7 Days and 7 Nights

Painting is not easy; I would add it to my list of things I don’t like doing but, to be honest, painting our house was extremely satisfying. Why, you crazy person, one might ask. Well, I’ll explain. One, our house paint was really trashed and two, it was our first big project. I was way too excited to see the outcome, so we powered through this beast of a project in a week with smiles on our faces.

Here is what we did: wash, scrape, sand, prime, caulk, prime, paint, paint, paint, paint. And voila!

Before:

After

Miracle Product: Powdered Graphite Lubricant

It is amazing what this product will do for a stubborn lock.  Possibly the best $3 I've ever spent.

Let There Be Light

The previous owners were kind enough to take this ugly light out of the house, saving me the trouble of throwing it away:

We replaced the gaping hole with the light below, which looks pretty good and required all of a $10 investment.

I will admit, the LED light bulbs I installed in it did cost more than $10 each, but they do use a fraction of the energy of an incandescent bulb, they don't contain mercury like a CFL and they will allegedly last ~23 years.

Cabinet Conundrum

We have a this cabinet that stands over the toilet tank and we wanted to put it in the master bath.  Unfortunately the legs have a cross-bar that hit the oddly placed, toilet water supply valve.  A couple minutes with the saber saw fixed the problem, and gave a custom look.

Cross-Bar

Modified Cross-Bar.  Note the perfect radii, done completely by eye.

Success!  You can also see what the room looks like without the second TP holder.

A Little Lower

The previous owners thought installing a satellite dish right on the back of the house was a good idea.  Given that I plan to never pay for television programming, it doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Before

I left some of the wiring in case I ever do break down and pay for TV.

After

Garage Evolution

This is what our garage looked like after moving day.

This is the amazing set of shelves I made from four milk crates and some extra boards from out street bed (a bunk bed we found on the street and are using the bottom half in our office).  I figured adding zip ties to hold everything together counts as being "earthquake safe."

These two pictures show the garage after being organized with my sweet shelves.  Still room for a car!

This picture is the latest iteration of the garage.  We bought the two metal shelving units and then connected them with 2x4s and plywood to create an eight foot work bench and another shelf below it.  It is a great solution, and I challenge you to find a better garage storage system for less than or equal to the $235 this one cost.

Things are still a little cluttered, but we're working on that.

Another fun thing in this picture is the very manual reel mower that my parents came upon quite some time ago and I demanded they save it for me.  It is ridiculously rusty, yet cuts grass like a champ.

Here is the garage when it was fresh and clean.  The hoodlums you see are my Dad and Uncle Mike who visited for the weekend and helped with all sorts of great projects.  You will notice the workbench is rock solid.

We are the Greatest Neighbors Ever (The Story of a Gate)

 Before

So let me start with some background.  Our house has a pretty narrow "side yard" on both sides, which are basically just concrete walkways.  One side has a gate, while the other side (the side featured in this post) had a fixed fence.  Both the gate and the fence are sloppily painted bright white, which matches pretty much nothing.  My preference is for wooden fences and gates to be left natural wood colored.

I decided I want a gate on both sides so that I can store my trash cans out of sight.  They have been kept in front of this house for who knows how long.  And that looks trashy, low-class and lazy.

The driveway side of the house had the gate.  I anticipate this being used as a walkway fairly frequently, and it is much too narrow to store the trash cans and still function as a gate, so I needed to create a gate on the other side of the house, where I don't think we will walk so much, therefore it isn't a big deal if the garbage cans take up most of the space.

So we need a gate, and to kill the awful white fence.

It turns out this was an "Inception" fence.  When I took down the first set of boards, I discovered they were build atop the old rotting/termite infested boards (explaining the termites in the house), so we had a fence inside a fence.

Since I'm a cheapskate, I wanted to reuse the newer old boards.  That required a little work with Chrissy's birthday present, the belt sander.

Completed boards.

Demo complete.  Le gap.

Working hard, with cold beer.  This was also the first use of my Black Friday table saw.  Worked like a charm (after 3 hours of assembly and countless swear words).  My brother, David, came over to help out, and drink my beer.

 I made David work while I looked cool with power tools.

Gate frame completed and hung.

Well hung.

It opens...after we did a little adjusting.

Final board added.  You can also see the work Chrissy did with the paint scraper.

Quite an improvement, not only with the look of the fence/gate, but also in removing the garbage cans from the front of our house.  You can see why we are great neighbors--we are making our property nicer for our neighbors to look at, and probably increasing their property values.

Now I just need to talk to my neighbors about hiding their trash cans, which you can clearly see in many of these photos.  I'm sure that will go well.