Weekend Projects: Light

It has been a few weeks since I have been able to do any special projects. With scout camp one week and swim meets the next, this weekend was the first chance to get a few of the projects out of the way. And wouldn't you know, all the projects dealt with light

Twilight (Breaking Dawn)
Now this really wasn't the first project, but I have to share. Alecia spent Friday night (early Saturday morning) on the couch. No, she was not in the dog house, but chose to stay there to read.

Here is how it goes. On Friday, August 1 at 11:30 p.m. Alecia headed down to Hastings Book store to pick up her reserved copy of Stephanie Myers latest book in the Twilight series "Breaking Dawn".

She said the parking lot was full and the line for the release of the 4th book went to the back of the store. She came home with the book and immediately went to reading it.

I woke up a few times during the night noticing she was not in bed, but knew she was safe reading her book. When I got up to fix waffles (click here for the recipe) for Brooklynn and her friend Maddie, this was the picture I first saw coming down the stairs.

I tried to get Alecia to let me take her picture, but she was very self conscious about the way she looked. Never mind that she was absolutely beautiful and really cute in her reading glasses, I still had to take a picture with the book in front of her face.

She stayed up til 9:00 p.m. Saturday (awake almost 38 hours straight now) reading the book (754 pages) and finished the book. I am only on book 3 (see Alecia's challenge to me to read the books here) and I am now on team Edward. In an earlier post I was on team Jacob.

Ceiling Fans/Kids Room Lights

When we first moved into this home they had ugly gold light fixtures all over the home (inside and out). Over time we replaced all the light fixtures inside including the kids' bedrooms.
We put ceiling fans in all the bedrooms and put cheap ones in the kids' bedrooms. The fans were noisy, and the glass fixtures over them broke a little while later. So we finally got some new light fixtures and took out the cheap ceiling fans.

Outside Lights

Speaking of ugly gold light fixtures, we have always hated these standard gold light fixtures on the outside of our front door and garage door.So we got some new lights at Lowe's, put them up in less than a half hour and WOW, what a difference. The lights were a little bigger than the last ones, so I had to move the house numbers down a board in order to see them from the street.

Weekend Projects: Mine/Not Mine

Weekend projects always involve mowing the lawn and something else at home. This week however Jen & Scott were working on replacing the wood on their deck with composite material similar to TREX Decking.

In talking with Scott yesterday, I got the feeling he really wanted help, but he didn't come right out and ask if I could. So, this morning I called Jen and told her about that and she said he really could use the help. I went over at about Noon and came home about 9:00 p.m. and we only finished about 1/3 of the project.

The hardest part of staring this project was putting the first board under the railing. Notches had to be cut out to go around posts and measured just right. After that the rest of the deck should be pretty easy until we get right up against the house.

It was a long day, but I know Scott really appreciated the help. I was really tired and couldn't wait to get home, get cleaned up and go to bed.

Weekend Projects

Mowing the Lawn

The weekend is always filled with projects and one constant one is ALWAYS mowing the lawn.

As I was mowing this morning around 10:00 a.m., it was HOT!!! It got up to 99 degrees today and it sure felt like it was near 90 when I was out mowing earlier.

I was mowing in the backyard and would go under the shade of the trees and boy did that make a difference. Felt 10 degrees or more cooler. And as I walked under the trees it reminded me of a situation we had encountered with our neighbor a week and a half ago.

Trees

When we first moved into our home about 6 years ago, there were no trees just shrubs. And the shrubs were planted haphazardly throughout the lot. No rhyme or reason to any of it. We moved all the shrubs to other spots in the yard and planted some trees. We put in 6 willow trees, 3 pine trees and a quaking aspen. Realizing this was way too many trees, this year we pulled out 3 of the willows and 2 pine trees all from the back yard. Still have to work on getting the stumps out and putting grass over them.

Well, our neigbor came over and told us that we "have to cut back our willow tree" that overhanges in her yard (see picture below on the right). She said that they grow 3 feet each day and they are too messy.
Needless to say, we were not going to trim back the trees or take them out. These trees provide a little bit of privacy and create the much needed shade in the hot summer sun. Alecia volunteered for us to go talk to our neighbor after dinner and I did not want to go. The neighbor was all up in arms about the leaves dropping on her garden and the sticks that blow out of the trees when the wind blows. I said that was an act of God and not our doing. I also said that we don't throw these things into her yard on purpose like she does with our yard. YES, she actually picks up the leaves and sticks and throws them over the fence into our yard. Things were getting a little heated at this point and Alecia had to calm us down.

I told her she has every right to trim the tree herself up to the property line but not an inch over. Then I volunteered to trim it myself up a little way, but not all the way up. Better to do it myself than have her hire someone else to do it and look totally bad. If you enlarge the picture above, you can see a notch on the bottom right corner as not to hang over too far into her yard.

Cars & Bikes

The next project was to work on rearranging the parking situation in our garage.

With the price of gas so high these days (just paid $4.14 gallon at Costco today), I decided to start riding my bike to work each day and let Alecia drive the smaller car that gets better gas mileage. She takes the kids to swim team practice every day and has to go back and forth more than 2 times.

With Alecia driving the small car, it is usually parked on the side of the garage without the automatic garage door opener. She wouldn't park the car in the garage because of having to get in and out of the car and would just leave it in the driveway to soak up the summer sun. Boy did it get hot in there.

So, I rearranged some things to make it so the mini-van could be parked on the manual garage door side and the small car could go on the side with the automatic door opener. Now there is no reason to let the small car sit out in the sun and get super hot the next time she drive it.