Weekend Update: 2 Week Edition!

I've been up to all kinds of things the last 2 weeks and I have yet to blog about the, lol. So I figured I would just combine it all into one mega post - lucky you :) I started off last weekend by finishing all the painting around my bay window to finish off my wall I was working on in the living room. I also changed out all 4 sets of blinds there. It sounds like a simple thing, but it was seriously a lot of work - there will be a separate post about that later.

Once the window was done, the only thing left before moving the furniture back was to change out the old light sockets. The sockets all over my house are not only yicky cream colored, but most of them have been painted on or all scratched up as well - no so pretty. So, I changed them out:

Two of those are actual plugs, the other is just a plain cover. Originally there was a large cable just in a knot and sticking out of the wall. We still have no idea what type of cables they were - it wasn't tv cable or a phone line - so we just pushed it back into the wall and covered it with a plain cover. Now it looks great! No more big hole!

After completing those sockets, I was on a roll and continued with more sockets upstairs. Out bedroom has been painted since before we moved in, but the switches and whatnot have remained old and without covers ever since - which meant there were big dark holes in the wall everywhere. So, I changed out 2 light switches:

As well as covering one with a plain cover (like in the living room) and 5 double plugs. One of the plugs was a home-done install that tapped into the switch for the closet light. It was really difficult to do (the box wasn't mounted right so it kept pushing into the wall as I screwed into it), and on top of that they cut the hole for the box too wide. A normal plate cover just wouldn't hack it. I ended up having to go to Lowe's and buy an extra large cover. Here is the difference:

Quite a difference, huh?(sorry for the crappy photos) Of course that extra large plat was double the price, but they are really cheap anyway so oh well :) After the sockets I finally hung something on the wall in there!

So that was one weekend down and I was definitely pleased with my progress :) This past weekend I decided to keep the momentum going. I've been putting off painting my vent covers for the living room ever since we moved in. It's been on my list and all, but the weather here just hasn't permitted much outdoor spray painting.

 So I finally buckled down and decided I've had holes in my nice finished walls long enough and painted them :) I started with 2 coats of Rustoleum Metal Primer in White, then finished off with 2 coats of Rustoleum Spray Paint in Semi-Gloss White. I went with semi-gloss to match the trim in the room and it worked great. I even bought new screws and painted the tops white to match!

This is my intake vent cover in its permanent spot - directly next to the tv so we see it all the time. It is SOOOO nice to not see a giant hole into the air conditioner cabinet! While I was in there I also replaced that plug too :)

To install the vent cover I had to move the couch and get the ladder in there (the vent is about 12 feet up). While I had the couch moved I decided to change that plug as well :)

And here is my vent cover now :) Isn't it great?! lol Seriously if someone had told me I would be this excited about vent covers one day, I would have said they were crazy. But there is no denying it - I'm ecstatic with how they look. I was also inspired to finally hang this big metal wall art. I bought it at Target at least 5 months ago when it was half price in the clearance isle. It seemed huge in the store and even around my house before I hung it, but look how small it looks on that huge wall, lol. That just goes to show you how big that wall really is. I can't wait to get actual pictures up there around it.

The best part about completing all these little things in the living room is that they were literally the finishing touches in their areas. I can now look at a totally finished section of my house :) It's a great feeling.

Weekend Update: Baking Bonanza!

I ended up in a serious cooking mood on Saturday when I came home from work. I ended up going by the local produce shop and 2 grocery stores to get some of the ingredients I needed and then I just went to the kitchen and got to work.

My first endeavor was chicken caprese. I cut 2 chicken breasts in half length-wise (to make them thinner - hopefully that makes sense, I'm not sure what the technical term for that is), then I dredged them in flour and pan fried them in a griddle pan. This made them nice and crispy outside but juicy inside. While the chicken was cooking, I boiled down 1/2 cup of balsamic vinegar to make a reduction. I served the chicken with the balsamic drizzled over top, sliced cherry tomatoes, torn fresh basil leaves, chunks of mozzarella cheese and corkscrew pasta. Of course I drizzled more balsamic over everything after I took the picture - I could drink that stuff. It was quite tasty if I do say so myself :)

At the same time as the chicken, I made a batch of Almond Poppy Seed Bread. We needed a nice thank you for one of our neighbors, so I figured this would be a nice treat :) And of course we got a loaf as well, so it's a win win. Delicious stuff.

