Happy Halloween

Stepped off the school bus like this!  Creepy cool.

More Sam Stuff

And this little gem of a book entitled Fall….

When I see a big leaf pile I will jump into it.

 

In the fall I like to jump into a leaf pile.

(Headfirst obviously)

 

I want to see a scarecrow. 

What if the scarecrow had a gun?

What if the scarecrow had two guns?

It will scare the crows!

 

I love it.

I Do Declare

this to be Crazy Hair Day.

House in the Works—Driveway

Gary is enjoying his new position at work very much, I am happy to say.  He recently had his first-in-years business travel.  We got along fine here at home without him for the week, not to say he wasn’t missed.  I, however, learned just because I am home and in charge, I maybe can not be trusted to make executive decisions. 

The gravel guy that came by last year with a deal for us involving the first half of our driveway stopped by again.  He was finishing up another job and had two loads of gravel he was offering for a good price that would finish out the rest of the drive back to the buildings.  He even threw in grading up the old and rollering the new.  Honestly, it was the idea of getting out all that old grass that sold me since I had fought it all summer long with spray and it still looked so bad.  Fifteen minutes of their equipment or me pulling it by hand for days?  Well, suffice it to say, I thought it was a good idea and gave him the go ahead. 

 

AFTER

Well, the other half of the executive branch was not happy with my decision once he got home since he had other plans that all the new gravel now makes tougher to accomplish.  But for the immediate effect, it looks so much better, right? 

Miscellaneous Catch Up

This is a cereal bowl that contains the sugar/miniscule crumb pieces that remained in the cereal box.  I had asked Grant, “Is the Cinnamon Toast Crunch gone?”  And Mr. Literal said, “No.” and put it right back in the pantry.  And not as a joke either.

With kids having open access to your camera, you never know just what’s gonna be captured.  Downloading the pictures almost always contains a fun surprise, like this.   What is this??

Caroline, telling a story.  Maybe about this time she and Sam got into a really bad fight.  Like this.

You can see they’re still getting plenty of mileage out of the old trampoline.

This was me with the camera, btw.  I couldn’t stop taking pics, trying to get a really cool one.  It might help if some day I get a real camera.  Love my simple camera, but you can’t do too much fancy stuff. 

   

See flying Sam in the corner?   Wheeee : )                ^^^

Hmm, what else do I have to share?  Well, I snapped this picture below while I was working concessions at Grant’s first school fling, a Friday night event for all the 6th graders.  What makes this funny is as I pulled into a parking spot outside the school as we were about to go in, he says, while wearing a neon green T, “Oh yeah, Mom? I have to wear blue tonight.”

Really, Grant, really?  I quickly assessed my options: 

Go back home. 

Go to Target. 

Go on like nothing was wrong. 

I went with Option C.

House in the Works—Deck Re-do

It took me about a whole day of playing with like 100 paint cards, holding them against the house in the bright sun part of the day, in the shadowed areas, up against the gutters, the outbuildings, etc., and finally I weeded them down to what I thought would look good around here.

 

A Fall Rainbow, if you will.

And our new shingles were called Autumn Blend.  See the connection?

The porch colors, basically a dark red and dark brown, were already picked and painted so those set the initial scheme.  Plus, that our house and fences are still Fake Cedar Orange made it so it had to be in there. 

Finally, that decision of the general color scheme was made, but then I was really struggling to decide what exactly to do for the deck out of these choices.  ‘Cause you know the screen porch which is now red and brown connects to the deck and then when we paint the whole house a new color… blah blah.  After whining about it maybe one time too many, Gary took it upon himself to politely choose for me which amounted to a random pointing to a this and a that.  And then there was no more discussion.  We went to town to get the paint/stain needed in the colors he had so thoughtfully pointed to, and I went to town getting this deck re-do party started.

When we were looking at this farm and considering buying it, it appeared everything was so nicely painted.  Yes, it was Fake Cedar Orange, but still it was a nice, new looking finish.  See what it was like a year ago June? 

Well, introduce one long snowy, icy winter and some other factor that I don’t really know about (watered down paint? wrong kind of stain?  improper prep?), and most of that stain was practically gone from all the deck flooring by the time spring came around.  Throw in a huge dog with huge claws living on this deck (despite the doggie condo sitting there nicely in the yard), and our deck was embarrassingly in need of serious work this whole summer: 

  

Yucky deck.  So we replaced a couple bad boards and I went over the whole thing with the power washer a couple of times and then applied a deck prep solution.  Then it was ready for stain!

 

So Gary’s dictate was for this:

And it turned out like this: 

   

This big wooden table is going but since Gary couldn’t lift for so many weeks, it’s stayed put and I basically painted around it.  I do love my new tablecloth.  Thanks, Mom!

 

It was so hard to stop since the paint was making such a huge improvement, but painting the rest of the fence and house will have to come next year.

And look at these gates!  We Scooter-proofed.

 

The design basically came out of a combination of what would add structural strength to the gate and what Scooter could not fit his head through.

I absolutely love them.  Except for the finicky latches… but the Scooter-proof part, I love them!

   

Unfortunately, Bob/Bruce did not get the stay off the deck memo. 

You know…confession time… I still do not know one cat from the other after more than a year, and Caroline just told me this one pictured is Bruce.  The only names I call them are Bobrooska or KitKit so I figure I’m covered.

