Home Projects

In the last few weeks I've been doing projects around the house.  Last weekend I fixed the fence I put up when I first moved in.  When I first put it up, I wasn't thinking about much more than getting it built quickly so that I could let Karlie run wild in the backyard.  So the rails were placed pretty randomly, the bottom rail was generally waist high, and just looked kinda crummy.  Because the rails were placed so poorly the fence boards started bowing pretty bad.  In addition to that, on of my posts twisted and bowed pretty badly taking the rails and fence boards with it.  So last weekend I took every single fence picket down, adjusted the rails, removed and replaced the bad post.

It looks a million times better now.  Hopefully I won't have to do anything like that again any time soon.  Took about 13 hours to complete, and of course I did it on the hottest day we've had so far this year.

The weekend before that, I hooked the water up to the fridge, so now I have cold filtered water and ice!  This project became much more difficult than it should have been because I couldn't find the water shit off for the house anywhere in the house or crawlspace.  Eventually after much gnashing of teeth, I decided to try all the valves over by the drip system just in case.  Turns out one of them turns off the water to the house.  After that things went fairly smooth, attached the saddle valve to the washer cold water supply and brought a copper line to the fridge.  Unfortunately that didn't produce enough pressure, so I got another valve and pulled from the water from the supply to the sink, and now its still slower than I'd like but well within the spec that GE said to expect.

That same weekend, it was also time to replace the counter microwave.  The plate didn't spin, it barely heated anything up, and just generally sucked.  I've always liked over the range microwaves, and given how small our kitchen was it seemed a no brainer for getting one.  We picked up an inexpensive GE OTR at Depot, and I set to installing it by first removing the range hood.  That went pretty smooth until I noticed that the power cord did not go to any outlet, it just went into the wall.  There was no hidden outlet available for the microwave.  Then it was Dad to the rescue!  After a few calls and texted pictures, Dad was able to help me wire a plug into the wire coming out of the wall that would suffice for the OTR.  After that, things went smooth, and got it in.

The weekend before that Audrey's grandparents needed a new roof, and her Dad asked if I could come down to help out.  Of course!  We worked on it on Saturday, and at first I was afraid I was going to be fairly useless, Audrey's Dad and his friends that helped were all construction veterans.  I got the fairly simple job of placing shingles so the other guy could nail them down.  I would occasionally do the nailing when he went to set up the next staggered row.  So not the most glorious job, but I think I was pretty useful in cutting down the time for the job.  It was a nice cool day, and didn't really run into in any problems.  Plus I learned a lot.  Like I don't want to be a roofer!  :)

A week or so before that, I finally hung the TV up on the wall mount that had been sitting around for a few months.  Looks a lot better though now we need to decide how we want to hide the cords.

Next up?  Getting rid of the weeds all over the yard.  My next house will not be xeriscaped, because at least if my lawn gets weeds, I can just mow those bastards down.  Also  on the agenda?  New floors!  We're going to get rid of this nasty carpet that just holds on to all our pets hair and looks awful, and destroys vacuums and smells and all the other awful things about carpet and replace it with some decent laminate.  We've got some money set aside for this project and are actually going to go to a few flooring stores this afternoon to check some stuff out.  Can't hardly wait!