Serious (House) Business

I haven't been blogging here much since late October because my wife Becky is pregnant. She yelled at me back then for posting here and NOT mentioning it, so now she gets top billing. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY NOW BECKY! Also, I love you! Our daughter is due on March 12th, so not only did we have Thanksgiving in November, then Christmas in December and New Years shortly afterwards, but we experienced the full second trimester in there and transitioned into the third. What this meant for me was a shitload of house work needing to get done.

Just this weekend I managed to repair the chewed up carpet edges in our living room (thankfully the puppy out grew that!) with some cheap carpet tape and some scraps cut out of the linen closet upstairs, buy new blinds for the baby's room and the living room, and install a new bathroom wall cabinet to finally give us some storage in there.

To get the baby's room ready I had to paint the walls light green, then go around and repaint ALL of the trim in the room white semi-gloss from the hideous yellow color that was apparently painted over an even more hideous navy blue color. Why would you paint trim like that? I don't even know why you'd paint trim to begin with. Leave it white! Certainly there are exceptions to this, but not many that I've seen. I also had to climb up in the attic, drill down through the top of the wall, and cut a whole in the ceiling to install a ceiling fan/light which improved the comfort factor of the room a ton.

I figure it might be interesting to list ALL of the repairs and upgrades we've made to this house since we bought it back in 2008:

• Installed two new windows in the living room bay window
• Repainted, re-caulked the outside of the front bay window
• New locks on the front door
• New sliding glass door in the back/kitchen area
• Wood stairs from sliding door to back yard (replacing stone pavers stacked barely high enough)
• New Microwave installed above stove (replacing generic range hood/light)
• Installed carpet pad/carpet in main basement room (covering up bare concrete floor)
• Patched a custom vent in basement that never should have been cut into ductwork
• Installed Ceiling Fan/Light in both upstairs spare bedrooms
• Installed awesome fan/light switch in 1st spare bedroom
• New Heat pump and Central A/C Unit
• New refrigerator
• Pantry doors in the kitchen
• Closet doors in the 1st Bedroom

I think that's everything! The great thing about this list is that I believe everything except the new Heat Pump/Central AC was done by myself. The big things I had a lot of help from my father-in-law who is a general handyman but also does drywall as his day job so that helps with the "oh well it can be patched" factor of messing up in-home repairs.