A little of this and a little of that…

It has been pretty busy around here, yet nothing seems to have been completed. Yikes! We have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks doing things other than working on the house. That’s a good thing, but it only leaves small windows to make progress on a project. And by ‘a project’ I mean approximately seven.

No, really.

We are in one of those vicious cycles where you keep starting stuff and never finishing the old stuff :-/

Let’s run through said projects shall we?

Shop:

We found carpenter ants in the shop while The Engineer was working on the well pump. You see, we have a well that we want to use for irrigation and The Engineer was working on it and needed some electrical juice. So we took some of the outlets off in the shop to borrow power while we were testing the pump and low and behold there was a carpenter and nest back there. Needless to say, extermination shot to the top of the list. We emptied the entire shop and pulled off some wall boards and part of the floor to see if we could get all the nest areas. We knew we wouldn't get all of them so we bombed the shop. Twice. No mercy over here. We then reloaded the shop and organized it while doing so. It is so. much. better. Now we don’t have carpenter ants crawling all over the shop. Who would have thought? I think this one of the only projects as of late that we've actually completed. Heh…

Irrigation Pump:

If you didn't guess, The Engineer has been working on the irrigation pump. It has been a bit of a pain and since we suspended work for the shop project it has been on hold. We’ll get back to it soon though.

It looks absolutely awful now, but someday I will look back at this picture and remember how far it has come. Until then...I try not to look that way. 

Table Upcycle:

Do you remember this guy (the second table in the post)? I started working on it a while ago but it also stalled when the shop took all our attention. It is coming along nicely and I have most of the parts I need to put it together. I just need to finish sanding it and start the finishing work. I’ll put a post together when I get the table together…whenever that is. Not on the top of the list at the moment.

Built-in Shelf:

We wanted a built in shelf in our bedroom by the door. We bought said shelf (aka bare wood plank) and brackets and needed to stain the shelf. I used some left over stain we had and once I finished the first coat we realized it was way too red for us. 

So I sanded that all off one day when I had the sander out for the table. It’s basically back to square one. I need some creative inspiration to finish that.

Water Softener:

We’re installing a water softener because our water is as hard as steel. But really, it’s pretty rough. We were going to install it outside and put it in a little shelter but we just felt that it would last longer inside. The plan was to pull the washer and dryer out a little bit and sneak it in behind them in the laundry closet. We then realized that the water comes into the complete opposite side of the house meaning a huge cost in pipes to get all the way over there. We are now debating putting it in the closet in our guest room and building a little closet inside a closet for it.

Anyway, before we decided to switch that we ripped up the floor in the laundry room and cut a hole to get access to the crawl space below to tie the piping for the water softener in. No worries though, we actually needed to get down there anyway to repair a leak. So we didn't rip that all up for nothing. And by we I mean The Engineer. J

Leak Repair:

Sooo The Engineer got in the ridiculously small space under the laundry room and fixed our leak. That is actually done now. Woot!! He worked on ripping up the rest of the linoleum (couldn't be happier about that), sanding the floor, and semi-permanently patching the hole last night and should finish today.

Re-flooring the Laundry Room:

Since we ripped up the floor in the laundry room, we need a new one! I wanted those simple vinyl stick-on tiles since it’s just a closet and with the washer and dryer in there you only see a 1-foot strip of floor in the front. I just didn't see the need to spend more money on it. We got super lucky when a neighbor was cleaning out their garage and had 4 boxes of those vinyl stick-on tiles that they didn't want anymore! Free = wonderful! We have it on the books to get the tile down this week and put the laundry room back together. Which is much needed because we have a growing mountain of laundry.

Painting the Sunroom:

The sunroom has yet to be anything other than a storage room. I got some items for it for my birthday; a rug, desk, and cute little lamp that The Engineer arranged oh so cutely for me...

And we finally bought a love seat for the room. 

The main hold off was/is the wall. Most of the room consists of beautiful floor to ceiling windows. The back of the room, however, is plybead plywood panel that is plain wood. And I don’t like it. 

It is the same stuff that was in our front entry that I painted white and now love. 

I’m doing the exact same thing in the sunroom and can’t wait to see how the white will pop against the brick floor. I finished priming it last night so now it needs two coats of paint and we can set up the sun room!!! Can. Not. Wait!!! Post on that before and after coming sometime after that room is finished.

Fixing the Shed:

Somewhere in the middle of all this we did some work to the shed. The Engineer started cleaning the roof, which desperately needed it and was all too noticeable after we trimmed the trees above it. He realized that the trim was actually hollow and was housing a bit of…organic matter. As in 10 years’ worth of leaves, dirt, bugs, mud…you name it, it was in there. On that particular day I recall that I was doing the trim work in the sunroom and when I realized the magnitude of the problem with the shed, I abandoned it to help The Engineer tackle it. We took all the trim off and I was happily battling carpenter ants as we did. We were deep cleaning everything as we went and it got a bit late. As we were cleaning up I found the mecca of the carpenter and nest and terminated it. J It’s the small victories. Anyway, we haven’t gotten back to the shed yet. We need to finish cleaning the trim and put it back on. We are then going to clear out the entire shed and bomb it for bugs, maybe twice for good measure. Before we load it back up, we are going to move it. That’s right I said we are moving it. It sits a good 8 feet from the fence and there is no reason for that. It is just wasted space back there. So we want to put it maybe 2 feet from the fence so we just have a little access walkway and gain some 6 feet of yard out of it. It seems like a small thing for such a task, but we both believe it will be worth it. One more thing on the list :)

Table Build:

When we were cleaning out the shop we found a small counter top. Just the top. I want to build a base for it so it can be used. This isn't something I've started so it’s not fair to include it on the ongoing project list, but it is on my mind.

So in case you lost count, excluding the last table mentioned, that is actually 9 projects in the works…two of which that are actually finished. Don’t worry, we've set aside some time in the coming weeks to get some of this stuff wrapped up.

That’s what’s been going on over here, any lingering projects in your house?