Another weekend

Well, this weekend I have a few other things I wanted to get done and ended up doing a lot of other little things, but it feels good to have a list of finished projects:

• Nailed the loose baseboard in the Office to the wall so we wouldn't keep kicking it across the room
• Put some fold down door stops on a couple doors that like to work their way closed; Master BR, master bath, and Office. These seem to be way nicer and easier to use than the wedge door stops we were using.
• Vacuumed, to clean up the drilling mess from previous task and catch oversize hairballs in the office and bathroom
• Tried to patch hole in roof over garage that is leaking; but didn't quite get it completely, or the roofing sealant didn't completely stick.
• Hair cut; done by Aimee - really short
  
• Tried to patch up the small holes in Aimee's car trunk that are letting in water when it rains really hard; but with little success.... I think the bondo I got was not the right stuff to use, so I have to go back to the store to see what else I can find.

The Weekend

While Aimee was volunteering at one of her clubs, I decided to do some stuff around the house and ended up just doing odds-n-ends:

• Mowed the Grass
• filled the pond; I had taken a little too much out when I was lowering the water level from the winter buildup
• Christmas lights taken down off the house
• Plum Tree hole got filled the rest of the way
• Sprayed the first application of Round-Up on the yard to kill off the weeds that have started to spring up
• Put back up and fixed the black-out shade in our bedroom; it needed the brackets put back up and some adjustments to make it work right
• Weeded and cleaned out a flower bed in the front yard that needed attention since last fall when the gladiola greens had browned and almost rotted away.
• Put a padlock on the tool shed; have been meaning to do that since we got it because of guidance from "It Takes a Thief" on Discovery channel.
• cleaned up some of the dead stuff in the flower beds by the front walk and driveway
• Noted that I need to cap the ends of the deck so cats can't get under our deck and make a mess

Well, that is about it I got finished this weekend. Will post some pictures if I have a chance later.

PTO - Day 6

Aimee decided to take the day off today and stay home with me. She was getting caught up on stuff at work and even though she took off two days last week, just decided to take another day to herself. So, I get to have some company today, which is great since she also cut my hair.


I ended up shuffling my feet all day and not getting a lot accomplished. I have been really excited about doing this lumber cart, however, it occurred to me that this was the first one I saw and I have since found another plan that had more options and had more versatility in holding lumber and cut materials. I can't find the second one though. I have been scouring the magazines I subscribe to, both print and web, which I can only imagine would have been where I saw it. Nothing!!


So I will build the one I have plans for tomorrow and call it good, until I find that it doesn't meet my needs and/or I find the plans for the other one and find it has features I would find more useful.

PTO - Day 3 - the weekend

Saturday morning, I picked up the garage again and made sure all the painting stuff was put away and found that I have a lot of scrap wood, part sheets of plywood, etc from past projects that was just stacked in inconvenient places. So I started looking through web sites looking for an idea for a lumber cart that I had seen within the last couple months and found it on Popular Handymanclub.com website: http://www.handymanclub.com/Projects/Project.aspx?id=21069

Aimee got home from out-of-town around 12:30 and took about an hour before we were ready to go to my company picnic at a big park downtown. It is only about a 20-30 minute bike ride and the weather was really nice, so we biked down there. We ate BBQ chicken, shredded BBQ pork on really soft and fluffy rolls that were really, really good, then settled in to people watch and walk around the carnival type booths they had set up.

I was really surprised that I didn't really recognize anyone there, and didn't talk with anyone. No one from my group at work was there and I guess I just don't interact with many other people at work cuz I didn't even really recognize people who I may have just seen walking around or in the cafe, etc. That was really weird. We only stayed about an hour before heading home.

We got home and I went to Home Depot to pick up the wood for the lumber cart and the benchtop for my cabinets. I borrowed the neighbors truck to haul it all home... a 2 and a half hour trip in all. We got it all unloaded and again I realized I needed to get that lumber cart built so that I wouldn't have to be tripping over wood while trying to do stuff.

