It gets worse before it gets better

Before I get on to today's details, let me take a moment to note that this is our 200th post! Pretty amazing. I had no idea we'd be able to keep it going for this long.

Now on to our regularly scheduled program. The problem with any major project - home repair or not - is that often it take a while to come together. And it usually hits bottom before getting better. We finally decided to tackle the last bedroom in the house (or technically the "not-bedroom" according to the jerk appraiser a few years ago) - what was evidently one of the kid's rooms (complete with height measurements drawn on the wall). For the last few years, it's just been storing random furniture that didn't otherwise have a place. Time for an upgrade.

It didn't look bad but it just wasn't our style. But of course with the prep and painting, it was going to look awful.

First, as we have done in every other painting job in the house, we took off all the switch plates and cleaned down the walls with TSP-PF cleaner. That's trisodium phosphate-phosphate free, to you. And don't even get me started on how name something that includes the fact that it does not, in fact, have the main ingredient in it, which is like milk-free milk or something. But it's better for the environment and still works pretty well. While getting up close and personal with the walls while scrubbing them, we noticed they were in pretty bad shape - including staples everywhere and pock-marked drywall.

Once the walls were clean, we went back around to all those messed up areas, pulling out staples, nails, etc.Then it was time to spackle the damage and calk the edges where there were cracks in the walls. (Of course we thought we had done a thorough job but when we started painting, we noticed new spots that we had not caught the first time - some we spackled and some we ignored.)

Then it was time to set up for the painting. Isn't the room looking beautiful?

But we're nothing if not quick and (more or less) efficient painters. A day later, the yellow was almost gone! Thank you, primer. And this is the last yellow in the house! (For anyone who remembers the early days of this place, almost every room was yellow: the office and main bathroom, the living room, the upstairs hallway.)

So it may be a mess, but at least we are just about rid of the yellow. Stay tuned for our big color reveal.

Undetectable Motion, Etc.

I mentioned last month when we put up our breezeway ceiling fan that we were gathering electrical projects that might require professional assistance. There was one more we attempted to do ourselves before giving up and calling in the experts. We have a security light at the back of our house that has never worked.

We don't really anticipate using it much, but it would be nice to turn on for parties and, you know, maybe scare away potential robbers. The point was that it was there but non-responsive, so we wanted to know what was up with the electricity?

The good news is that it is strategically placed to be accessible from the bathroom and side bedroom windows, so no scary ladders were necessary for us to take a closer look. From the bathroom, we could see the switches and tried turning them to every possible variation. We thought we had fooled the system to believe it was dark out but, just in case, we also tried at night. Nothing worked.

The only obvious part we could fix was the lightbulbs. And, conveniently, we just happened to have some. Unfortunately, that didn't get us very far - still no lights.

Funny enough, we actually own a new motion sensor light kit - well, an old-new kit that my parents gave us when we moved in. It's pretty much identical to what's already there. But the problem is that we don't have a clue which circuit to turn off and we suspect that to really get access to the wires, we would need to get at at the light from outside the house on a ladder. Time for a professional estimate.

The electrician came to take a look and confirmed that the sensor was dead but that we have electricity to the right place. He explained that any lamp we would buy at Home Depot or Lowes would only be guaranteed for 90 days. His lamp would be guaranteed for 5 years. According to the estimate his company provided, the lamp itself would cost $110 plus installation would bring the price to $325. Our electrician also told me, "off the record," that since we were repeat customers he might be able to knock the price down a little. He did mention that it would require ladder access from the back of the house, which is pretty high and scary. However, since this is a light we have never used and will never miss, we're on the fence as to whether it's worth it.

The second project we wanted an estimate on will be a tad more destructive. Somewhere in our lawn and garden escapades, we must have severed the line that runs from the house to our lamppost. One day it worked, and another day, it didn't. We had come across the wire before, just a flimsy white rubber-coated wire, and thought we knew well enough to avoid it. Obviously somewhere, we missed.

The electrician confirmed that we had power at the light switch but none to the post itself, meaning that the connection got lost somewhere along the way. We reasoned that if we did most of the grunt work of digging up the wire (and reburying it), that we would save a lot in labor cost. The electrician would run a line inside a PVC pipe, making it a lot more difficult to cut in the future. He'd also add a plug at the base of the post, which would be nice for stringing up holiday lights or anything else we might want to plug in. So minus all the cost of dealing with the trench, this would cost us about $380. If we get it done at all, we will wait until fall after the grass is mostly dead. No sense in digging up all our precious lawn work now.

