Brown Out, Red In

It was another busy weekend as I decided to take the entire weekend off from work to help Lawrence do a bunch of things around the house. I normally work on weekends, and it's not always easy to get the days off, but I got them and it payed off with lots of projects being worked on and some projects completed.

In the last blog entry I mentioned that we were getting a new, big, heavy, and expensive saw delivered to the house, and it finally came. It's amazing what that thing can do, and Lawrence uses it for cutting various types and sizes of wood for projects all over the house. The saw is located in the garage along with a smaller saw. I'm not sure what the difference is between them other than size, but I don't dare ask or I'll get "the stare". I can just tell you it's big, fairly loud, and thankfully it has retractable wheels on it so it can easily be moved around. Don't forget, we also have three other saws inside the house, including a router table, a "saws-all", which is a hand-held saw that is used to cut through just about anything, and of course the proverbial jigsaw. Yes, five saws total, and the neighbors probably wonder why it sounds like we're operating a sawmill in the garage.

In the middle of the living room floor sits the router table. We use this to create all the window, door, base and crown moldings for the entire house. The special bit spins at somewhere over 20,000 rpm and is extremely loud. It has an attachment on the back that allows the shop-vac hose to be connected to it to collect the sawdust, but when both of them are running at the same time, it's deafening. We both have to wear hearing protection when using them. We use some pre-fab moldings for around the doors and windows, but the base and crown moldings are made by us. We buy the raw lumber in various sizes, cut it to length, pass it through the router table three or four times, prime it, then apply a final coat of gloss white paint. The final product looks amazing. The hard part is cutting at an angle on the ends of the boards so they can be joined at 90-degree angles. It gets a little tricky, but with pen and paper in hand, Lawrence calculates it all out, and magically it works.

One good by-product of the saws is a large amount of sawdust, which is collected and dumped into one of our three compost bins in the backyard. Since the grass is growing so fast and has to be cut every weekend, we ran out of room in the first two bins, so off to Sam's Club for another one. Somehow, I have a feeling we're going to end up with an entire fence line full of compost bins.

All of the rooms in the house have been textured and painted, including both hallways, and all light fixtures and ceiling fans installed, as well as all wall plugs and wall switches replaced and covered. The master bath is untouched at this point except that we use the bathtub in the master to rinse out brushes, rollers, pans, buckets, and other painting items. That poor bathtub is now stained with a rainbow of colors that will be very difficult to scrub out. We might have to replace it completely. We did a little work in the guest bath by removing the toilet, which was interesting and somewhat gross, as well as the large mirror and accompanying ugly light fixture. We haven't textured it yet as there may be a small problem. When the previous owners decided to put up some awful dark blue wallpaper, they didn't use wallpaper paste. They used some kind of industrial glue that not only made it very difficult to remove the wallpaper, but now we have these random large glue trails all over the wall above the sinks. We might have to use some kind of large belt sander to remove it, so we just stopped at that point and moved on to other projects. We'll get to it eventually, and we're not looking forward to it.

Guest Bath (note glue on walls)

Master Bedroom

Kitchen

Living Room from Front Door (with router table and moldings)

Living Room from Fireplace (the red thing against the wall is the texture gun in it's stand)

In one of my previous posts I mentioned that we painted the two guest rooms, one being baby poop brown and the other a light green. After we did those rooms we decided to paint one wall in the living room, the same wall with the tan fireplace brick, brown as well. Now, we have way too much brown. I decided we need to repaint the brown guest room red, and red it is. So now, instead of baby poop brown, the room is "Velvety Merlot" as the label reads. It's a very dark red and is actually quite lovely. When we finally put up the bright white moldings and other items, it will really pop. I also had to go back and apply a second coat as the first coat streaked on me. My back is killing me, but it was worth the effort. One drawback to the red paint is I now have an abundant supply of said red paint all over my work jeans previously ruined during other projects, and now when we go to Home Depot or a local eatery for lunch, it looks like I either murdered someone or work in a slaughterhouse. No one speaks to us. I wonder why?

The Red Room (not as bright red as in the photo - actually quite dark)

The Green Room

(As for the above pictures, the ugly carpet has yet to be replaced, the tile in the kitchen has not been replaced, none of the moldings are up, and overall the place is a mess. We're working on it.)