Also while I was at it, I really wanted to make one of the dessert recipes we had at the Biergarten restaurant in Epcot. They serve this Berry Compote recipe in those little shot glasses and you can pour vanilla sauce on top. I just liked it plain and I've been craving it ever since. I'm seriously so glad I found the Epcot recipes on All Ears Net. I've used several of them and no joke, these are the actual recipes. I'm not sure how they get them, but they really are the real deal. This berry compote is no exception. It was fantastic - my nephew liked it so much he cried when we took it away from him, lol. For the juice, I used about 1 tbsp of orange juice and then filled the rest of the 1/2 cup with cran-apple juice. It was so good! I highly recommend it.

Monday was another day of baking. I've been wanting to make bread bowls and this soup for like 3 weeks now, so this was finally the day that it worked out. I made the French bread recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. This stuff took all day - I started it at 10am and didn't pull it out of the oven until 7:30pm. Technically it wasn't "finished" then since Julia Child says you should let the bread sit for 2 to 3 hours before you eat it - yeah, like that happened lol. It was really good nice and hot.

I filled the bread bowls with The Pioneer Woman's Baked Potato Soup which was also delicious. It was quite the tasty evening in our house :)

Mmm.... Check out that soup action...

I also decided to try my hand at making pastry dough again. I tried about a year ago and it was a dismal failure. It was dry and didn't rise at all and I pretty much swore off making it ever again. This time I followed the directions from Julia Child and I have to say I am much more hopeful about this time around. At least it looks correct at this point:

I had intended to make a tart using the berry compote as a filling, but that didn't happen. I was afraid that my kitchen was too hot for rolling out the dough and it would ruin it. So I will be making this tart experiment sometime in the next few days :)

I also did a lot of house work and fixing things, but the cooking was a good part of my weekend :) Every time I go to Epcot, I get the bug for fancy foods for a while after. I'm sure there will be more weekend updates similar to this one in the near future!

Weekend Update

Holy cow! I can''t believe it's been so long since I last post! Sorry for the radio silence, but it's been another of those weeks. I hope not to make this one as long as the last post, lol, but we shall see. You've been warned. At least I'm happier now than I was then.

So, all was well in Megan's world until August 10th. My husband called me at about 2 o'clock to tell me that our air conditioner had stopped working again. This time it just fizzled out - no lightning like last time. At first my plan was to just get a new hard start and install it when I got home since I had just watched the repairman replace one that Monday and I knew it was easy. It turns out that you can't just go to the hardware store and buy a hard start. No stores in our area had them except the ac repair places and they wouldn't just sell you the piece. Amazon had them, but it would be at least Tuesday before one would arrive; so we knew we just had to endure the heat.

This was taken at 9pm one night. It got up to 94 at the hottest!

This time, I called our home owner's insurance company. I told them about how lightning had struck our front yard a week before and an ac company came and did a bandaid style fix but it had officially died. I was seriously amazed at how nice and helpful they were! I was fully expecting to get the run around like you hear so often, especially since my claim was on an ac unit which is normally not covered, but since it was caused by storm damage they would cover it! I had the ac company salesperson out on Monday to give me prices to send the insurance company and the wheels were in motion. We also got to claim our electronics that the strike had affected, so our tv (the hdmi ports were shot), our wireless router, and our desktop computer were also covered under the same deductible. I was so surprised by all this - as a new homeowner I have never had to deal with insurance before and the only stories you actually hear about these situations are the bad ones, but I really have nothing but great things to say about our insurance company (which is Tower Hill just so you know).

We stayed in the house as long as we could, but Tuesday night it was officially too hot to even sleep there - and that was with the portable ac unit we installed in our bedroom running on full blast; the poor thing just couldn't compete with how hot the house was. So we've been staying at my in-laws' house since then. We would sleep at their house and then I would wake up early in the morning, drive home and get ready for work in the heat. I also would swing by on my way home from work just to get clothes and check on things.

After getting all the particulars sorted out about the ac, they got our new unit in and were able to install it yesterday! We used Colman AC and they did a fantastic job! We switched from the "water to air" unit that the house had back to "air to air", basically giving us what most everyone else has. The unit was more efficient, had a longer warranty, and came with a bigger rebate from the electric company so it was really a no brainer. It's a Carrier system too, which I've been told is very good.

Anyway, those poor guys from Colman arrived yesterday morning at 8:30 am and didn't leave until 5 pm! It was so hot and they had to do a lot of manual labor - it was hard for me to stay downstairs and I wasn't doing anything, so I seriously commend those men.

