Ring! Ring! ...Hello?

In a few weeks, my doorbell will have been dead for 3 years. It doesn't seem like something worth keeping track of, but I miss it. I miss it every time I have to replace the piece of tape I put on top to discourage people from pressing the bell and waiting, assuming that we are on our way. I miss it in the evening when I come home and there's no little orange glowing button. I miss it every time I have to text or email someone: "Just knock, because the doorbell doesn't work."

Well no more. After 3 years of not wanting to pay for an electrician to come rewire it, we decided to take a different approach. We paid Jeff Bezos to fix the problem instead, recently adding a ring to our ever-increasing amount of Amazon products in our lives (we're not happy about it, but we've come to love our lord and master).

We'd been waffling for about a year on it (in part because of our reluctance to buy more Amazon products) but after seeing one at a friend's house, we decided it was the cheapest, easiest solution to my sad doorbell problem. And it was incredibly quick. D and the girls even managed to install it in the rain in about a half hour (it probably would have been quicker without the "help" of small children). The kit included an adorably small level and several inserts to angle the device. We didn't end up needing to tilt it, screwing it directly into the door frame. The only question really was whether to use the gray metallic faceplate or the black one.

We chose the black face plate instead of the gray metallic one since at least it matches our shutters. It is linked to our echo to tell us when "someone is at the door" and offers some motion detection as well, which is nice for when a package goes missing or to make sure the cat sitter remembered to pay us a visit. Most important for me, it makes an audible chime for the person at the other end pressing the doorbell. It's the little things, I guess. The kids find it hilarious and love to ring it every time they come in. We get a fun video on our phones.

Despite this unneeded extra use, we've been impressed with the battery life so far (you can hardwire it in but our original problem was that we don't have electricity to the doorbell). It's not totally flush with our door frame because it was a bit wider than the space between the trim, but it looks great. From above, you can still get a peek at our sad little doorbell. But at least now it isn't confusing visitors.

Dead wood

Last fall, we noticed that our one-year-old maple trees were being ripped apart by rutting deer. We took action quickly by wrapping them in plastic tubing. Well, sadly, we were too late, at least for the one in the back yard. After 18 months in its new home, it is dead as a doornail. Or a dead tree. We looked up about a week and a half ago and realized that it was not well:

 Yeah...that doesn't look right.

Here's another picture of the bark - I guess despite covering it up at this stage, too much of the infrastructure had been damaged. We are so bummed. That tree had such beautiful red fall foliage and was one we planted in the hopes of one day re-developing our tree canopy, after losing so many trees in our back yard.

It isn't helping that nearly every time the kids play outside, they find another pile of deer poop that we have to shovel up.

Fortunately the other maple in the front seems to have recovered:

And rather than dwell on our sad dead tree, here's our lovely summer garden at the moment. We have black-eyed susans (though sparser than last year on one side of the yard for some reason),  some echinacea/coneflowers and Russian sage.

Here are some surprisingly happy red and pink roses, despite my utter lack of effort:

And new this year, a hibiscus plant we bought last summer, probably as an impulse purchase at Home Depot or something. The flowers are huge - toddler hand for scale:

One tree, all things considered, is not too bad. But I'm still beginning to hate the deer fouling our yard.

Desk organization

My desk was a disaster. I didn't take a before picture of the whole thing because it had lots of stuff I would have to "fuzz" out, but trust me when I say there were just piles of papers - some that needed permanent filing, some that needed addressing (i.e. bills, summer kindergarten assignments), some that needed surreptitious trashing (children's art). I have still been using the mesh wall hanger that you can see in this picture from during our remodel. Except that because we now have a backsplash, I have been keeping it propped up against the wall, precariously balanced. All the papers theoretically go in there, but without a way to organize them and because the whole thing keeps falling, I also end up just stacking things in piles. I almost lost a gift card in the stack. I was constantly worried I would miss one of our few paper bills. It was getting bad.

I have shelves built in above the desk area, but the size of all the cubbies makes it hard to do anything practical with them. So filling the space I have, I stockpile folded up receipts, expired meds for the next give-back day, $1 bills for my daughter's allowance, old greeting cards, etc. But no full sized papers - which is the one thing that I seem to accumulate. It was time to make this a more usable space.

It was clear that these were assembled as two "H"-shaped units, so we thought (hoped!) that removing one of them would leave everything else unharmed. We used a keyhole saw and started sawing into one side of the structure.

 A little more, and then a little more than that, working in slow chunks:

When we got enough of the vertical pieces out, the rest came out pretty easily. Still the whole thing was slow going, since we didn't want to ruin any of the finish.

Then we were left with the nails sticking out from below. We managed to hammer a couple of them out from the top. D leveled the others with a dremel.

The shelf looks smooth and evenly stained without the inner structure, fortunately, as expected. You would never know the letter-holder-sized organizer was ever there.

Here it is now, with two document trays stacked inside, purchased after careful measuring. The shelf is about 11'' deep - an annoyingly precise depth that meant that while a paper could fit in there long-wise (so that the 8.5'' side faced out), an organizer slightly LARGER than a paper would stick out (most of the document trays were 12-14'' long). So I opted to buy trays that are open on the long side, though that meant less real estate inside the shelf. I was able to squeeze two in there, because while the clearance was only 4.5'' to the top lip, beyond that first half inch, inside was almost 6'' high.

It's not perfect of course - I'm still a victim of my own flawed organizational skills. But I have two distinct full-sized shelves, plus a couple of folders, to sort papers. It definitely makes the space more helpful for the types of things I actually need to store there.

Meanwhile (as you can see from the bottom right corner of the photo above), I'm still using the once-upon-a-time-wall-mounted organizer. I had purchased a version matching the document trays that would actually stand up on a flat base, but it turned out to be envelope-sized, rather than full-sized. And that was exactly the size that I *don't* actually need to help me organize. So I need a similar item that would hold normal 8.5x11'' paper. I haven't been able to find one - so please let me know if you come across something.

As usual, we've been so busy around the house that I've had trouble finding time to post. But I have a few projects lined up to talk about. AND we are filing our shed permit paperwork TODAY. So more on that soon as well.