Making Some Progress

Hello everyone!

We took advantage of the beautiful weather this weekend and worked outside in the yard.  We also hired a neighbor (who is a carpenter for a living) to replace some rotten wood on our house.  

Our house is aging and needs to have a lot of things fixed and replaced.  Ughh!  We've never lived in a house this long so it has been a learning experience to have to replace so many things.  We've lived in this house for over 18 yrs.  

The first thing was to fix up our back deck.  My husband cleaned it and then stained it.  He still needs to do one more coat though.  He ran out of stain. 

But, even with one coat, it's already looking so much better!  He will do the same thing to our front porch floor too.

Next, he planted our garden.  It's just a little one but plenty for our needs.

We're just growing some tomatoes, squash, bell peppers and cucumbers.  These should take off soon.

We also cleaned out our woods behind our house.  I love that we have these woods since it gives us more privacy, but it does become a dumping ground for lawn and bush clippings and sticks. So, we used our burn barrel to clean that up.  Still have more to do on that front too!  

Our neighbor and good friend has his own business as a "handy man" or carpenter (I guess you could call him).  He is so knowledgeable about everything construction related and we were thrilled to have him fit us in his very busy schedule.  

He replaced some of our rotten window sills with the kind that will never rot again.

We still have a few more that he will get to at another time.

And he replaced a piece of rotten wood on the back side of our porch.  Our builder did not add flashing above it so that's why the wood rotted.  Our neighbor made sure to do every thing the right way!

Of course, it needs to be painted, but we must pressure wash the house first.  It's always something!

He gave us some tips to improve some other things on our house, too, that we hope to get done on our own.

He told us that homes that were built in the 90's (which is ours) were not always built with the best materials compared to today.  Builders used bad siding (ours has been replaced), bad stucco (we dodged that one), bad plumbing (ours is good), bad septic tank field line set-ups (ours was improved), wooden window sills (ours are being replaced).  And on and on and on!  Whew!  No wonder we sometimes feel like we live in a money pit.  Even the water saver toilets of today are better than the ones that were installed in our home 18 yrs ago.  It's as if our home was the guinea pig for construction and now they're tweaking all the problems.  

So!  It has been a busy weekend, but a good learning experience about our house as well.  

Slowly,  we will make things better ....................and then we'll move!  Ha Ha.  Isn't that the way it normally goes?

Hope you all had a good weekend too.  And to all you fellow southerners, stay safe during the line of bad storms coming our way today!  My heart goes out to all those affected in Arkansas that experienced the deadly tornadoes. 

Thanks for stopping by!

~ Kelly ~