Another new addition to all of this is my Mom's Honda Civic. About two weeks ago it was really getting hot outside and I didn't want Lawrence riding his bike in the heat and local bad traffic, so I went to my Mom's house and asked if I could use her little 1993 Honda Civic until I could afford a new car. Mom is 90 now and doesn't drive very much, and since my brother and sister live with her and do all the driving anyway, it wasn't a problem for me to use the car. Besides, with all the driving I do everyday, the Honda Pilot explodes my gasoline bill so the little Civic is a welcome gasoline sipper that has dropped my monthly fuel bill dramatically. It's a lot smaller than the Pilot, so even a Mini Cooper looks big next to me. I won't even talk about passing an 18-wheeler on the freeway.

We have had an ongoing problem of bad cell phone service at the house, and since that same signal also covers our data usage, streaming music was impossible. I decided it was time to install some Internet service, and after doing some comparison shopping decided to go with AT&T U-Verse. There were some initial problems getting it to work, but after a visit from our somewhat friendly AT&T field technician, it's up and running with amazing speeds. It doesn't help with phone calls, but who cares....we have music now, and it makes working a little more enjoyable.

We did the usual weekend duty of laundry while working around the house, so we're good for another week or two on that front.

We brought Rusty McNose to the house on Saturday so he could romp around the yard and have fun, but apparently he overdid it a bit as today he is very sore and can hardly stand up, and can barely use his right-front leg. He's getting older now and is quickly realizing he can't run around like a puppy anymore, so we're giving him some baby aspirin to help the stiffness and pain and he seems to feel a little better now. We still get a good wiggle of that big fluffy tail and a warm lick on the arm telling us everything is OK.

What's going to happen between now and the next update? I'm not real sure, but we're on the downhill slide of all of this and the place is looking amazing. We still have to install all the carpet, floor tile, window blinds, kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures, but the very distant light at the end of the tunnel, yet faint, still keeps us motivated.

Divas Don't Bark!

Sorry for the delay in the updates, but we have been very busy at the new house, and I'm happy to say that most of the rooms have been almost completed, with a few exceptions.

First, We have purchased and installed all the new ceiling fans and light fixtures for all the rooms, and there is color on all walls of all rooms except the two bathrooms. We haven't even started on those yet.

The master bedroom is now a dark Midnight Blue color that will look great with the white trim and blinds. The master bath will have a lighter blue color eventually. The master closet is being rebuilt by Lawrence as I write this. He ripped out all the poles, boards, shelves, etc. and is starting all over. I asked him if he had the plans for the closet drawn out and he said no....It's all in his head. I see.

The kitchen is now blue as well, and I was surprised with it when I got there after work one day. Our friend Stephanie came over and helped Lawrence paint and miraculously clean the entire kitchen! It looks great, but we still have a lot of cabinets to clean, repair and refinish. The original wood counter tops are still in place and will eventually be replaced with some kind of stone, but that hasn't been decided yet. The black refrigerator that came with the house will eventually be replaced with a stainless version, and a new stainless stove still needs to be purchased and installed, as well as a new dishwasher. We always hand wash and dry our dishes, so I'd rather put in a residential ice maker in the spot where the dishwasher is now, but that's still under discussion.

The breakfast nook has all paint applied and a new ceiling fixture, and it looks great.

The dining room has all paint on the walls and a new fixture as well. Fabulous.

In an earlier post I discussed the main living room and it's new light fixtures and the now dubbed "big ass fan" we installed, and it's all painted. Try to imagine these colors working together: light gray, brown, and blue. That's what you see in this room, and as weird as it sounds, it still kinda works. If anyone says "ewwwwww", I'll just use my standard line: "Normal is boring". Once we get furniture in the room, pictures on the wall, and other assorted crap all over the place, the colors won't be so noticeable, I hope.

Lawrence has replaced all the wall plates for the phone outlets, power outlets, light and fan switches, and cable outlets. Most of the air conditioning vents are replaced also. All in bright white, of course.

On the weekends, we do our laundry in the weird washer and dryer system, and it gives us a nice break to have to hang and fold things. Let me clarify that by saying I hang and fold things...Lawrence dumps everything in a basket and considers it done. I don't let him touch my clothes!

Rusty is still prancing around the yard driving the neighbor dogs crazy as they bark and bark and bark, and he ignores them. Divas don't bark.

