December 2008

Loads of updates!

The simple stuff first... my parents were nice enough to give me an extra digital dimmer they had lying around in their garage. That was really cool.

I also ordered a bunch of furniture from Motif in Austin, and it came in way ahead of schedule. So now the living room / family room are getting closer to being set up even though there's still a lot of work left to do. Also picked up a desk for the office so we can ditch the tiny sub-laptop sized thing Elle had and my green 1970s office chair.







I decided to go ahead and do some work with the trees in the front yard. I walk around the neighborhood a lot and there are all kinds of different houses, with different landscaping things going on and then there's this place... They say that winter is the right time to do this sort of work, and I've already started on the HOA paperwork and looked into different places that sell trees. Apparently these things are sold in much bigger sizes than I thought they were. At this point I have a budget and know what I'm looking for, so I'll just get the biggest and healthiest ones I can get.

And the hard stuff... summer cooling bills were nuts, so I decided to try and do something about it. The biggest problems were the fact that it seems really humid most of the time, the main bedroom is always warmer than the rest of the house thanks to some big windows that face due south, and the attic is an oven. Right now I'm working on the attic, and it looks like the best way to keep it from getting so hot is to install a radiant barrier. Since it's not hot out it's the best time of the year to get started with it. Guess I'll find out if it did anything once summer rolls around again.

I also started another project (ok fine, in late November). Not on purpose... it was raining outside and I got out the scrub brush to try and clean up the weathered, gray cedar wood the pergola is made of. The little spot I started cleaning up came out really nice, but you can't just have a clean spot and leave the rest alone... I borrowed my dad's power washer and it took care of blasting all the gray stuff and algae in a couple of afternoons. I'm about halfway through staining the wood at this point. I'm using Sikkens brand stain. It's not cheap, but this is enough of a hassle so that I don't want to have to do it again anytime soon.

Here's what it looked like before. The wood is gray and nasty.


After cleaning the wood, with a little stain. I'm surprised the wood came out this clear after being exposed to the elements for 3 or 4 years.


It's going to take forever to stain the whole thing...

June 2008

The movers showed up WAY ahead of schedule - before they got in all I could really do is unpack whatever Elle and I brought along in her car when we drove over here. The car was packed, but that's not a lot of stuff. The plants look bad... I don't know what happened but they really don't look good. Maybe they got a lot of sun on the way over, who knows. Also got an LCD TV and stand (thanks to my parents for the stand). It's a pretty massive piece of furniture, it took a 4-wheeled furniture mover or two to get it indoors.

After all my stuff arrived I had a little repair work to look into. Two fence posts, rotten at ground level for this short section that runs between the fenceline and a wall. Of course you can't just go buy new fenceposts and put them in the square hole in the concrete.

The hard part was really only an afternoon job but it felt like a weekend. It's hot in San Antonio in June, and breaking up the old concrete and getting the new fenceposts installed straight isn't exactly a good time when it's 100 degrees out. Anyway the fence is installed with new pressure treated posts that should last a long time and stand up a lot better to the carpenter bees I spotted going in and out of the old one. I also got the chance to write Elle and my name n the concrete and that's always fun. Wonder how long they'll be around? Hopefully longer than the old ones anyway.

We want to redo pretty much everything, of course the hard part is figuring out exactly what changes to make. The plan is to start with easy or repair type stuff, then move on to bigger and better things once I have a better feel for the house.

Anyway here are a couple of pictures of the concrete. Cheesy I know.