Once I got going, I had second thoughts about such a light color for the floor boards, but I’d already put on two coats of the solid-color stain and I don’t think there is much more you can do to get rid of it other than to completely strip the stain (not me), so we will live with it and see how it fares.  It’s so light that it shows every little grain of shingle coating that comes down off the new roof, not to mention all the bits of dirt and tree debris.  I guess I will just keep the broom in hand. 

I don’t have that much other stuff to do.

The one upside of the floor color is now you can’t see the dog hair.  But he’s banned from the deck now anyway.  Btw, boy, was he hatin me for awhile. 

 

Headline:  Dog Gets the Boot

Family Takes Back Their Deck

I like it much better this way.

House in the Works—New Roof, Finally

We moved into this place Memorial Weekend 2010.  A terrible hail storm happened June 15, 2010.  I heard it was 2 1/4 inch hail stones.  Big!  We were out of town at the parents for the weekend so we didn’t witness it.  And once we got home, no damage was visible.

Well, fast forward about four months past that and we found out from our former neighbor that every house on our street at the Walton House was getting their roof replaced due to the hail damage from that storm.  We had a contractor come out and take a look and also asked him to take a look at our Rosie house.  We didn’t really think there was damage, but some of our neighbors in the Rosie neighborhood were getting new roofs, so maybe we should have it looked at. 

Oh yeah, we ended up needing one at the Rosie house, but not the Walton.  Maybe the damage at Walton was limited since we had just replaced the older half of the Walton house roof in May 2010, and yes, out of pocket as luck would have it.  Of course.

Well, we had quite a run-around getting things lined up between the contractor and State Farm with disputes over what type of shingles the original roof had and them being heavier, more expensive than the typical shingle and on and on, but finally fifteen months after the storm, we got a new roof.

   

A crew of siete was here for fourteen hours one 100 degree August day and a few more hours the next day to finish up.  The pitch is super steep, it was blazingly hot, but they got it done and I think it looks good. 

And I was the sole color picker on that one.  Autumn Blend, the shingle was called.  Tune in next time to see just how serendipitous that choice was.

House in the Works—Beginning with the Screen Porch

It was the first thing we’ve really done here at our new place, and by new, I mean we’ve lived here well over a year.  Until we sold our other house, though, we just didn’t feel we could jump whole-heartedly into any big projects here.  Heck, I didn’t even do any small projects, like painting walls, because it felt like everything hinged on making big future decisions about an addition which we were waiting to do until the other place sold, and I saw no point in painting the living room when it is possibly going to become dining room and then what color would I even want? 

We’ve kept the original Magic Eye wallpaper, the ceiling–level corner shelf thing (??), and the fancy

chandies as is this whole time.  So basically everything, but just living in it as it was the day we moved in as seen here, was on hold.  Until now.  Yippee!  Walton House sold, permission granted to progress.

The screen porch is a great area for us to spill over out of our tiny house for additional space.  When the weather is nice, it is nice.  I’d go as far as to say nearly ideal—the only thing is I just wish it was bigger.  Anywho, it was painted the same ol’ same ol’ that practically every other exterior surface on this whole farm was painted, and that is this color I not so warmly refer to as Fake Cedar Orange.

Since this back porch door is essentially our main door to the house, for both us and company, the porch floor gets lots of traffic.  That floor looked dirty

 

no matter how thoroughly I scrubbed it, so new paint had to happen.  I already had some porch floor paint around here that I had picked up as a bargain at Wal some time ago called Tile Red.  I decided to just go with that since it was handy the day I got a bug to start painting.  Our steps outside that you can see above were looking really rough, so I started with those.  At first stroke, I thought Oh no!  This is going to be a mistake.  My Tile Red was going on as Lipstick Pink.

Once it dried, though, and the kids came home from school and said, “Hey, Mom, you painted red?!,” I knew it was ok, in fact, maybe a good color choice.   Gary actually complimented me on the color.  Winning! and I didn’t even pore over paint chips and specifically choose it, so there you go.

Once I had the floor and doors red, I could totally visualize the trim in a dark brown. I got some Walnut Bark mixed up at Home Depot and painted the three sides of the tiny vertical slats of trim with a kids’ paint set paint brush and that took about forever.

After, see how the slats kinda just blend now?:

    

 

I wasn’t planning to paint this originally-exterior wall that the porch was built onto, with the lovely electric meter and telephone box as part of the wall decor, but you know how once you start these projects, all the old stuff looks even worse?  So I painted the wall with my trim color brown, including even the under-venting from the pre-porch house roof.  The only thing I didn’t paint was the porch ceiling itself which is of raw lumber and maybe I should have.  But I didn’t. 

I did scrub down all the screens inside and out and wow, those held a surprising amount of dirt.  It just looks so much better all the way around.  Nothing like having clear views!

And can I tell you, I have not yet been struck down dead for painting over the permanently mounted Ten Commandments plaque left by the previous owners  and removing the Jesus on a crucifix hanging over this door.  Now I’m still gonna do something creative with that little corner there, something beyond adding my tin star that says Howdy.

 

You might want to just glance quickly or you may get caught up in the Magic Eye wall.  Or get blinded by the glowing fancy chandy.

  

So, now I am loving the porch now even more than ever and I already loved it while it was Fake Cedar Orange and dingy as all get out.  Adding on the screen porch has to be one of the few smart moves ever done on this house, and, unfortunately, we haven’t found many others. 

Next:  roof and deck re-do.