We made another big purchase this week as we ordered a very large (and expensive) circular saw system from Home Depot, and it's so big and heavy that it has to be delivered by a truck! That 300+ pound behemoth probably wouldn't fit in my Honda, so for $100 extra, they'll deliver and hopefully help us set it up. It's being delivered later this week and we have yet to clear a spot in the garage for it. It will probably be a last minute scramble to make the clearing, but we'll get it done. It will be used for the master bedroom closet project currently underway, as well as all the base and crown moldings for the house, and whatever else Lawrence wants to dive into. There was some discussion of extending the back patio out a bit and putting up a lattice-style cover over it for shade, and possibly an outdoor ceiling fan for a cool breeze. Yes, he'll do it all himself. It's what he does.

Other than the three new appliances for the kitchen, we still need to purchase blinds, wood for the moldings, tile and carpet. I'm shoveling away as much as I can into savings in preparation for all of this, but it's a battle.

Lawrence has also been installing attic insulation as there was not very much up there to begin with, and in some areas, especially over the living room, none at all. It has made a big difference in the amount of time the air conditioner has to run, and since I pay the bills, I like that. He goes over early some mornings at the break of dawn to work in the attic as it gets very hot up there very quickly. To also help keep the attic a little cooler, Lawrence purchased a solar-powered roof vent that runs whenever the sun is up. It moves a lot of air and will help a lot. I plan on buying one or two more of those things to install later when we will eventually have to replace the roof. The roof has minor damage from past storms, but nothing serious, and it can wait a couple of years if need be. We still need to install all new gutters around the house, and we'll probably do that when we replace the roof. Lawrence wants to install a rainwater collection system that will collect water from the gutters and store it for all the watering needs on the outside of the house. I'm going to need a lot more money in the savings account for all of this!

The backyard looks good as Lawrence mows the grass about every other weekend, as well as uses our new electric trimmer. All the clippings are dumped into our two compost bins for future gardening use. There's a bunch of flowers and small trees planted, and even a tomato bush, but the birds ate all the tomatoes. We hope to have solved that problem as we have invested in a large bird bath and large bags of bird seed for the little tomato eaters. Somehow, birds have a way of letting all their bird buddies know that there is free food and a clean bath at our house as a large amount of birds of every shape, size and color dine and bathe at their leisure throughout the day. So now I'm not only having to feed myself, Lawrence and Rusty, I'm also having to feed all the damn birds within a 100 square mile area! My food bill is enormous, but at least I don't have to actually cook for the birds. At least, not yet.

We get asked all the time "when is the house-warming party"? Well, it's gonna be a while as we still have a lot to do. A few more months and we should be able to sleep, shower and cook there some of the time. I'm already working on party plans in my head, but I'm going to need some help. There will be lots of food, an open bar, and lots of good friends, so get ready! Well, maybe not right at this minute, but I'll give you plenty of time to prepare for the gala.

We Have Light! (and some color, too!)

Another action packed weekend at the new house, and we got a lot done.

Poor Rusty McNose, he got textured by his daddy again! While Lawrence was texturing the dining room and the front entrance, the dog once again walked by and got splattered, as well as brushed up against one of the textured walls, so this time he had texture on both ears, his snout, the top of his head, and along one side between his front and back leg. It was so bad this time we actually had to cut out some of the fur to get it all, but he's so fluffy anyway, no one will notice.

The two guest rooms and the study all have ceiling fans with lights now, and the living room has a big ceiling fan with new light fixtures on either side of it. This living room fan is 5'8" wide! The blades have a deep pitch to them so even on low, it moves a lot of air. It looks like an airplane propeller...very cool!

Lawrence climbed into the attic early on Saturday morning before it got hot outside to roll out 3 rolls of insulation in areas that had none at all. We can already tell a difference.

We finally got the garage door opener that came with the house working, even though it will eventually need to be redone as it was very poorly done the first time. We had to make arrangements for power and a switch in the garage to activate it. We also programmed the built in remote device in the Honda so Lawrence can take the actual garage door remote with him on the bicycle to get in and out of the garage. Because we got the garage door working, we had to also replace one of the locks on one of the doors leading into the house.

We still need to tape and prepare the kitchen and master bedroom for texture and paint, as well as both bathrooms.

That's it in a nutshell because I wanted to post some pictures of various things:

Here's the new living room fan and one of the fixtures. We were lighting it from directly below so that's why the shadow is so big.

Lawrence installing the fan. You get a good idea how big the fan is compared to him.

Blue tape and plastic everywhere. The place is a mess, but one day it will be beautiful!

Some of the beautiful flowers around the yard....

Baby Poop, Pea Soup, and a New Wardrobe!

