clumping

well guys and dolls, we've got some catching up to do. we had a long but productive weekend, and with some happy successes along the way. 

when we last left our hero & heroine, they were about to embark on a weekend of scrubbing walls & floors, yard-work, and appliance hunting. also, they'd just had a mason's estimate come back and were waiting on another mason, a roofer (possibly 2) and a new plumber to get into the bidding. so lets see what happened!

friday.

so friday we heard back from the 3rd mason. and wow! we are glad we did. he called me up when he was at the house to make sure he was seeing everything and we discussed the various things i wanted taken care of while he could see them. so just a quick run-down to refresh you guys [& dolls] we've got the brick wall thats in pretty bad shape from water damage from the busted box gutter above it; theres also a chimney above that wall that needs to come down because its falling apart and is no longer being used; theres a second chimney on the back of the house thats in the same situation; and then theres a couple of spots where some bricks are just going bad and need to be replaced; and some various spots that need tuck pointing. okay so ballpark for all that work + materials he says we're looking at about 2-2.5g's... what?! thats amazing! thats a quarter of what the other guys are estimating! so the catch. he cant do it right away, hes booked for the next 2 weeks. bummer - good enough though. so he said hed do a little pricing on materials and get back to us with a written estimate early this week - awesome. he also gave me the name of a roofer he works with and he knows does good work for a fair price, so i tried calling them, but it was already 5 when i got off the phone with the mason - no answer. but overall im hopeful!

after work i discovered that karen had gotten a line on a stove on craigslist and we were going to pick it up. sweet. 50 bucks - you cant beat that. so we drove out to where the stove was... it was a little scary i'll admit. we we're deep in the suburbs and surrounded by "mccain/palin '08" signs in every single yard. it was very frightening, we were skurred. anyway, so we got there and the guy was really nice, showed us the stove, and we loaded it up and headed out. it just so happened [as it often does in deep deep suburbia] that we passed a home depot not far from his place and given that we needed a few things for the weekend's yard work, we stopped off to pick em up.

so after a half an hour, we left home depot [our second home as of late it would seem] with a new trashcan for the yard, a new chainsaw [hell yeah!] some hedge clippers, and a few other smaller things like extension chords and what have you. 

well again as it turns out [just...so...shockingly...] theres a red lobster next to the home depot and i grin at karen mentioning how tasty the cheddar biscuits are. and she stares blankly back at me. huh? im sorry, i dont care who you are, you cannot deny the tastiness of red lobster cheddar biscuits, thats like blasphemy! so i ask her what the deal is and why she isnt eagerly and excitedly agreeing with me - shes never been to red lobster! what kind of island dwelling crazy person did i marry!? totally cut off from the deliciousness of cheddar biscuits. its tragic really. so i decide to end her suffering and make her go to red lobster for dinner and resolve this travesty once and for all. [haha, dramatic much? who me? never.] so we had red lobster for dinner, it had been years since id been, so it was quite delectable, karen was mildly appeased, hardly impressed [ugh, shes such a food-snob! if it doesnt come from the island its just not good enough for her highness, bleh.] but admitted my biscuits were good. [lol!] so after that we were pretty drained, but went home and changed quickly from our work clothes and unloaded everything at the house before calling it a night. 

saturday.

well we got up early and checked craigslist for appliances again and found a fridge for 125 bucks, sweet! it looked fairly new from the picture, and it was certainly well taken care of so we called em up. a half hour later [after a trip to the atm] we arrived at what turned out to be an estate sale and a jolly middle-aged man greeting us on the front porch. long story short here, we got the fridge for 75 bucks [score!] and had to take the doors off of it to get it out of the house. however, somewhere in the midst of everything we managed to lose or forget the center hinge that is pretty much the integral connecting piece of the entire set-up [although we didnt discover this till later that night]. so we took the fridge to the house and got started on our work for the day. 

saturday we spent the entire day in the back yard. i got to use the new chainsaw [and it was quite joyous!] and karen fell in love with the hedge clippers. i have never seen anyone have so much fun with a pair of those things, lol, but she just got into it man. so throughout the day we did mostly cleared out the brush [and obviously fixed that felled tree situation] and cleaned up the yard in general. in the process of doing so we discovered a wealth of large rocks, bricks, and chunks of slate just below the surface of the yard [odd, but cool] and that we had a network of serious roots from some small plants that were growing through our fence [that we seriously could not dig up despite our best efforts. these little buggers are crazy! the plant is like a half an inch diameter through the fence, but the roots are like 3 inches in diameter! insane!] 