This is what our ac unit looked like before - it had been there since 1983 - yeah... It was pretty gross and the cabinet was just as bad. The unit was sitting on some 2x4s in the cabinet and all that moldy and nasty insulation was exposed.

Since our system didn't have an outside unit before (water to air are all in one unit), we had to clear out this area to put the compressor outside the kitchen window. This whole area was grown over and it had several pineapple plants too. We were sad to dig them up, but we are transplanting them to a different area, so hopefully they survive.

See our two half grown pineapples?! They came with the house lol.

Once they got the old unit out, they fixed up the cabinet. They custom cut that piece of plywood to go around the new air handler, insulated the whole thing and just generally cleaned it up. I was so excited when I came downstairs and saw this :)

After all is said and done, here is our new unit outside - it's huge! Our house is big enough that it needed a 5 ton unit and this beast is what makes it all work. The drain pipe was honestly a constant flow from suscking all the humidity out.

And this is the pièce de résistance - our air handler and new cabinet. I never would have thought I would describe an air conditioner as beautiful, but this looks beautiful to me. Just look at the different in the cabinet itself! It's all clean and insulated - the edges are caulked and have mastic over them so they look better. They also added a service shut off which we didn't have before. We could feel the difference within a few minutes just from the humidity leaving the house and I could have hugged those guys. They were so nice and did such a great job - I was absolutely thrilled yesterday when it was done. Even better, as they turned on the air for the first time I was opening that day's mail and found our checks from the insurance company! It was all in all a great day.

Until later...

My husband and I were watching tv last night and enjoying our cooling down house when our power shut off completely at 10 pm. There was no storm, no pop, no breakers tripped, and only our house was affected. Great. We called the power company and they sent out a technician. They arrived at 11pm and told us that our transformer was going bad on our pole - the pole that only supplied our hose - nice. So they replaced it last night, but the man said it takes a whole crew to do and it would take about 3 hours, so we grabbed our stuff again and headed to my in-laws' house again. We were not very happy at the time. I mean, really, what are the odds?! We didn't even get to cool the house down completely and then that happened. So our elation was dampened considerably. Thankfully, when I came home this morning to get ready the power was all on and the house was completely cooled down, so at least there's that.

In spite of the unfortunate occurrence last night, I am still happy with the whole experience. Was it pleasant? Absolutely not. But thanks to some great customer service and nice people, it was taken care of at very little cost to me. If lightning had never struck, the ac would have died someday anyway and I would have had to pay the $6,000.00 out of my own pocket. Also if the ac hadn't gone out, we never would have claimed the computer and the tv through our insurance because it wouldn't have been worth it after paying our $1,000.00 deductible. Since all these problems were caused by the lightning, they were all covered with just the one deductible payment. It really could not have worked out better for us this time and it feels nice to have finally caught a break on all the problems with our house. This has also renewed my vigor to get things done to improve the house. I will be painting more of the living room this week to start. I'm so glad it has all been taken care of and we don't have to worry about the ac anymore :)

Weekend Update From Hell

This last weekend was hard. To say it was tumultuous would be a bit of an understatement lol. I have come through it alive though, so I figured I could tell the tale here. Just to let you know - this will be a long one.

Saturday night, my husband called me on my way home from work (around 5 pm) to tell me that the storm that was going on had knocked out our power. He heard a loud lightning crack not far away, so he got up and unplugged everything (last time our hdmi ports on the tv got fried so now we are super careful). While he was going around and unplugging, he said that lightning struck again and very close to the house - so close that when it hit he could hear the light sockets sizzle and crack for a few seconds afterward. The rain had subsided slightly by the time I got home, and we went outside to see where the lightning hit. We were surprised and freaked out to say the least when we saw where it hit:

 This is the edge of the front planter, right outside our front door. From the front of the house, it would be here:

See that black circle? Yeah, lightning struck right there.

The crazy part is that it was so obvious except there was no scorching to anything but the roots of the grass. The pressure from the strike pushed all the surrounding grass away from the impact spot. Pretty scary. We were without power for a few hours, but everything came back on around 7:30 pm and we though all was good except our internet connection wouldn't work.