I apologize for not updating in a while, but since I got a promotion at work and new days off, it has thrown our work schedule into disarray. The good news is that we (mostly Lawrence) have gotten a lot done in the past three weeks, and we can finally see some progress!

Most of the walls have been stripped, sanded and textured, but we still have a few rooms to go. The three guest rooms have been done, as well as the living room and the breakfast area. Today we applied our first paint with what turned out to be interesting choices of color. We used an online application from Behr Paint that allows you to see various colors on walls, ceilings, etc. We looked them over and decided on a kind of brown color for one guest room, and a slight green color for one of the others. We opened up the cans and the brown looked like liquid baby poop. Not good. We went ahead and applied it to the wall and after it dried, it didn't look too bad. We will have bright white trim and moldings on the ceilings and floor, as well as around the windows, so that will hopefully lighten it up a bit and give some good contrast.

On to the other room and our green paint. It looked like pea soup. Oops. We applied it and again, it didn't look too bad once it dried. We're hoping the white trim will do the same magic as with the baby poop room.

All of the ceilings in the house will be painted with a standard flat white paint specifically for ceilings. It will give good reflectivity for lighting and allow for contrast with the “interesting” colors. We have picked colors for the other rooms, but we might have to go back and rethink some of them.

I contacted a buddy of mine about the need for an electrician to replace our main breaker box outside. His ex-son-in-law was recommended, and he came out today and looked everything over. We bought all the parts at Home Depot (of course), and he will come back on Thursday and finish the work. He quoted me an excellent price that turns out to be about 1/3 of what I was expecting. Awesome!

Lawrence and I are in the process of penny-pinching as we try to save up enough to buy new carpet for the house. It's going to be between $3500 and $4000, and will be our last big expense, that is until we have to replace the roof, but that can wait a couple of years. We also need to purchase a new table saw so Lawrence can make our new moldings along with a few other items, and that is about $500. This house rehab stuff is expensive, but still cheaper than hiring a bunch of people to do it for us.

As I mentioned a few entries ago, we have wrought iron fencing across the front door and along one side of the house. It was tan in color, like everything else in and around this house, so we decided to change it to gloss black, and it looks amazing! Lawrence sanded and primed the fence since it had some rust on it, and the painting began. It took three days to paint that damn fence as it has a bunch or ornamentation on it like grapes and leaves and other stuff. It takes a small brush to get in all the nooks and crannies, but we finally did, but not before ruining a number of articles of clothing. One good pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts were sacrificed for the effort, but it was worth it since it turned out so well. I needed to update my very old wardrobe anyway...now I have an excuse. Look out Old Navy, I'm coming to see you, but not until we get new carpet and a table saw.

On the gardening front, we have purchased and planted a number of different pretty flowers with names I can't pronounce, a banana tree, a lemon tree, a lime tree, an orange tree, and the backyard is looking very colorful.

We also did an inventory of what we have already purchased in the way of various lighting fixtures and other electrical items, and made a list of what we still need to buy. It includes three more ceiling fans with lights, lights for both bathrooms, exhaust fans for both bathrooms, a couple of hallway lights, a few closet lights, and some nice large light fixtures for the kitchen and dining room.

I mentioned earlier that we will be installing molding in all the rooms, but we aren't going to buy pre-fab moldings. Lawrence is buying his own wood and will make them all himself. He has already made his own rolling wood platform for a ladder to stand on which allows someone (me) to push him around any room while he is texturing or painting the ceilings and tall walls and not have to climb down the ladder. It worked better than I thought it would, but he was confident all along. I could just see him and that ladder go tumbling to the floor, but it didn't. Pretty damn clever, this Lawrence fella!

On the weekends while we are working, we both do the laundry. Or should I say, I do the laundry. He is much too busy thinking of something clever to design and build to be bothered with laundry. Slave Boy Bill does the laundry, pushes him around on his ladder-mobile, drives him to Home Depot, brings him lunch, and whatever else The Master desires. It's all worth it so I don't have to climb on that movable ladder thingy.

Rusty McNose has been joining us on the weekends, and he loves the backyard. He gets good exercise and works himself up to a good nap. Which is good since it keeps him out of the way, most of the time. Last weekend he was watching Lawrence texture one of the rooms and promptly got sprayed with texture himself. Here's a reddish-brown dog with white texture firmly adhered to his fur. It looked like he had dandruff. He got a good brushing when we got home to get it out, so he didn't mind.

