It feels like this week we have accomplished a lot. Some of the work we’ve done ourselves, but a lot of it we hired out (such as the foaming). In one of my last posts about Brendan’s room I mentioned the painter not showing up and how disappointed I was. I’ve since decided that every thing happens for a reason.

Shane and I have been getting to know our neighbors and I have to say it’s great! I’ve always wanted to be the friendly/neighborly type.  On to my main point. The gentleman across the street, Ron, is a painter! After talking with him about the projects we have going on he offered to come take a look at Brendan’s room. Well every thing worked out and he started Brendan’s room today!

Before

We had lots of plaster cracks and Ron really knew what he was doing. We know from talking with him and looking at his work that he has the experience. I am very excited in case you can’t tell! They are done for the day, but will be back tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday.

After

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I know I posted the blue color I was going to paint in Brendan’s room, but here is a picture of the two colors I decided to go with. The blue is going on all of the walls except the window wall. The tan is going on the window wall and up and on the ceiling. Do you think the brown color is too dark? This room gets a ton of natural light, but I am still struggling with if I should go a step lighter.

After the walls are finished in Brendan’s room we only have the floor left. I don’t think I posted on this, so if I have I apologize. Shane and I ended up going the carpet route. We tried many different ways to uncover the wood floor and in the end the wood floor was pretty much shot. Our options then went to ripping out the floor and putting in a new, old wood floor or carpet. Carpet was cheaper and required less work. Shane, Brendan, and I headed to Lowes to pick out carpet and we got lucky! The carpet I had picked out a while back was on sale and had two different promos going on.

The installers were here yesterday to take measurements and now they are waiting on us to decide what color we are going with. All in all it has been a very exciting week! I see an end in sight for Brendan’s room. Then it’s on to our room….but not for a while! Here is a random picture to end the post on. We have been making an effort to have more family time and do some fun activities. Last Friday we took Brendan to the races. He LOVES the races.

Things have been busy around here this summer. If you follow this blog at all, you’ve likely noticed due to the almost non-existent posting. It is just hard to put together a blog post when you’ve either got sunny, 80* weather outside, or a project here or there calling your name.

Another one of the reasons I have been so busy is I’m making a pretty big (and positive) change in my life. I’m stuck keeping it quiet for a bit longer as some key people are not aware of the change and they probably wouldn’t be pleased to find out via this blog. I’ll spill the beans in the next week or two.

But onto the work we’ve been doing recently. The basement bedroom/office is slowly coming together. All of the exterior walls are framed and wired up. Yesterday, the last key component was completed. Foam insulation:

This was done by the same company (Cullen Insulation) that did the basement bathroom. I absolutely love this stuff. My wallet, not so much. But it is the only feasible way to seal up the concrete and it quickly adds R7 per inch. I’ll be adding R11 fiberglass insulation over the top of this (my wallet really wouldn’t like 3 1/2 inches consider how it disliked the 1 inch). Ideally this would result in R18, but since the foam took up a bit of the room in the stud cavity, the fiberglass will get compressed a little bit and will likely lose a bit of its insulation capabilities. It’ll be more than enough for a basement though!

We also stopped by Menards last night to pick up some materials needed to continue on. We picked up some plastic for a vapor barrier and the necessary staple gun. We also grabbed another 250ft of 12/2 wiring. It is amazing how fast you can run through 250ft of wire! I also picked up more 2×4’s to frame in the area around the furnace. Did you know you can fit 20 7ft 2×4’s in a 4 door Grand Am, as well as a two year old and a wife (with the trunk closed)? It takes impressive skill, though .

Thanks to every one who posted a name for our new dog! We did the same thing on facebook and a friend on there came up with Joey. We decided to go with this name, because Brendan can easily say it and he says it so cute!

We took Joey to the vet the first week we had him. After getting checked over the vet concluded Joey is 3 years old. However, because we will never really know, the vet decided to go with at least 2 years. The vet also gave Joey a clean bill of health.

Shane was a little worried that Joey wouldn’t be easy to train. Our neighbor, who is quite taken with Joey, also made the statement that Joey would be difficult, if not impossible, to train (upon learning that we adopted him from the humane society). I have to be honest, I was a little offended! Joey has shown both of them though that he is very intelligent. Shane was able to teach him how to sit in one night. I was pretty impressed. Now they are working on down (not off).

I’ll try to remember to post some pictures of Joey and Brendan soon. Good night!

It is amazing how warm weather seems to make the to-do list grow exponentially. I don’t even want to know how long it has been since I have written a post last. If I could find some great excuse as to why I haven’t posted an update recently, it would have been placed here. Maybe something like: “I thought of writing a post on my trip into outer space to save planet Earth from an incoming meteor, but time was of the essence.” Instead, all I can say is I’ve been busy, and the longer it was between posts, the more guilty I felt about not posting, which seemed to make posting even more difficult.

But anyways… the post, Shane. Focus. The most up to date, update, I can give you is on our fence. I came home for lunch today to find a friend of the neighbors out pressure washing their side of our fence. The aforementioned fence isn’t anything award winning, to say the least. It is a previous owner’s DIY job. Basic 1×10’s run horizontal, attached to 4×4’s every 8 or so feet.

It used to be your standard ~6ft tall, but at some point it seems one of the previous owners and the neighbor got along so great they chopped it down to 3-4ft and added a gate between the two yards. When we first bought the place, we were planning on raising it back up. Potentially replacing it altogether in the process. But we’ve gotten to the point now where we rather enjoy mingling with the neighbors over the fence. And they have a couple black lab puppies that are fun to play with:

Abby

Bella

Back to the neighbor’s friend pressure washing the fence… after finishing my lunch, we went out and asked them what they were up to. Their side of the fence is in pretty rough shape. Some of it has never seen paint, and the rest appears to have just been primed. They were finally going to paint it. After looking at it for a bit, we mutually agreed that it needs a bit more work than that. We pointed a couple dozen boards that needed to be replaced. Some were sistered where parts must have rotted out. While replacing them would probably have been easier and not that expensive, I can appreciate the macgyver spirit. Others were badly warped, and others rotting. They seemed on board (hah, no pun was intended, but it works!) with the suggestions, but they might be cursing me now that I’m back at work.

Neighbor's Side