also, we have these weird bushes [i guess is what they are] that are clumps of stems that are long and tree-like individually and are just overgrown everywhere trying to get sunlight. well, when i was in denver i saw a grad project [possibly a thesis, not sure] that was about wrapping trees. it made a good argument that wrapping trees didnt hurt them and actually created a habitat for wildlife within the wrapping [like for birds to nest in and the like] that they wouldnt normally have. so this led me to suggest to karen that we wrap these things in tighter clumps to maybe encourage them to grow more vertically, and also to wrap some of the clumps together. well when i mentioned that to her, she loved the idea and told me that she knew something about binding oleanders [i think is the bush she told me about] and eventually the stems will actually grow together into a tree trunk. sweet. so we decided to give it a shot and we wrapped/binded all our bushes/trees while we were clearing out brush and digging up the dead, mostly dead, or somehow intertwined in the fences, plants. 

oh! and i forgot to mention! karen was all ready to go on scrubbing the inside of the house until we realized we dont have any plumbing, lol! kinda hard to clean without water. so we nixed that for the time being. ;]

heres a few before and afters for you on saturdays fun:

sunday.

so sunday morning we did whats become our normal routine:

church followed by a trip to home depot, lol!

church was good, a bit much, but i wont go into that now. home depot is always fun, lol! so upon discovering late saturday night that wed misplaced this hinge, we decided to see if we could get a replacement one at home depot as well as some replacement handles [the ones that came with this thing were just plain ugly with no hope]. also we looked into what it might take to repair or replace the door jambs and door hardware that were partially destroyed at the house right now, although we really liked and wanted to salvage the doors themselves. they were actually in good shape - its just the jambs that were messed up from someone kicking in the door at some point in the past. 

so we did some shopping and actually ran into our new neighbors at home depot which was fun. ive always wanted to run into my neighbors at home depot, haha, i know its silly but its very mayberry and for whatever reason i like the idea of that. although, running into the neighbors just isnt the same without their enormous dog feigning for attention, lol! i dont know what kind of dog this thing is, but its a friendly monster!

so after 'the depot' we went back to the house and got started on our new projects for the day. somehow [lol] i just assumed that installing new door hardware was going to be no big deal. heh, i was wrong. it probably took me 3 or 4 hours to install the first deadbolt having none of the proper equipment, lol! all i had was my drill and my largest bit is a 3/8" so you can imagine it took forever to bore out the 2"+ holes necessary, and to keep them clean for that matter! however, ive gotta say, i did pretty damn well considering. to look at em, youd never have known i didnt have the right equipment :]

so the first deadbolt took forever, but once i figured out some tricks with what tools i did have, the doorknob took like a half an hour, lol! when it was all said and done, it took most of the day, but i got one door mostly finished and all the hardware works properly. [and it only took one re-do on the deadbolt, lol!]

meanwhile, karen had taken on some projects of her own to keep her busy on sunday. while we were at home depot we discovered we were up $h!t creek [so to speak] as far as the fridge hardware was considered, so we were looking to improvise. the big stores dont carry all the little parts [or even the big ones] for fridges, so we decided to look in the general hardware section to see if we could be creative. well we didnt find anything that would work for the hinge [thats a pretty specific part that we were just going to have to re-order from the manufacturer] but we were pretty successful with the handles. as far as we're concerned, handles are handles, whether they be for doors, cabinets, fridges, cars, chairs, whatever. and we were looking to put something cool on our fridge that really spoke to our more fun & eclectic style. i wont spoil the pictures and tell you what we found, but we were very happy with the results! also, when we were looking for the handles we decided we were going to need some spray paint and we got some appliance enamel stuff. this is where karens projects came into play. as we were looking at the spray paint she got an idea for some fun and thats what she spent the day doing. again, pictures to follow - and keep in mind shes not quite done with the appliances yet, so these are just a taste. 

heres the sunday before and afters:

so over-all it was a very successful weekend and we're excited to get out to the house again and see what else we can accomplish!

we miss you all, hope you had a good weekend too!