Home Improvements

For the last few months, we’ve been working on some projects around the house. I need to take some “after” pictures of a few things before I post about them, but I’ll cover a few projects that I do have evidence of.

As far as Allie is concerned, a major improvement was the acquisition of a swing! While we still like to walk to the two neighborhood parks near our house, there is something special about having a swing right out back when you need one. When Allie is in a swing, she reaches a special level of zoned-out mellow bliss that needs to be seen to be believed. She gets that from me, I think. I still love to swing. Anyway, I was pleased as punch to find this swing at a neighborhood garage sale for $2 (complete with heavy-duty ropes!), so all Seth had to do was toss it up in the apple tree at the back of the yard, and we were in business!  (As you can see, we are still working on growing grass in the yard ... pictures and update about that to follow in later post… hopefully when I have something good and green to report.)

Our downstairs bathroom (home of my beloved bathtub on feet) was another project for us. A water leak in the wall (from a pipe that burst when it was un-winterized at inspection) necessitated opening up the wall and repairing damaged wood. We paid someone to do this; I didn’t get a great “before” shot, but here’s a “during” picture of the wall as it went back together (to the left).

We eventually got around to priming and painting everything and now we’re happy to have the bathroom in working order.

We’ve also been painting the front room (it only took us 5 tries to get the right color!), working on the backyard (we had a small deck/stairs and a brick patio installed, I threw together some landscaping, and we’re working on grass), fixing the kitchen ceiling (after having another water leak repaired), and rearranging furniture in the rest of the house. It’s been fun to get some momentum going on projects (rather than just feeling overwhelmed at the long to-do list when nothing is happening). I’ll try to post more pictures soon.

As you can see, Allie is a big help. Here we are, trying to get some control of our paper mess and filing system.