Events and holidays galore

So once we finished that last door, I stepped away from this blog for a bit and moved on to new adventures. Really though, we just love our house! It's comfy and cozy. It's not drafty like what we'd been living with for over 40 years  and yay for that. It's the perfect size for us and we both love our offices and our shared spaces and our yard. And our neighborhood. And our church family. So we're pretty sure we picked the right place. 

I don't believe I mentioned that we had a blast on the last day of our family reunion turning the backyard into Grandma's Carnival. You know, tickets, prizes, the whole deal. Here are a few highlights. 

Complete with nine exciting games like 

Sticky Turtle

Tarp Throw

Hammer & Nails

The dads were most competitive as they tried to completely sink their nail with just one blow of the short 6-inch hammers. Fun to watch, especially when they missed the nail completely! 

Squirt it! It was a super-hot day and a good one for a little water game.

Putt-Putt Golf - and one grandson actually got a hole-in-one!

And of course that perennial favorite, Fish Pond, which almost every child wanted to play twice. Anyway, you get the idea. 

Grandpa's Treat Stand out the back window worked perfectly! For the record, the children LOVED the Pushups, a gadgety little sherbet treat.

Thanks to tons of help from older cousins, aunts, and uncles, every station worked like clockwork. We finished it up with a Swedish Pancake brunch. It was so exciting to me to see that there was plenty of room for everyone and a good time had by all, at least as near as I could tell. 

Moving ahead

Here's our friendly turkey-on-the-door for Thanksgiving. 

And a spanking new Christmas wreath on the door and lights on the edge of the roof. You might note that Doug spends a lot of time basically vacuuming the lawn to get rid of the leaves. And it's working!

We're just about to bid farewell to the Year 2020: not just the year of COVID-19, but the year we finished up our remodeling and got to sit down and relax for a bit. 

Finally, the LAST ONE!

A couple of weeks ago I painted the garage side door window (previously the back door of the house that Joe so kindly installed for us) with a frosted spray paint for privacy. It still lets a good amount of light in.

Today was a day for rejoicing: I painted the final door in our house. Here, all masked and ready to go! I spent several hours yesterday scraping old paint off of the brass hinges and a couple more this morning scraping off the old weatherstripping, but wanted to have the best result. 

And here the finished product.

I'm so thrilled to be done with all of the DOORS!

The big shed + miscellaneous

I tore out the four tiles that needed replacing after they installed the new door. We discovered that the adhesive was working quite well as they took some prying to get them up. The grout in-between them stayed in place very well, so I just put the new tiles tightly into the grout frames and added a little layer of new grout on top. 

Since it was predicted to be the hottest day of the year (about 100 degrees every day), we decided it was time to paint our giant shed, whose dimensions are about 12' x 20'. The paint was just shredding off. 

It took the full 5 gallons of paint we bought to give it two coats, but it is SO much better! This was the last of our bigger projects, so it felt great to check it off. 

I sanded down the front door and repainted it so no longer feels like coarse sandpaper at least. I decided to use a brush this time since the foam roller was such a disaster the last time. Of course I painted in the morning when the temperature was still ok and it made a big difference.

We got some outdoor furniture for our patio. Just $89 at Walmart on clearance for the four pieces. We hope it will do the job for a good, long while!

We took our old, little round white kitchen dinette set over to the Habitat for Humanity/Restore place, and I hope someone gets it that will enjoy it as much as we did. 

Paint, glorious paint!

I painted the back door, frame, and outside wooden areas around the door last week. Two coats' worth. I like it! 

A couple of days later, I started masking and prepping the front door for painting, but unfortunately by the time I had finished painting the frame, it turned out to be the hottest day of the week (hovered around 96 degrees all afternoon). The paint in the tray was getting a big scum on the top and the paint on the foam rollers and doors was drying before I could even get it spread properly. The sun was beating down on both me and the door. 

I was rewarded with door panels that feel like coarse sandpaper (photo below)! I think the paint must have been pretty much dry when the roller ran across it and pulled it away from the door. Or something. So I get to repaint the front door again. As soon as I get over the trauma of painting it the first time...

On a somewhat brighter note, but still within the Endless Painting that is associated with this house, this week I decided it was time to paint the picnic set. I sanded down the table and benches a bit to prep them for painting and tried to flatten out some of the uneven top edges. There were a few rough spots and rough ends that I wanted to remedy as well so there was no chance of anyone getting a sliver while sitting there. 

I got the bench undersides and part of the table underside painted before disaster struck.

I bumped my paint container off the table and it went spraying and splashing across more than half of the patio. Oops! I was anxious to get it cleaned up while it was still wet, so didn't stop to take a photo, but it would have been quite impressive I think. Here's a picture of the drop cloth drying in the sun looking like something from the scene of a murder with its brick red hue.

Doug kindly helped me spray and scrub the paint off mostly on our hands and knees and with the use of much elbow grease over about a two-hour period and the result you see below is definitely the cleanest patio on the block!

I finished the rest of the painting today and am delighted at the result! Doug had a 4-inch one-coat paintbrush that worked really great on this project. (Supplemented by a 2 1/2-inch brush and a small sponge brush.) 

The last big-ticket upgrade!

It's so exciting to finally wind down on the big, expensive remodeling to our home. This week, we had exterior doors installed in the front and back! Here you see it on the outside and inside. Personally, I don't think these photos do justice to the huge difference this door makes to our curb appeal plus our living room. Love it!