We still have a long way to go, but it's great to see some color on the walls, even if they are a little out of the ordinary. We now watch TV shows not necessarily for the storyline, but more for their decorating tips. Need some decorating ideas for your home? Watch Desperate Housewives. Fab-u-lous!

Let The Texturing Begin!

It was another busy week as Lawrence went over to the house every day after work. In fact, there hasn't been a day since we purchased the house in February that Lawrence hasn't been doing something at the house.

He finished coating and smoothing the walls and ceilings getting ready for texture. But before we started texturing, Lawrence wanted to build a stand to hold the texture gun upright. It's a weird shaped device that can only lay on it's side, that is until Lawrence built the stand. The stand makes it easy to fill the texture gun with the compound, which has to be mixed with water to the consistency of pancake batter so it will flow through the gun. There are different settings for different types of texture. We want what's called "orange peel", so Lawrence set up some cardboard in the garage to test the gun for the right spray pattern.

My project this weekend was to cover windows, outlets, switches and doors with either plastic or paper and tape it all up to prevent both texture and paint from getting on any of these objects. I got three of the rooms done, and it's a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Once we were ready, we moved the compressor to the hallway, plugged in the air line to the gun, filled the gun with texture, turned on some lights so we could see what we were doing, and off we went:

Being our first time to do any of this, there were a couple of small problems with thickness of the texture, too much in one spot, not enough in another, etc. About 5 minutes after spraying, I went through with a large flat metal scraper and "knocked down" the sprayed material. By the time we got to the second room we had it pretty well down, and overall it looks good! We may go through and do a second coat, but we'll wait until it all dries to see what else needs to be done.

Spraying the walls is easy, but the ceilings are very difficult since the sprayer doesn't like pointing very far up as it loses pressure.

The nasty carpet that is in the house was bad before, but now it's got lots of stuff in it from texture material, ceiling scrapings, and no telling what else. As planned, it will be the last thing changed before we move in. We have more rooms to texture, then all the painting, so it's going to get a lot worse.

We also went to Home Depot, as we seem to do every day, and looked at various types of molding. We're trying to decide what we will use on the ceiling, the floor, and possibly chair railings. We also need to start thinking about tile for various rooms. While we were there, we picked up some more plants to fill-in the backyard. Lawrence has been busy planting and digging. It's coming together, but just like the inside of the house, there's a lot more to do. We also picked up a new and larger birdbath.

A couple of loads of laundry and some cleaning up finishes the weekend. It's nice to see progress, even as slow as it is. Lawrence will continue to go to the house every day after work, and I'll be there next weekend.

Weekend Update - April 15, 2012

Things are progressing well at the new house as Lawrence has spent almost every waking moment over the past few weeks working on something. The biggest project he has undertaken, and is still working hard at it, is finishing the ceilings and walls. If you'll remember, all the ceilings had this thick texture that was sprayed on then moved around into a wave type pattern. Looked really bad. The walls were fine but had that old fashioned popcorn texture on them. I scraped most of the walls, Lawrence and I did the living room ceiling together, and he did all the other rooms by himself.

After that was done, Lawrence went and covered every inch of those ceilings with a smooth layer of joint compound, and is now going back and smoothing and sanding all of it. It's a major undertaking that has taken weeks to complete, and he is just about finished. I started taping plastic to all areas not to be textured or painted and hopefully I will be able to finish that project next weekend. There are still a few minor details to complete, but when we do, out comes the texture gun as well as Lawrence's new toy, a brand new professional paint spraying system. When it comes to tools and toys, he doesn't fool around!

My two big projects this weekend were cleaning out the garage of all the junk that needs to be thrown away and dragging it to the curb since tomorrow is heavy trash pickup day in our neighborhood. This included old ceiling fans, stove vent fan and light thingy, old closet poles, and just about anything else that needed to go. I also carried all the tin gutters that were removed from the house and stacked in the backyard against the fence. All of that is now at curbside as well. With Lawrence's help, we both removed the junky old gas stove that was in the kitchen and moved it to the curb also.

As we were finishing up with the stacking of junk, an ambitious old man came by in his pickup truck and started loading all the metal items for recycling. I had no problem with that, but there was a lot of metal on the curb and his pickup truck was already full. Surprisingly, he got every bit of it in that truck, including the stove on the back tailgate, and away he went. All that was left was a box of scrap wood and the closet poles. I was impressed.