So now we have the plan and we just have to decide if the price is worth it. What do you think?

Third Time's a Charm

The light fixtures in our basement are just exposed bulbs that screw directly into the ceiling junction box.

This has worked just fine for years. Until a few weeks ago when D, swinging his bike up over his shoulder to take outside, whacked the bulb and it shattered. Right on top of his head. It was a CFL bulb. Filled with mercury powder. So yeah, not so great. After dust-mopping, vacuuming, showering, and checking for symptoms of mercury poisoning, he decided to take action. After hunting around Home Depot for a while, no thanks to some very unhelpful employees, I found these:

Light bulb cages! And for only about $3. They're a flexible plastic so I think in theory it would still be possible to hit the cage hard enough to make contact with the bulb. But it would definitely take more force. Time for an easy install! Or so we thought...

First try - tighten the screws around the little lip in the socket. It doesn't seem particularly secure and the clasp won't shut, forcing us to resort to twist ties to hold the cage together. But it seems to do the trick ok.

Then we noticed some extra pieces in the bag. And the instructions. We decided to actually read them and realized that installing these cages right would take a little extra effort. Little legs were supposed to screw directly into the fixtures, making the cage much more secure. "That makes sense," we reasoned, and started over - loosening and taking the cages down, unscrewing the fixture screws, and getting it all back in place. See the little legs at the top of the cage?

One problem - now the lights didn't turn on at all. Apparently those screws were grounding the fixture and now because of those little plastic legs, they didn't go in all the way or something. Not much good protecting the lightbulb if we can't turn it on anyway.

So it was back to the first system, twist ties and all. In the end it didn't take long except for having to put everything together three times (and, actually, factor in the day and a half in which we temporarily gave up out of frustration). But now it's assembled AND the light turns on, so that's progress I guess.

So much for reading the instructions!

Yard Doctor, Checking in

Wow, I don't really know where May went. OK, I guess I do. A few special events kept us busy and not-blogging, but here and there, we've still managed to do quite a few small projects (and lay the groundwork for some big projects). Before it turns into summer and our yard turns into a singed and dead mess of hay, I wanted to let you know how good it's looking. Those of you following this blog for a while know that we have tried year after year to improve our grass and make our garden look respectable (each of those words is a link to a different post on the topic, so even if you aren't a regular reader you should have a idea by now how much we talk about this issue). And while it's far from done, I'd say this year we definitely turned a corner.

We took your advice in this post to act now and stop the pretty flowery weeds from taking over. D spread weed and feed all over the front and back lawns to clear them out. We do still have weeds and clover, but it looks a little better. We'll do it again in two months like the instructions say. The grass density isn't perfect, but it is a lot thicker than it used to be and a lot happier looking.

We decided after this post that the slacker lilac bushes in the middle of the row had to come out - or at least part of them did. D hacked at the worst of the two and got most of it out of the ground, leaving one section that was still blooming (we'll see how that goes next year). In it's place, we moved the small healthy guy that was temporarily living among the butterfly bushes, so now all the lilacs are back in one place.

We also bought a bunch of cheap additions at Lowes and a recent local market run- a few new azalea bushes to fill in between our sickly looking ones, some salvia (we've planted it from bare root a few times before and it never seems to come up, so maybe planting a full, living bundle will help), and some Russian sage (again, we have some planted already but it's not really doing anything).

Other updates - the thyme at the front of house has really taken off, the clematis got so big that I had to tie it to the lamppost to remind it which direction it needs to grow in (up, not out), and our alliums bloomed (and then died).

The bumble bees seem to really like the pink flowers on our spirea (and hopefully on our butterfly bush once they start to flower)

Next up, our hydrangeas are waking up and hopefully our black-eyed Susans will grow this year. We just weeded and re-mulched so right now, everything is looking pretty happy. We have some growths that don't exactly look like weeds but are as-yet unidentified. I didn't pull them up so maybe they'll turn into something too. But it's definitely fuller and happier, even in this sort of in-between stage after the irises, hyacinths, lilacs, and camellias have lots their blooms and it's mostly just green:

And a bit off-topic: someone in our neighborhood has one of these - any idea what it is (google image search isn't working)? The flowers just finally fell off last week in a storm but it was spectacular in bright fiery yellows and orange for at least a month before that.