June Already?!

I’ve been taking it easy over the weekends, as my arm is still in pretty bad shape… I really need to get it checked out. Plus I also had a nice fall down the stairs last week and have a HUGE bruise on my butt. (I was tempted to take a picture of just how amazingly huge it is, but can’t bring myself to actually do that.)I’m fine now, but for the first part of last week I was super sore and achy.

Despite my absence from the home repair scene, Martin has still been busy throughout the week, and a lot has been done since my last post to catch everyone up on. The biggest thing is the tear out of the basement is finished. The bathroom is stripped, except for the toilet. All the carpet and padding is gone and the floor is now bare concrete. It’s not a particularly inviting space at the moment, but we don’t really need it either. We have plenty of space upstairs, so that leaves it as a nice canvas for future work. We will probably hold off on doing much more this down there year, as we need to work through the current remodel bills, but will hopefully get the bathroom done at some point this fall.

Last Thursday our new windows went in. We replaced 3 old single-pane windows from the kitchen and our offices. There’s the new window in my office. Woot!

It’s super nice - better be, it’s from Anderson - and the screen is barely noticeable at all! So awesome!

The kitchen window had some damage to the millwork, so they are going to replace it. I wouldn’t have even noticed, but the Anderson guy did when following up on the install. They really aim for perfection. I guess that’s cool, especially since they are leaving the window in until the new one comes.

The basement patio door was also ordered, but after tearing out the old door, they discovered some issues with the concrete around the doorway which needs to be cut out before they can get the door put in properly.

The opening is currently boarded up with plywood, and it sounds like it’ll be about 4-5 weeks before they can come back to finish that up. Martin is considering trying to rent a saw to do the cut out work himself and save some money, but he hasn’t decided for sure yet. I’m not sure if that would get the door in sooner either. They may still be booked out on the installs.

The yard needs mowed now too, but it looks really nice out there! The trees have leafed out and the garden is filling out nicely. There’s a lot of shade, but there’s also a nice sunny spot along one side where I could probably put in nice bit of garden. I’m going to hold off this year while we sort through what we want to do out there. We probably need a shed, or as Martin says a wood shop at some point, so we can have more space to get both cars into the garage. We also probably need to get some tree work done, which I know all too well can quickly become quite pricey.

We did buy a new grill this weekend. It’ll be another week before it is delivered, but I’m super excited. Martin has a freezer full of brats and has been waiting all spring for a grill to put them on. So, we decided to get one of the Big Green Eggs. Since it is just the two of us, we got the medium sized one, but that’s still big enough to cook a lot of food - 3 chickens, or even a 18lb turkey they say…