Home Improvements

Hope this post finds you well. We've been doing great! We had a pretty relaxing weekend. We spent the time mainly just lounging around, getting Alisha a wedding gift, grocery shopping, and playing with the dogs. Blake actually used our treadmill for the first time yesterday. It was exciting! I hope he keeps it up so I can have a fitness buddy! He ran for a pretty long time, I was impressed!

We rented the new James Bond movie on Saturday, and both of us were very unimpressed. It was borderline boring, and just so unrealistic that it's hard to take seriously. Maybe we are just so used to Jack Bauer being awesome that anyone else like him just seems lame.

I'm still enjoying substituting. It's keeping me busy everyday and has been going well. I'm to the point now where schools are requesting me specifically, so that really help me get jobs everyday.
Blake's been enjoying his job, he was able to work from home everyday last week. Penny really liked that, she bothered him all day long!

Our next Home Improvement project is going to be tackling the grass, or lack there of, in the backyard. The backyard right now is in really bad shape. It's mainly dirt sprinkled with a few weeds. Lovely. So the bad thing is that ANY time it rains, the backyard becomes a mud pit.
When we have to let the dogs out to potty in the back, their feet are covered with mud and it gets tracked all over the house. Not good. We've even tried cleaning off their feet before they come in, or having them wait on a towel, but it doesn't get even half of the mud off. I've gotten so frustrated with it that I've picked up Penny and just given her a bath for the sake of not having to clean up the entire floors all over the house. But that is pretty pointless considering I can't pick up Barney to give him a bath, so he just makes a huge mess, counteracting the clean Penny. Lately we've resorted to letting the dogs potty in the front yard when it rains or the days following, which I'm sure the neighbors think is pretty weird. But if they saw our backyard, they'd understand.

To remedy the situation, my parents are going to help us cut down some of the trees in the backyard to try to help with the lack of grass. That and some of the trees are running into each other. We are very appreciative of their help, considering we found out that to hire someone to do it, it would cost around $600 per tree! Cutting down a tree is not an exciting home improvement that I went to spend money on. After we cut down the trees, we are going to till the soil and put down plots of grass all over the yard. And voila, we should have a nice grassy backyard. Of course we'll have to keep the dogs out of the backyard for a while, and definitely limit Penny-The-Annihilator's time out there, but it will be worth it!

One project we've already completed last weekend was tearing out Blake's mom's "Orthodox herb garden." We had no need for it, it was kind of weird, and most the things in it were dead or dying. We still have to tear down the three posts that are still left that were holding up the fence around the garden, we think that's going to take a while. Blake dug for about an hour on just one post, and we still didn't even see the end of the concrete. So that's one project that will just be requiring sweaty, manual labor.

The next Home Improvement project that we want to tackle after our grass planting is replacing the hardwood floors in the main room downstairs. It's in really bad shape with black spots and stains everywhere from when "the previous owners" never cleaned up when their dog would pee inside and just let it sit on the wood. Pretty gross. So we would like to replace that instead of having a constant reminder of where Roly Poly decided to mark his territory for the day. I'm not sure who we are going to use for that, but probably just whoever we can find that can do the best job matching it to the existing hardwood throughout the rest of the hose.

After that we want to paint the interior of the house a nice earthy color, maybe a light brown. We are going to hire someone for that since it will require scaffolding and a lot of work!

Then after that we'll work on replacing the white tile kitchen floors(a bad choice with a dog, especially 2 dogs right now!), taking down the wallpaper border, staining or painting the cabinets, and adding hardware to the cabinets.

There are a lot more projects, but those are just the ones we want to get started with first. Of course this will take time, we are only going to do it as we save up money for it. But be looking for our "before and after" pictures of our backyard either this month or the next!

Until next time,

-Tracy-

P.S. An easy way to tell if it's me or Blake posting is if it's a "marathon post" (as Blake calls it), then it's me. If it's short and sweet, that's Blake. Just so you know!