Because guess what. When we're not at our actual Places of Employment, that's where we are. Working.
So before I regale you with photos of our most recent exciting adventures at The New House We're Not Living In, here's a picture of me and Nick at the boys' gymnastics class last night. (He sat out because he wasn't feeling great.)
(That's it for pictures of humans in this post.) (Sorry.)
When I got to the new-to-use house on Saturday, the first thing I did was take a flat-head screwdriver to the inserts in the garage door windows. I know lots of people like them, but I'm not one of them. At least, not the sunburst style.
Five minutes later, I had a nice cut on my finger, but all of the inserts were gone. Win! I'm already on antibiotics for the dual root canals I'd had unexpectedly the day before, so I figure they'll keep me from getting tetanus or whatever. Right?
The eventual plan is for all of this trim to be painted out in a brighter, fresher color. Budget will be the key concern there.
My next step on Saturday was taking down some extra doors and a couple of really damaged doors.
I removed one between the kitchen and the rear hallway, one between the dining room and den, one in the laundry room, and the one below, which was between the laundry room and the kitchen. DON'T ASK. I DON'T KNOW.
As I was finishing up with the doors, Grayson arrived with the kids and we started working in the backyard. Our main focus of the day was raking leaves and digging up concrete pavers that were buried all over the yard ... a Big Job, for real.
We filled up two cans at the street, plus put as many loose bags out there as we thought we could get away with -- without making the sanitation team mad.
We stacked a bunch more bags in the garage to carry out when we go over mid-week, after the first pickup (which was yesterday morning).
And we left a bunch in the yard to pick up and move up to the garage or driveway when the space is available.
My friend Lisa's son DJ helped us with all of this for a few hours ... he needed Community Service hours to satisfy a Student Council requirement. WE'RE OFFICIALLY SOMEONE'S COMMUNITY SERVICE PROJECT, INTERNET.
DJ, Nathaniel and Nick worked a good bit on all of the buried concrete pavers, and they did a good job pulling them up.
They dug up more than 40, but we know there are at least that many more out there left to go.
Part of my overall landscaping plan back there is to re-grade the whole yard, and I hope to get to reuse these.
Here are some of the ones they dug up and were able to carry down to the patio, getting them out of our way. I'm anxious to move all the others, too, because they're so dangerous to have sticking up out of the yard all over the place!
There are also a lot of these brickish border pieces lying around, and I'd like to move them to the front yard to border the beds up there.
They gathered maybe a third of those and got them stacked up for me while I was raking ... I think I can make good use of them.
At the moment there are still nice piles of woodchips all over the place, because we just had eight trees cut down. Most of those were dead, and those that weren't were deemed "liabilities" anyway ... they were leaning either toward our house or neighbors' homes and needed to go.
Even with all this work we put into the yard this week, it still looks like THIS:
Like a pretty bad "Before" picture. But I do have plans. Good ones. It's just gonna take us some time to get there.
And it'll help my budget if Grayson doesn't step through the attic floor into any more rooms.
It'll be super-terrific if I can keep the Repairs List down to things that were broken BEFORE we bought the place, rather than adding new things to it on a weekly basis.
Just a thought.
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