So Justin went to work and I watched a movie while knitting. Everything was fine until 12:05 am. The air conditioner started to grumble like it was trying to turn on, and then it just died off and all you could hear was the sound of a fan blowing in it and I smelled burning. I was afraid it might have sparked something, so I shut off all the breakers for the ac unit and waited about 15 minutes. When I tried to turn it back on after, it would just blow the fan - no cooling. I will confess, I was so sad that I broke down and cried. We knew that our ac unit wasn't going to last forever when we bought the house, but it honestly couldn't have happened at a worse time. Not only is it the absolute high heat of summer right now, but we just had to go through and re-budget this past week to try to make up for some bad financial stuff. I had a box fan, so I just slept with that on all night and I was ok. The house stayed fairly cool until about 11 am the next day due to the rainy weather, but it was so muggy and humid. 

One good thing is that my dad and I had already planned to install a portable air conditioner in our bedroom on Sunday before all this happened. He came over that morning and the two of us set to work at redneck-rigging this ac unit into our non-accepting window. Our windows are the old fashioned kind that you turn a crank and the little panes flip outward. All ac units are made to fit in the kind of windows that slide up and down, so the equipment that came with the unit wouldn't work. Instead, we devised our own system.

We took some plywood I had from our old attic and used two pieces to make it the right size, then we added another small plank I had hanging around for length and made it just slightly smaller than the size of the window. Then we measured the exhaust hose for the unit (also jerry-rigged - the old hose dry rotted so I bought a dryer hose which was slightly too small) and cut a 4" circle toward the bottom for the air to escape. Then we cut a notch for the window crank. After everything was cut and screwed together, we painted it white with 2 thick coats on each side and the edges to avoid rotting from moisture. Once the paint was dry, we took this stuff:

Rubberized stick on weather stripping (white to match) and not only stuck it on, but stapled it with a staple gun as well so it was very secure. We put this one all the sides so we could create a good seal around the window. Once all this was done, we went upstairs to put it in ... and it didn't fit! The window sill was actually crooked and not level when they originally made it. So, we had to rip off the weather stripping, cut it down a bit, reattach the stripping and try again. And it fit! Check it out:

This is the window when the curtain is drawn back. The hose is fed through the wood, stapled and clear duct taped on the outside, then secured with more duct tape on the inside. We did lots of layers of tape to make sure it held well - like 4 or 5 on each side. 

This is a close up of the weather stripping on the edge. The only place it didn't match up perfectly was around the crank, so I used more clear duct tape there to seal it better. 

The hose itself is also heavily duct taped to the exhaust opening on the unit - again like 4 or 5 layers of tape. We didn't want the pressure of the air blowing to make it come undone.

This is what it looks like in my room now :) The real kicker is that this window was already broken and screwed shut, so it could never open anyway. Now we have the bottom pane propped open with a nail and the others all closed, adding to our nice seal. The fact that the window was already broken ended up really helping us out, so it was meant to be :) So even though our house ac unit was kaput, we still had a nice cool bedroom and we were able to sleep comfortably.

My dad and I planned a few other projects to work on as well.  About 3 weeks ago my husband got a little heavy handed and pulled the fan light cord in our bedroom so hard it broke the spring and you could no longer pull the cord to turn the light on and off (he would never admit that he broke it though, so please don't mention it to him lol). The cord was stuck with the light on, so we could only have the fan on if the light was on also, meaning we couldn't have the fan running at night - a big nightmare for us as we are serious fan fans. So, we pulled the whole fan base apart and diagnosed the problem. My dad fidgeted with the pulley piece a bit (involving using a few knitting needles, lol, they are handy), but the spring was sprung and it just needed replacing. So I went to the hardware store and wouldn't you know they sell new ones? I never would have guessed you could just go buy a new "3 way split fan pull" and put it in. This is why dad's are great things :) We put it back together et voilà!

The pictures are crap, but they show that the fan now works with the lights on or off! Hizzah! This helped with our no ac situation as well, believe me.

The last thing my dad and I worked on has been a long time coming, and it's still not done. Our master bathroom is pretty much the joke of the house. It could literally fall off the side of the house and we wouldn't notice for a week or so - we never go in there. There is a hard clog that has made the room completely unusable for almost 2 months now. We haven't had the money for a plumber, so we've been trying things ourselves, all to no avail. My dad has tried with me before to break the clog and he was just as determined on Sunday, but alas it still remains stopped up. He was bummed, but we definitely know we will just have to call a plumber. At least we have 2 other bathrooms we can use.

