Another Project

Our house is built on a crawl space, as you've seen before in the duct tape project.


In the post, I mentioned what terrible shape the cover doors are in, in that post.

I decided to do something about that the other day and paint them.

We have a few cans of rustoleum paint in the garage, so I pulled those out and used them up.

One door before. I forgot to take a picture of the other

Painting!

Door Number 1

Door Number 2

The doors are different colors because I ran out of some cans. I did a white primer coat on both doors and then used some black/dark gray I had on one door and then got half a coat on the second door and the black ran out, so that one turned grey, but I think it looks all right anyway. :)

Now the rust is stopped, and these don't bug me every time I see them. I think they look better.

Liberator is Here!

My dad's 19th novel arrived a few days ago. Liberator. The 4th book in the Dragons of Starlight series.


I helped him package up all the books for the pre-orders and we got it all done in quick time.

Lots of books to package!

And a few days  later two more books arrived! You'll see later. :)

More Fix It Projects

When one lives on a 22 acre property and in a largeish house, there's always work to be done. This house was also built to Mississippi standards (Which all the Tennesseans around here scoff at. I have nothing against Mississippians, but apparently the natives around here have problems with their building skills) so anyway, there are a lot of things going wrong with it.

 It's also 15ish years old, which isn't that old for a house, but around the time when many things go wrong. We had to replace both air handlers in the past two years (one for upstairs, one for downstairs). The upstairs air handler has a long and involved story with replacing it that I wont' go into right now.


 Anyway. Last year ago or so, a board beside our garage door started to rot near the bottom, so we had it replaced.

The repair guy never painted it, and we never got around to it, but I had white paint from another project, so I finally got around to painting it.

Before

Other side - 15 year old paint. I decided to repaint it, too

After! Looks much better, yes?

This side repainted - and all my painting stuff is still out.

I also removed the coded garage door opener that was on this wall (See before picture). It has never worked while we've lived here, and it was to a garage door opener that wasn't even installed. It was a LiftMaster and our door opener is a Genie! So I took it off.


The frame of the little door still needs to be painted, but I'll do that later.  This project took about 2 hours total. Set up, painting, and cleanup included.

100 Year Old Wall

I haven't been in a very bloggy mood the past few days, so it's a good thing I wrote some buffer posts or you wouldn't have seen me. :) Here's another project we're working on in our yard. While mowing the lawn by the street, the mower would often hit the edge of a rock, every time. It was annoying and damaging, but the rock, when dug around, seemed to go down very far, so we left it alone for awhile. Later, we came back armed with shovels and dug down about 4 inches around this little point that came up and kept coming to more and more rocks. In the end, we discovered a rock and mortar wall that extended down into the ground about 3 feet and kept going to the left and the right. We've dug a trench (removing the rocks as we go) about 7 feet long and have so far not met the end of the wall. We've been removing the rocks and lining our rose garden with them (Roses pictured in a previous post).

Pretty blurry picture, but you can sort of see the rocks making up the wall (Keeps going into the dirt)

The trench from above. It doesn't look very deep, but it is.

And it extends in this direction, too



Now, our neighbor's father owned the land before 2 sets of owners before us. This wall seemed rather old, since it must have taken a long time for the ground to erode enough to cover it completely. We asked our neighbor (Who is about 86) if he remembered there ever being a wall here (He's also lived nearby his entire life) and he said no, he can't ever remember a wall being there, it had always been a cotton field before our house was built.  

So the wall is at least 80 years old and probably much older, since the ground had eroded enough to cover it.  We're guessing at least 100 years, maybe more.

Pretty cool, huh?

   We're still digging it up. ;) 

Too Many Pictures

My sisters, mother, and other nephew went to the cousin's house to go swimming at the cousin's neighbor's pool (complicated, I know), but 3 year old nephew didn't want to go, so he stayed home with me and we hung out. First we played trolls and dragons were hiding in the closet and we had to fight them and defend ourselves. Which mostly consisted of shooting nerf guns and jumping on and then off the bed again. Which is too high for 3 year old to climb on himself, so he always requested being tossed up and down and he enjoyed that immensely. Then he played on my sister's Kindle Fire for awhile while I read a book and recovered from throwing a 30 ish pound person around for hours (Gets tiring, you know). And after that we watched Rio, which I had never seen before, but he loves because he loves lots of colors and music with a beat. The game he played on the Kindle was called 'Cut the Rope,' some entertaining kid's game of getting a candy through obstacles and feeding it to a little green alien who makes funny noises. 3 year olds find it hysterical. None of these are posed, these are his reactions to the game as it unfolded. I just had to share them all. :)

Trip to the Mailbox

I have a few unwanted/unused things listed on Amazon and one sold the other day, so I had to ship it off. Someone also requested a pre-publication copy of Noble Imposter for an interview thingy, so I mailed that off, too.

I can print mailing labels from home, so I just have to stick them on my packages and put them in the mail box.

Our driveway is rather long.

When we first purchased our house, we left it empty for a year while we lived in Florida and made a slow, easy move up to Tennessee. We had a small, locked mailbox at our street so no one could steal the mail while we were gone for so long.

The slot for the mail person to insert the envelopes, however, was teeny tiny and after we had lived here a few months, the mail deliverer complained that she was always having to drive up our long drive way to the house to give us our mail. So we purchased the largest mailbox we could find and put it up.  It's handy for posting packages.

On either side at the end of our driveway  we have three roses planted in memory of our deceased neighbor, Connie. She died at 57 of congestive heart failure (We live in a rural area and she couldn't get to the hospital in time and yellow roses are her favorite).

Ferdi and Lady

Some people find it rather odd, but my sisters and I call our mom 'Lady.' Some think it disrespectful at first, but it's an endearing title for our mother. To be a lady is a wonderful thing. I started calling her Lady a few years ago and my sisters soon picked it up, and now we rarely call her anything but. :)

(And yes, she really likes being called Lady.)


Anyway. Here's a picture of our Lady and my cat, Ferdi. 

We were out in the front yard inspecting the work I did on the shutters.  Lady brought her dessert out with her (Right after dinner).  Zucchini surprise!  Which is a lot tastier than you might think.

Ferdi is my cat, she's about 4 years old, but she weighs only 6 pounds.

She's very hard to get a picture of because she's always moving!

But she's adorable anyway. :)