Home Improvements (part 1)

Well, it has been a busy weekend! When we moved in, the house was certainly liveable, but there were a few things we needed to do to make it work better for us. One of them was to fence in the entire yard, so that the dog could go outside without a leash (coming from his open acreage with Invisible Fence, having to be walked on a leash has been a real adjustment for him - and for all of us!). The small white picket fence that was here when we moved in didn't actually enclose any of the front yard (see photo), and the back yard was really just a small patio and garden. So, after studying the city code regarding fences, and after much deliberating (and competitive pricing), we finally settled on a nice fence that encloses a large part of the yard, meets code, and will make us all happy. Although it was installed on Friday, we have no gates yet, as they were apparently damaged in shipping...so the fence doesn't actually enclose the yard just yet! We are hoping they will come in and be installed any day now. I will post a photo of the new fence as soon as it is finished!

Meanwhile, on Saturday afternoon we decided to try rearranging some of the hundreds of boxes in the basement in an effort to organize ourselves a little bit. In the course of rearranging, we discovered about 2 inches of water in one part of the basement! So, the reorganizing effort became a cleaning out effort. Luckily, very few things were really damaged. Once we soaked up all the water and plugged in the dehumidifier, we figured we would try to find the source of the leak sometime in the future....

And we moved on to the upstairs (on Sunday - we were wiped out Saturday night!). One of the other projects that we felt we needed to do immediately was to tile the mudroom, the room between the garage and the kitchen that has doors to both the front and the backyard, as well. It had berber carpeting in it, and was already pretty grungy looking, and the previous owners didn't even have pets. And then we figured that while we were tiling the mudroom, we might as well retile the kitchen to match, since the two rooms are adjacent to each other. So, knowing that the tile installer was coming this week, we decided to pull up the carpeting in the mudroom and move the refrigerator out of the kitchen, in preparation. When we pulled up the carpeting in the mudroom, we discovered that there was old linoleum tile underneath it, rather than the concrete floor we were expecting! Yikes! We found the corner that Fu the cat was using as an alternate litter box (yes, we know, he is on Prozac now and is hopefully improving). And then, we found the corner that had water damage....directly above where the water was coming into the basement! Aha! So we went outside to investigate the source of this water, and discovered that the downspout was pouring rain directly against the house. After finding a long section of downspout by the side of the house, we attached that to the offending downspout and re-routed the flood away from the house. You see - there is a point to all this madness! I have now treated both corners of the room with plenty of bleach, to kill germs and mildew and hopefully any smells, and the new tile can be installed without fear!

I will be sure to post photos of the all the improvements once they are complete. I'll spare you the tale of how we got the refrigerator out of the house and down the front steps...suffice it to say that we're lucky no one was hurt and the refrigerator wasn't broken. We'll be running up and down the stairs to the basement fridge while the kitchen is being tiled, and bringing in lots of takeout for dinner, I'm sure!