Even though we don't use the room, we did solve another problem. Our shower was seriously made for midgets. The spot where the pipe exposes for the shower head seriously hit me at about my ear, so I would have had to crouch under the shower head in there and I'm only 5'7". My husband is 6'4", so you can see our problem. Happily, they make extenders for your shower head. They aren't easy to find and a lot of them are pretty expensive, but Ace Hardware had one for about $20 that gave us an additional 10", putting it at a normal height for average sized people.

 Here's a closeup of that extender:

It's pretty neat really. I did end up having to run tot he hardware store again for a new flange to accommodate the little pipe (the flange is the round thing that covers up the hole in the wall - I learned that Sunday lol), but other than that it went very smoothly. So we were able to strike 3 things off our to do list! Who cares that the bathroom still isn't working lol.

To top off all my crazy work in the morning, we shot a family portrait session at 4 pm and then went to my parent's house at 6:30 for a birthday party. It's was a crazy day. I seriously couldn't stay awake later in the night. But we definitely got a lot done :)

Monday morning, an AC technician came over to check things out. They were able to fit us in at 9 am - bless them! Seriously, it was so nice to get it looked at before the heat of the day. The burning smell was coming from a "hard start" which is some type of accessory that assists the compressor. The technician didn't think a new one would fix it, but he put one in just to rule that out as a possibility, and it cranked up! I wanted to cry I was so happy! He was amazed it worked. Apparently it's a bad sign that our unit has to have one of these to work - they are supposed to work without them; so we know it won't be long before we have to replace the whole thing. But at least we didn't have to replace it right now! Now we have time to set some money aside. The only other bad thing was that it turned out our  internet issue was that our router is fried, so we had to order a new one. It was more money spent, but at least it gets here today and the problem will be solved :)

So, my crazed weekend turned out ok in the end. We even went out to dinner to celebrate - and paid with gift cards, of course :) - and we watched Warm Bodies finally (it was awesome and the soundtrack was great!) and I worked on my giraffe a bit (he's really close to being finished!). It was emotional to say the least, but it all came out well. The events of this weekend really brought me to a realization about our relationship to our house. When we first bought it, I was very gung-ho and accomplishing things left and right and I was really happy with my house. Once we moved in, we kind of "gave ourselves a break", which turned into months of not doing much fixing up around the house. I mean, I still don't have any doors on my kitchen cabinets! I never got them painted! Yeah, I'm kind of ashamed to admit that. The sad part is that both my husband and I have become really dejected with the house over the last few months. Since we haven't been making it nicer, all we get to see are all the things breaking and feeling like we made a huge mistake buying this house. So I have resolved to be better about it all. I am going to focus on one room at a time - another problem solved there since I was working on several rooms at once, making it impossible to see any progress at all in any of them - and I will work on it until there is a big improvement before moving onto the next. The kitchen cabinets will be the first one I get done. I will start painting the doors this week - and you all will be my wardens! I will be accountable on the blog. So be prepared to see a lot less animal making and much more house and diy posts :)

Thanks for reading this far, and I am excited to show my progress in the next few weeks!

Weekend Update

If things like mending bore you, you will not like this post :) Just a warning.

So this weekend was spent doing lots of random little things around the house. I spent a good deal of time knitting, but got a little bored with it and decided to branch out. I have a good size pile of clothes that need mending or altering, so I picked these 3 to tackle.

The skirt with the circles I wear a lot, but the seam at the zipper was coming undone (to the point it was a serious nuisance to zip and unzip). The purple blouse had several of the bows that had fallen off. Also the black skirt had a large section of the blind hem that came undone in the front and was driving me crazy. All of these problems could be fixed with just a little hand sewing, so I just hit the bullet and went for it.

I started with the purple shirt. I love this blouse, but seriously haven't worn it in about 2 years because a section of the bows on the bottom came off. So I repositioned them all so they looked good(not as easy as it sounds) and sewed them back on. I noticed how all the thread that was holding the bows on was getting pretty loose, so I went ahead and stitched them all to make them more secure. I also saw that the back button was about to fall off, so I stitched it up too. Then I cut out the tag because it was very sharp on the edge and always drove me nuts. Now I can finally wear it again!

My next victim was the black knit skirt. This has been my go-to black skirt for a while now and as such has gotten a lot of wear. This caused the blind hem to come loose across more than half of the front edge. It seriously drove me crazy, but I wore it anyway. No more! I did the best hand picked blind hem I could manage on this thick knit and was quite satisfied. You can see the new stitches just a bit if you look right at it, but this fabric was just too difficult to make it completely invisible. I'm happy with the results.

