The storm that blew in over North Carolina dumped about 8-10 inches of snow on us this weekend. With temperatures below freezing since Friday, we haven’t ventured much outside.  I opened the doors long enough to snap a few photos.

Here’s the view from our back deck – check out the 9 inches of snow on the table:

Here’s the view from our front porch:

Our landscape lights should look something like this:

They look pretty cool lighting up the snow!

Did you get hit by the snowstorm this weekend? Anyone brave enough to go outside and build a snowman or make a snow angel?

The house renovations have slowed down a bit lately.  Maybe all that new homeowner vim and vigor has finally run out. Or the money has run out. Or perhaps is just takes two to do the renovation tango.  Renovating can be fun, but it also can be a tough job for two people to do together, let alone on their own-some. My month long excursion to the UK didn’t help our progress. Plus, as soon as I got back to America, Rick had to go on a week-long work trip to Notre Dame university (I tried not take it personally). Yesterday, a good friend noted that I hadn’t posted on the blog for some time, to which I replied that we hadn’t recently finished many projects to blog about.  But it got me thinking about all we have done around the house.  Today marks six months being in our new house.  Six months! Where did the time go? Seeing as I tend to be a ‘glass half empty’ kind of girl, now seems like a good time to think about all the projects we have completed so far:

All carpet has been pulled up

Back yard fence was built

Front and back doors were replaced

Landscape lighting has been installed

Downstairs bathroom was gutted and new tile installed. Bathroom vanity made over with a granite top and vessel sink.

New exterior lights installed

Dining room window replaced

 French doors hung between kitchen and office

Foyer chandelier replaced

Two foyer walls removed and headers installed

Dining room floor painted

Master bedroom ceiling fan installed

Dining room chandelier replaced

Siding removed and rehung

Thermostats switched out

100,000,000 green bugs,  3,000 big-ass spiders, 2 bats, a mole, a lizard, a frog… and a partridge in a pear tree.

Pheww! We’ve been busy! But all this optimism is making me feel all Paula Abdul – I’m much more Simon Cowell-esque (must be a British thing).  If I wear my pessimist hat for a minute, I’d hate to compile a list of all the projects that we have left to do around the house. Wow, that list would be longer than a prize bull’s ba-donk-a-donk. We’ll get there in the end.  That’s what the bull said.

First task today was to finish the trench for the landscape lighting cable.  I was relaxing, I mean, supervising Rick from the comforts of our porch on our new rocking chair (another great bargain found on sale at Big Lots), when I spied two visitors just across from our front lawn.

In the first picture, you can just about see two deer on our neighbor’s drive.  Luckily, I had my camera to hand and snapped a couple of photos. Seeing that I needed the telescopic lens, I ran inside, changed the zoom and took the second close-up.  I guess this is one of the joys of country living – having such fab wildlife in your front yard!

 

Anyhoodles, after that little bit of excitement, Rick and I got on with finishing the landscape lighting. Following the steps we outlined here, we now have fully functional and maintainably tuft-free lights.  Now all we have to do is figure out how to get Number Five out of our yard!

 

With the extra long Memorial Day weekend upon us, we have a number of projects planned to complete:

1. Convert dingy dog room into delightful dining room

2. Paint and install French doors between kitchen and office

3. Finish trench for outside landscape lights (and then mow grass!)

4. Grout the downstairs bathroom tile

5. Develop and upload secret photography project to blog

Not sure exactly how many of these projects will get done, but that’s the plan anyway.  Check back to see how we’re progressing and in the meantime, have a great Memorial Day weekend!

No, this isn’t a post about drunken dancing as the title suggests (did you know the phrase has its roots in poetry and songs about nymphs, witches, and wild women? The phrase is an alteration of lines taken from L’Allegro by John Milton, written in 1632. Milton’s lines have since been echoed by later artists, most recently in Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. The lyrics mention skipping the light fandango, referring to a man who has had too much to drink as he dances with a woman). So, no, disappointingly, this post isn’t about getting drunk and boogie-ing on down with wild women.  Rather, it is a play on words to refer to changing out the light fixtures this weekend.  Trip.  Lights.  Get it? (ok, I understand the whole pun, play-on-words thing is not as enticing as the drunken-women thing.  You’re still thinking about wild women, aren’t you?)

