Painting

Our next project on the house is going to be painting.  We're going to be painting the kitchen, the den, the foyer, a hallway and a bathroom.  Not sure how long it will take.  This is my biggest painting project.  I might go crazy by the end of it. 

Here are some pictures of the areas we're painting:

The kitchen.

The den.

We narrowed it down to three different colors and I got some samples and painted a few areas of the walls to see which color I wanted.

I think we're going to go with the middle one.  The bottom is way too dark.  I like the top (it's a bit lighter in person), but it looks a lot darker at night.  We're not going to paint for another week so I have time to change my mind, but I'm pretty sure we're going with the middle (Liveable green, what kind of name is that?).

Ever since we moved into our current house we have had a drainage problem in the front yard.  The first time we had a big rain our crawl space got flooded.  That's not good. Especially when the hot water heater is in the crawl space.  (Don't ask, that's another subject entirely).  Eric and his dad did some work a couple of years ago that kept the water from flooding the crawl space, but it didn't correct the source of the problem.  Well today we did.  Or I should say our neighbor did. 

We have a neighbor with a backhoe who does odd jobs on the weekend.  We hired him to dig a ditch in between our house and the one next door.  We have a drainage pipe that runs underneath the street, but the ditch wasn't deep enough for the water to drain properly.  So he came over and redid the ditch and used the extra dirt to level our yard so that the water would flow to the ditch.  He also took out some really ugly bushes that were on the side of our yard. 

Here are the befores:

 

The bushes I was referring to:

During:

Finished!

Dirt in the front yard.  We're going to get some grass seed and hopefully that will make it look better.

Remember the posts that were left after taking down the chain-link fence?  We got him to pull those out while he was here!

The backyard looks much better without them!

Knitting

Knitting is one of my hobbies, but I haven't done it in a while.  When we put our house on the market we packed up a lot of stuff in order to declutter.  My knitting needles were included in this.  I finally pulled them out and started knitting again.

I chose this as my first project:  Lacecap from knitty.com. 

I had to rip it out a couple of times and start over because I thought I could knit it without a lifeline. 
Once I finally did that though, it knit up pretty quickly.

Here is the finished project before and after blocking:

I'm not much of a hat person so I'm not sure if I'll keep this or give it to someone who looks better in hats.

Edit:

See, not a hat person:

Off the market!

We put our house on the market this summer in the hopes of being able to move closer to town.  Yes, the market is bad, but we hoped that the perfect buyer would come along.  We've had a few people look, but no offers so we've decided to take the house off the market and refinance.  I work at a bank and they have a great employee deal for refinancing so we're going that route. 

Which means we can tackle some of the projects that we've been wanting to do, but couldn't because our house had to be show-ready at all times. 

Today we decided to take down the chain-link fence running through the middle of our backyard.  We have a wooden fence, but the yard is cut on half with a chain link fence.  It was a spur of the moment decision so I forgot to take a before picture. 

We've gotten everything down except for the posts which we can't dig up right now.  Here is what the progress looks like so far:

The leftover materials:

Eric hard at work!

Linus observed the project:

Glad that's done!  Maybe next weekend we'll get the posts out of the ground.

Ice Storm!

This winter has not been typical at all for our area.  It snowed on Christmas day, the first time in my life that I've ever seen snow on the 25th. 

Then yesterday, we had an ice storm.  Earlier in the week, the forecast showed 7 inches of snow, but the storm shifted a bit, and some warmer air caused us to only receive ice.  Areas north of use got a lot of snow. 

Eric and I are both home from work today because the roads and interstates are impassable.  My office didn't officially close until about 9:00 this morning.

Luckily our power stayed on through the storm, but we woke up to no heat!  The gas wasn't working. Amazingly though, we called it in and someone just showed up and is replacing the regulator.  We also have an abundance of space heaters so we haven't frozen.

I went outside a short while ago to take some pictures.  Keep in mind this is all ice, we barely had any snow fall.

The view from our front porch:

Ice all over the road.

Linus in the backyard.

Ice!

This one was funny: Linus action shot in the background!

First post!

I'm joining the masses and starting a blog.  I've had various blogs in the past (and still do), but I wanted to make a general one for everyone to read.  I'm not sure what all I will post here.  Can't promise it will be entertaining either.

I guess I'll start off with some recent pictures of what has been going on in our lives.

These are all from the various Christmas celebrations with our families.