Once I finished the hem, I saw that the end of the zipper was starting to pull free from the stitches. This means that I've been wearing it and it looked like my butt was too big and was splitting the seam. Not a fun realization. So I just stitched the seam together to reinforce it - good as new :) This skirt also had a date with the clothing shaver - it's so comfy but pills like crazy when put in the washer. Now it's ready to wear and looks so much better than before.

My final project was the zipper seam on this circle pattern skirt. I started my sewing the seam back together so I could actually zip it without having to push the zipper base in with my fingers while pulling it straight. This was no easy feat with the lining. It wasn't hard per s&w, just cumbersome.

Once the zipper was secure, I saw that the lining was pulling apart below the base of the zipper too, so I stitched that up too. I used the same black thread, but it's the lining and no one will see it so I seriously don't care.

With just those few simple repairs, about an hour later I had 3 new pieces to add back into the rotation :) I think with today's disposable mindset, most people would have just thrown these away, but I knew they could be fixed and it was well worth the little time it took. Now to just tackle the rest of the stack :)

On Monday, I knew I needed to get going with using up a box full of fresh GA peaches we got, so I made 2 batches of freezer jam. This will replenish our supply and I can hardly wait til it sets up and we can eat it!

So those are just a few things I marked off my list. Did you tackle any long-awaited projects this weekend?

Weekend Update: Hanging and Mowing

Aside from my big time blog reno I did this weekend, I also got quite a few things done around the house. I have a deadline looming so I decided to finally get somethings hung up :) I started with my sewing room.

I am constantly wonding what time it is while I'm in there and I look up instinctively ... to see no clock. This weekend I fixed that :) Target had this simple clock on sale for $6.29, so I snatched it up. I hung it next to the closet door so close to the center of the room. I also put my fancy initial on the wall! Yay! My room is looking like someone lives there now.

I hinted last week that there was something else to hang up but Ikea shorted me on esome screws. Well, they popped them in the mail to me and they just arrived yesterday :) I couldn't wait to open the package and hang this baby up! This is the Fintorp rail series and I chose the basket and two little buckets to hang on it. I put it just above my cutting table so it will come in very handy for pens and tracing wheels I'm sure.

A friend of mine was cleaning out her storage unit a few weeks ago and gave me 3 of these drawer units (thanks, Tatia!). They've been sitting in my garage blocking the walkway ever since and I finally grabbed my husband and got him to help me carry them upstairs. For now there is one in each extra room upstairs, but that will likely change. My sewing room may need one more - he he. I filled the one that's already in there with yarn that has been in plastic bags until now. It's so neat and organized! Love it!

The downstairs bathroom has been the one we shower in and use the most since we're redoing so much in the other two. There is a towel bar on the wall, but it's all the way on the other side of the room, so when you shower you had to set the towel in the sink to be able to reach it when you get out. This is not convenient and drove me crazy, so we got this little hook that is nicely placed right at the shower entrance :) I plan on painting it white to match the other fixtures in the room, but it's been so humid lately and I didn't want to spray paint to bubble. So, I hung it up :) I'll just take it down to paint it later. Which brings us to the other side of the bathroom ...

We have a mirror! Oh, happy day! lol We haven't had a mirror up in this bathroom since I painted it ... which was before we moved in. It's such a small space that it was really difficult to find one narrow enough that still looked good. I just wandered by this one in Target yesterday and it was only $20, so I grabbed it and it worked great. Also the rounded edges tie into the circles on the shower curtain. I'm just so happy to have something up! Now if I can just change out those light fixtures...

After hanging all that, doing laundry, dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and organizing the bedroom, I scraped caulk in the pink bathroom. My goal is to make the room at least functional, so redoing the caulking is a big part of that. Problem is - the whole room has tile up the walls. That's a lot of caulk! lol So, now my knuckles are all bruised and cut up but I did the whole shower and am rounding over to the sink area now.

Front yard, Back yard, Far Side yard

While I cleaned and hung things up inside, my husband worked outside. And boy, did he work! I mowed most of the front yard on Sunday, but we ran out of gas. Not only did he finish the front and side yard, he also attacked the mini oak tree forest that was our back yard. Honestly, the back yard was just inaccessible before. You could technically walk through it, but you didn't want to. There were more oak trees than grass (from all the big oak trees) and you certainly couldn't do anything back there. Now it looks like someone lives here :) I can't wait to get those big trees out of there and actually be able to do something with our back yard! 

So, that's what I've been up to. Do anything fun this weekend?