So we managed to finally get all the exterior lights removed and replaced.  The old lights were picked up without event by the same nice man that picked up the first light (no irate emails this time). The two front-door lights were replaced no problem – they sit flush on the brick exterior.  However, the three lights on the side and back of the house are mounted on siding.  As you know, siding is not a flat surface and so the light plate has gaps where the weather can get to the electrical connections – not a good idea. 

Whilst shopping at the DIY store yesterday (yes, I think we live there now), I stumbled across a “siding mounting kit”, which solves all our problems! 

The octagonal plate is notched so its sits flush with the siding.  The larger rectangular plate fits over the first, providing a flat surface to mount the light to it.  Et voila! No more exposed electrical connections. We have to make a trip back to the DIY store as we bought the wrong size octagonal plates (depending on the size of the siding, you can buy the plates in 1/4″, 5/16″, 1/2″ sizes). But hey, another problem solved …

On Saturday, we were exceedingly lucky to have a couple of friends (thanks Matt and Logan!) come by and help us to remove all the debris that has been building up in and around the house.  On Friday, we had a dumpster delivered and set up in our driveway, facing the garage. With pizza and beer being offered as an incentive, Matt and Logan helped Rick to get rid of all the sheetrock and carpet that has been laying around the house.

The boys all worked really hard, especially seeing as it was around 90 degrees outside! (I was charged with the most important, labor-intensive job of all – going to get the pizza!). The carpet had been stored mainly in the bonus room upstairs and some in the garage – it therefore didn’t really effect our quality of living that much (out of sight out of mind, and all that).  The sheetrock was another matter. With two huge piles in the front living rooms, we were constantly battling the dust – as soon as we cleaned the floors and the surfaces, the dust would seemingly return right away and be coating everything once again (of course, not helped much by our doggies who thought it was a great game to play in the rubble and then track dusty paw prints across the house).  Although we still need to clean up a little, it has made such a difference having all the sheetrock out of the house.  So thanks again, Matt and Logan!

In the spirit of paying it forward, we continue to post the items we are replacing around the house for free on Craigslist.  In addition to the environmental concern of keeping perfectly working furniture/fixtures etc out of the landfill, in these tough economic times we believe it is important to help others that are perhaps less fortunate than ourselves.  Rick has begun to replace the outside light fixtures with more up-to-date ones.  On Saturday, the older, working lights were posted on Craigslist, free to the first person to pick up.

Almost immediately, we received several emails from people interested in taking the lights. Sorting the emails on a first come, first serve basis, we arranged a time for the first person to come by that afternoon. An hour after the scheduled pick up time, there were no signs of them turning up.  We even tried calling the phone number they gave us, but it said the number had been disconnected.  Having dealt with many “no-shows” in the past, we’ve found that the best course of action is usually to move on to the next person in line, scheduling a new time for them to pick up the items.  So we emailed the first person explaining that since we hadn’t heard from them, and they hadn’t picked up the lights, that we were now offering them to someone else. 

The lights were claimed by the second emailer shortly thereafter.  But the story doesn’t end there. Several hours later, we received a rather irate email from the original emailer, cursing us out because we had given the lights away to someone else. We replied kindly suggesting that we would have gladly held the lights for them if they had simply communicated about any difficulties they had picking up the lights at a certain time. It is now 24 hours later and we are still receiving emails from this person, explaining why they are “more deserving” of the lights than anyone else, even signing one email “from the poor people you could have helped”.  Who knew that the simple act of trying to give something away for FREE would cause such drama?!?

A couple of weeks ago, we installed four exterior lights in our front yard in an effort to illuminate the outside of our house.  However, the four lights weren’t sufficient to give complete coverage across the whole fascia, leading my friend Nick to comment that it looked like the Amityville (or Amy-tiville) horror house. We ordered two more 50watt lights (the power pack can be loaded up to a max 300watts) a couple of weeks ago and they arrived in the mail yesterday.

I think the illumination is much more even now (compared to the 4-light set up). Still looks like house on the haunted hill though…

Here’s how the outside lights illuminate the house.  There are a couple of dark patches, so we might need to get two more lights to ensure even illumination. Especially if we want to avoid it looking like (to paraphrase my friend Nick) the Amy-tiville horror house.

he’s buried in our front yard and is guarding the house!

 

 

 

 

 

We installed the new outside lighting today. Very easy to do – plug it in, run the wire, clip the lights onto wire and hey presto! lights are working.  Now we have to wait and see what the lights look like at night – we might have to reposition them slightly depending on how they hit the house.