Back to the taping of plastic in areas not needing texture or paint. Lawrence was using the 8 foot ladder in one of the bedrooms for his project, and the 12 foot ladder won't fit in the bedrooms, so off to Home Depot I went for yet another ladder. It's a 4-foot model, and that makes our current count of ladders at four. If you ever need a 4-foot, 6-foot, 8-foot, or a 16-foot extension ladder, we've got them all. When this is all done, I might have to start renting out tools, sprayers and ladders. We'll pay off that mortgage in no time!

Back inside the house, I finished up removing layers of wallpaper in all the rooms, including the kitchen as we prepare for texture and paint. Lawrence also did a load of laundry in our new washer and dryer. They are the weirdest machines I've ever seen, but they do a good job with the laundry.

Last weekend a friend of my family came by to help out with some electrical problems. He's a master electrician with over 40 years of experience, and he fixed everything that needed fixing, as well as solving a few mysteries of what wall switches went to what. He'll come back soon for a few more things. He also agreed that the main breaker box outside needs replacing but he can't do it since he is out of Austin and not licensed in Houston. He wrote down some important specifications of what we need to replace and I am on the hunt for a good electrician. The replacement of that breaker box is going to be expensive and crazy as we have to pull a permit from the City of Houston, have Reliant Energy come out and cut off power to the house, replace the box and do rewiring, have Reliant come back out and turn on the power, then have the city inspector come check it all out. I might need to start my rental service quicker than I expected.

A little further back we had a minor injury at the house, and it involved Rusty the dog. He was wandering around the backyard when he saw a neighbor dog, and he ran towards the wrought iron fence at a full gallop. He's not used to fences, so WHAM, his head went right through the bars and he got stuck briefly. He made a huge racket with a type of doggy scream, but luckily Lawrence was close by and helped him get out. He got a few scratches and they are healing well. Lawrence placed some big potted plants and bricks along the fence line to try and discourage Rusty from trying that again.

So, as you can see, we are progressing right along, and hopefully within a couple of more months we can start moving things over little by little. Lawrence wants to be in the house like right now and is about ready to set up a tent and sleeping bags in the middle of the living room floor. I keep saying it will be awhile mostly because we have some major expenses to cover like new carpet, blinds, a stove, all the paint, more furniture, etc. and it's a matter of money at this point. We get it, we spend it.

Patience, my friend. Patience.

Time Flies

It's been nearly a month since our last blog entry,..... my how time does fly..... blogging about what your doing when your mostly busy doing what your blogging about can be tricky to do, its hard for me to take the time to write, when all I want to do is work on the house for the most part. Hope you understand. I'll try to write more since Bill hasn't had the time of late to do it.

So what have I done for the past 30 days?.....

People told me it was going to be hard to do, and if I had to do it again, (scraping and smoothing the ceilings), I might seriously be looking for a new house to buy or ask for a discount from the seller. I'm looking forward to the day when this part is over and done with.

 After hand troweling nearly 8 boxes of pre-mixed joint compound, thats 28 gallons, or roughly 272 pounds,  I am nearly done smoothing out all the ceilings in all the rooms, (4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, diningroom, living room, breakfast nook, kitchen, walk-in closet, hallway & closet). I estimate that  Thursday, the initial work will be done, then I will check each ceiling and do any sanding of ridges and whatever to make it ready to be spray textured in the coming days...
It was not every single day that I worked on the ceilings mind you, but roughly every other day on average. A couple of times I cut the lawn, as the grass still grows, and weeds need to be sprayed with herbicide, then theres watering, and trying to plant some things in the back yard. Speaking of the back-yard, we now have 5 trees growing in it. one is a lemon tree, a mandarin orange tree, clementine orange tree, lime tree, and an elm tree. The Elm tree is Rusty's favorite tree, I've had it growing in a pot for about 10 years, now its in the ground proper,  just for him.....


More Breathing Room

One of several things I did to break the monotony of smoothing the ceiling was to install a second return air duct for the (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning) HVAC system. I had noticed the first time when I looked at it, that the amount of suction is so great, that on a new a/c filter, it warps the filter and it was almost enough pull to collapse the filter and render it useless.  Another thing is the amount of air coming thru the vents didnt seem like much, so with that in mind, and as luck would have it, I was easily able to double the air filter capacity by just cutting a second hole on the adjoining wall and thereby more air could flow thru the vents and the filters don't become so disfigured when it is running.

Hole cut in wall

I replaced the old return air duct with a new one also, old one pictured alongside new one in this photo. Walls need paint....I know...