Sunday, March 19, 2006

Home work

As noted in the last post, Lynda and I took the day off this past Friday.

We had a rip-roaring good time, working on various home projects, some planned and some simply recognized and engaged. Here's the run down of the things done:

1. We (or more accurately, Lynda) finally got the second, finishing coat of paint on Sarah's bedroom. Now the white walls are white and the accent pink wall is nicely pink. Once the walls were completed, Lynda also hung up some pictures and generally tightened up the feel of the room. It's nice and looks like a finished room is supposed to look. I think Sarah likes it as well.

2. While Lynda was upstairs rolling on the paint, I was downstairs doing two things. I was keeping one eye on the Buckeye game against Davidson while I was also attempting to remove the bay window seating bench that the previous owners had built. Lynda and I had never really liked it and it isn't very comfortable to sit on, so we decided to get it out of there and give us more room in the eating area.

Luckily the bench wasn't bolted to the floor or anything complicated like that. It was bay-window shaped and rather large, however, so I was a bit concerned about how I was going to move it. (Not that I was going to ask Lynda for help or anything.) I decided that I wasn't going to simply throw it out, as it could still be functional for some seating (or maybe for firewood someday). But the only place to put it was the basement, which meant getting it down the narrow flight of stairs.

I was able to drag it across the floor and flip it on its side, allowing it to fit through the basement doorway. Going slowly, I was able to brace it while it slid down the steps. But then, it got wedged in the turn at the bottom of the stairs as it made a hard 90 degree turn into the basement proper. The length , weight, and shape of the bench prevented me from getting it any further. So, I went upstairs to be frustrated and then to scrape up the masking tape on the floor where the bench used to be.

Finally I asked Lynda for help twisting the bench the rest of the way through into the basement. With a bit of grunting and effort, it got done.

Two jobs down!

3. On Saturday we tackled another job that we have been thinking about for a while and finally got accomplished--swapping out the stove in our kitchen.

Our current stove has been balky for a while now; the burners cut in and out at odd times, making cooking a bit more difficult than it should be. But the lucky thing was that some of our friends from church just finished remodeling their own kitchen and were willing to sell us their old electric stove cheaply. It is a nice, quick upgrade over our current one, so we jumped at the chance. But how to get it from their house to ours?

We don't have a truck, so I decided to rent one from Home Depot. Unfortunately, you can't reserve the single truck that they had available. So on Saturday I got up early and rented the truck as soon as the HD opened. Unfortunately, I only had the truck for 75 minutes at the low, low rate of $19. After that time period, they started charging an additional $5 per 15 minutes. A quick call to our friends house and I drove the truck over there and he helped me load up the stove and drove back with me to move around the old one, new one etc. Electric stoves are easy to install (just plug and go!) and it was all over before 10:30 that morning.

4. All of this renovation got us in the mood for more, so I also removed the old, non-functioning landscape lights in the front yard and replaced them with individual solar-powered lights. There are no electrical cords to bury and no plugs to worry about, so you can put them anywhere and they work pretty well. So well in fact that I added some more in the backyard today.

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