Something to start tomorrow.

PTO - Day 2

Today I got a little more accomplished. The first task on my list was to get the garage cleaned up from the mess it got in when I started painting the new cabinets and from moving stuff around to get to the irrigation pump and sprinkler valves. It was quite a mess. I got most of that stuff moved around and straightened up, but I realized I just need to get the cabinets finished so I can put stuff away and have room for working on projects.

So after cleaning, I got to painting the first coat of grey paint on the garage cabinets and finished the polyurithane on the insides. I still have to finish the last sanding of the insides, but need to wait 48 hours for it to totally cure. So onto the next project...

New Trailer

I ended up getting the less expensive folding trailer, and unfortunately, I have to assemble it myself. I picked up the two boxes from Fred Meyer the same night I got the grill last week, but I ended up going to the other Fred Meyer branch on the west side since the branch by my house had 3 in stock but were not able to find them in the stock room. It was a little annoying since it was like 9:30 at night and I was borrowing my neighbors truck and needed to get it back.

Anywho... I still have to put it together and it looks like I am not going to get to it until later this week when I am on PTO, vacation for those of you who don't work in a corporate environment, and Aimee is out of town. I will have plenty of time to work on my project list and get a lot done. I am really looking forward to it since it is the only real vacation I have had in about 6 months of really aggressive projects at work. They don't stop while I am away, and I don't look forward to needing to catch up when I get back, but it will be nice to "forget" about them for a week.

Kitchen Light

Well, since we moved into our house a little over a year ago, I have been trying to do the little projects that just fix the little issues that were in disrepair around the house. One of those items was the kitchen light, which had a broken cover and really wasn't big enough to give good lighting to work by.

We had gotten some coupons from our electric company for $20 off fluorescent energy star fixtures, so we went to Home Depot to check them out. We ended up with a 4 foot light fixture that had 4 bulbs in it. Since the old fixture was basically the 2 foot version of the same fixture, we figured it would give enough extra light.

Well the short story is that we once installed the light got the nickname "the sun". It was so bright that the white cabinets we have in the kitchen just glowed. Aimee loved it, but did acknowledge that it was kinda bright. It was that way for about a day when I decided to take two of the bulbs out to see if it would be less brilliant and found that it was going to be sufficient with just a two bulb 4 foot fixture.

I just bought the two bulb fixture and some other smaller fixtures for the back bedrooms from Home Depot and got the new one for the kitchen installed, the 4 bulb fixture installed in our new office (which is a little larger space without white cabinets and works much better) and one of the smaller ones installed in the room we are now using as the office. We are going to be switching our guest bedroom and office in the next week or so to utilize the larger space for our office that now will be very bright.

One thing I have notice with the new florescent fixtures is that the light is much brighter and definitely whiter, but at the same time not as hard on your eyes. Things just seem crisper with these lights. And when you have the right size fixture for the room, it is quite nice.

Keeping track of life

Since I have been working on a lot of projects around the house, in the yard, on my computer, etc. I decided to try to list it all out and have a place I could go to mark them as completed. Well, it ended up being a little more of a list than I thought. I ended up with almost 100 tasks!!! It was a little intimidating, to say the least, but at least there are several small ones I can complete quickly so I can show some progress.

Needless to say, I will have plenty to cross off my list when the tasked get completed. Maybe now I can seem like I am getting stuff done over time; which it just hasn't up to this point.

You know how it is, you seem to be busy all the time and when you look back on the past month, several months... year, it just doesn't seem like you have really accomplished a whole lot. Time just seems to be going by and leaving a bunch of stuff left undone. I guess it defeats me at times, cuz I just get tired of the "walking in sand" feeling; more like "walking uphill in sand" feeling... for every couple steps you take, you end up loosing a step due to sliding.

Now I have a means by which to measure my progress and that is probably the best way to identify progress. If you don't have a stake in the sand, it is hard to realize just how much progress you are making.