It was funny because when I went into the living room to look at it I asked one of the workers if they had painted our door trim white. He got a funny look on his face and said they had thrown out our door trim and replaced it with new. Turns out their "new" is the exact same pattern (Colonial) as the rest of our trim! Funny.

There were some challenges for the workers to install both of these doors. In the case of the front door, the space just wasn't wide enough for the new door to fit, even with every splinter of previous frame removed. So one lucky guy got to chisel the brick down until it worked.

In addition to needing to fill the nail holes and gaps in the trim and paint it, I also need to replace four of the floor tiles in the front hall. The new doors have a much narrower threshold than the old ones and it left a gap. They put a piece of wood in the space as a filler for now. So as always with home improvement, you're never really done!

Here's what they had to do to the back door - also a lot of work. There was no previous door frame on it, so it had to be sawed down exactly as well, no wiggle room here. One guy worked on that for quite a while.

On the right is the finished door and it looks great! The mini-blinds encased inside the door are only about 1/2 inch wide! You're supposed to move the magnetic opener slowly and carefully to avoid a problem. The trim on that door will also be painted brown like the rest, which will give a little break to the much white on that wall. It's so nice to be able to close off the world with the blinds as needed!

We bought paint for the picnic table and a big bucket for the shed, so the fun continues...

Tree stuff

Doug got a cool, new electric branch trimmer that he tried out on the neighbor's branches that were hanging over into our yard. Nice work, eh?

Speaking of the neighbor's trees, one of them is a cherry tree and clearly they're not going to be harvesting them. So I might have gotten out my grabber and plucked down a little bowlful for our enjoyment. Most of them were on our side anyway...

Today was the day!

I did it: I finished refinishing my last door and hung it! Hooray! Ten door panels altogether. I'm just glad we don't have a bigger house! 

Cool stuff

What's this, you ask??? Just a few bits and pieces that showed up on our doorstep and needed to be assembled!

Doug turned them into a fine cabinet for the new bathroom. Yes: a place for us to store some towels!

But wait: there's more! We liked the Nievaard's hanging shower caddy, especially since it allowed for the removable shower head hose. So we played copycat and are all set.

Speaking of new stuff: Yeah, a 55-inch TV! Who knew we'd ever fall for that old trick. It is really nice, though. We hope it will last FOREVER. You can see where the old one was in the hole below it. Well, now we get to cover that up. And what did we do with the old TV?

Ta-da! Doug is using it for a monitor! I think he's liking it a lot. 

Last, but not least, I'm finally on THE LAST DOOR TO BE REFINISHED! Hooray. My goal is to have it hung by the end of the week. I'm so excited!!!

Miscellany

Another round of applause goes to Joe who came and installed the glass door surround on our shower this week. I caulked it and we let it dry and tonight I had the privilege of TRYING IT OUT! Works great! It's so exciting to be finishing up this room. 

Doug thought our address was pretty fun since the "55" part seems like a speed limit. So he went online and found just that: a speed limit sign that included our whole address. He decided that right over the mailbox would be the most amazing spot for it on the planet, so here it is. Held on with super-strength Velcro and all. It does set off our red brick house that looks like so many others in the neighborhood and should help anyone trying to find our address!

I guess I should be one to talk since I ordered a cool new fruit bowl that makes us just that much more like the really cool kids. It's pretty big, but nice and sturdy and entices us to eat fruit. Yum!

Glass and rocks

The glass door to our new shower arrived yesterday! We opened the box on our picnic table on the patio to make sure all of the pieces were in great shape. And they were!

We bought a couple of Spiderman-climbs-buildings suction cup thingys to help us pick up the glass panels and carry them safely to where we need them. 

We carried a couple of the glass panels into the house that needed to be attached to a metal edge piece with clear caulk and let dry. It reminded me of all the movies where workers are carrying a huge panel of glass across a street and a car crashes into it. Luckily, no cars between the porch and Doug's office! 

 Here they are after attaching. We tried to let them dry as perfectly upright as possible. 

On another front, I decided that once I finish the door refinishing and painting, I should have some time for a little garden. There wasn't a spot set aside for that already, so we picked one just in front of the backyard gate.

When we dug down a just couple of inches, we hit rocks. Lot of rocks. We took turns digging them out down to about 6-8 inches. Below is a little rock path to the garbage cans that Doug has built from all of the rocks that have been dug up in our yard. About half of the rocks you see here came from my little 4x4-foot plot. So crazy!  We'll have to start putting some in the garbage each week now because there's just nothing else to do with them. 

Here it is in all its glory: 3 tomato plants and a cucumber! Even with three bags of topsoil added, the dirt only came to barely above grand level because of the massive rock removal.

At our old house we had too much shade and icky bugs to ever have a decent garden though I tried for quite a few years. We'll see. I love to till and plant the garden, but after that it gets boring, so my goal is to be more diligent and have a great crop!

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Never fear, though, I'm still working on doors... Below is the first panel for our bedroom closet, sanded, patched, and painted with a primer and two coats of brown paint. These panels are a few inches wider than the regular doors and therefore too heavy for pivoting screws in the ends and pivot, so I'm having to paint them one side at a time then wait to them to dry and it's taking a lot longer.