the corner of the carport there was a hole.  DAMN YOU SANDY!  However, it is a bit of a relief though that it happened, because the rain does not drive sideways into that side of the house during any other rain due to the direction of the house/general weather paths.

For reference of what the next picture is, carport meets house over window

Hard to see because I wasn't on the ladder, but where the siding is cut and the carport meets it, there is a hole!

So with the rain subsiding, no more water should be coming in, but I do need it to stay dry for a day so that I can caulk the hole so this doesn't happen again.  I did scrape and peel off the paint that was wet, anything that peeled easily really.  I had a little table fan as well and I sat that on the table and pointed it straight up at the ceiling to dry it out, can't have mold starting to grow!

Once everything is all good and we are sure it won't be an issue anymore, I need to get out my drywall tools, put a coat of mud up and sand it down.  Then repaint the ceiling.

Did I mention that I am having Thanksgiving dinner in my house in 3 weeks?  

Hanging our Wedding Puzzle.....3 years later!

When we were planning our wedding, we wanted a unique guest book, not the traditional book and pen.  I did a lot of internet searching and tried coming up with different ideas, but my husband didn't really light up on anything.  I finally found customized puzzles, DING DING DING!  He was intrigued!  We took one of our engagement photos and turned it into a cartoon print.  We chose our size (HUGE) and sent off the picture!

The puzzle is a 5-layer birch wood jigsaw puzzle.  The whole thing is hand-cut, with 2 special pieces in the center; 2 hearts that inter-lock.  When it finally arrived we wanted to put it together!  It also came with 3 special pens to be used for our guests to write messages on the back of the pieces.

When we dropped off our stuff to the reception venue, our coordinator was very impressed and loved it!  They set up an entire separate table for it inside our room.

We got so many compliments on it during and after our wedding, everyone had fun leaving us messages and once pieces were signed, it started getting put together.

After the wedding, we went through and read all the messages, it was awesome.  But then we looked at each other and said "now what?".  We found a custom framing shop and put it together and transported it between 2 pieces of cardboard.  The lady at the frame shop was amazed.  She made a beautiful custom frame for us so we could see both sides.  I will tell you, this was THE MOST expensive guest book ever!

So it sat in our apartment for the next 6 months wrapped in kraft paper.  When we were house hunting, and we found our house, it had the most perfect spot for this to be put.  It had to be spot that you could see both sides otherwise, what would be the point?

It's now been 2 1/2 years since we bought our house and it's still not up, but it's getting close!  Because of it's size and weight, it definitely needs to be secured and supported well.  So I had this idea that I would make a base out of a 2x4.  Well 1 piece wasn't tall enough, but 2 gave me the height I needed.  I cut them to length and sanded off the rough spots real quick because ultimately, the 2x4s will be covered up by something else.  I first screwed in the bottom piece to the window frame since I didn't have screws long enough to go through both pieces and the frame.  Once the bottom one was secured, I put the 2nd one on top of it, and screwed that one to the first one.  It does not move!  I also picked up a pair of hooks to attach the chains to.  So I drilled a hole and twisted in the hooks.  Kind of stuck at this point for right now since the rest is probably a 2 person job.  This is the most progress in 3 years though!

Rodents

Rodents.....ugh!  (Stop reading now if you don't want to read about rats)

So sometime in August, our fur-baby, Hannah, started being really interested in our breezeway.  Like wanted to get behind the mini-fridge in the corner obsessed!  My parents also came over about a month ago to help us with the vinyl siding on our garage and their dog was going crazy in the breezeway too!

When putting the vinyl siding up, we had to mess with the corner where the breezeway and garage meet.  Some insulation had to be monkeyed with but we were able to put the inside corner piece up to start the siding.


We have no access under the breezeway, it was an addition and is just kind of there.  We have no idea how it was constructed or anything.
 
A few days later, my husband takes our dog out in the morning and there is insulation strewn about from the corner.  GREAT!  FABULOUS! OH MY GOD! 


(I'd make it bigger but then it's blurry)

So our minds start running rampant. What could it be?  Squirrel? No, hole is too small.  Chipmunk?  Maybe (we hope it is just a chipmunk).  Rabbit?  Again, hole too small.  Then we both think it.....Rat?  Good possibility.  Our town has a rat problem, this is widely known but not much is being done about it.  

This is where I started getting the heebie jeebies, willies, squicked out, whatever you want to call it.  I DO NOT do rodents, spiders or snakes.  No sir, not now, not never, just NO.  Ugh, so H calls his dad and asks if we can borrow his Have-a-Heart trap.  Still hoping at this point that its any of the things listed except for the rat and that we could take it to the park and let it go, etc.

We set the trap and put some bread in it, not wanting anything really smelly as not to attract anything else.  Nothing happened for a week, bread disintegrated from the rain, and we were going to put more bait in it when it stopped raining.  Well, this past Saturday morning H went to let Hannah out and didn't think to look in the trap first and sure enough, there was a rat in it.  And he was so scared of Hannah, it was crying and whimpering in the cage.  

At this time, H wasn't sure it was actually a rat, said it looked like a hamster and had light brown fur, thought it was just a mouse.  He decided to take it to the park and let it go.  Ok, fine.

So we reset the trap for that next night.  H also filled in the hole with more insulation and pushed the pea stones up against it.  This would let us know if something was still trying to get in or out before we officially plugged the hole.

Sunday morning rolls around and we caught a rabbit.  We have a resident rabbit who knows right where the holes are in the chain link fence because Hannah chases it in the dark almost every night.  So I am sure it was the same one.  Why s/he was over near the trap, we will never know.  So s/he gets set free and we set the trap again.

H went to the store Monday night to get rat poison in the event we catch more.  Yup, another rat in the trap Tuesday morning.  So, H moved the trap to inside the garage, put a Decon packet into the cage and so we wait.  I refuse to even deal with it.  I do not want an image of a rat burned into my brain.  I find the rats in Lady and the Tramp to be terrifying enough as it is.

H plans to go out and look at getting a pellet gun so that we can get this over with and reset the trap, again...


This needs to end soon, it's getting colder here...

And yes, H said yesterday that we are complete idiots for not taking care of that hole months and months ago.  We should have known that something would find it and make a nice home.  Just our luck, always is...