Adventures in Home Improvement

We stayed at home for Labor Day weekend, and the decision was a good one, because we spent a good deal of the time doing projects around the house.

Saturday was a wash - between me having a meeting mid-day, and Randy going to the UT game, we just did not buckle down. Sunday was a different story. We went to church early, went grocery shopping right after, and had an early lunch. Then it was out of our church clothes and into shorts and old t-shirts. Randy headed out to the yard, and I set to work in the house.

Here are some pictures of our progress:

You can see the square of dirt that used to play home to a very tacky tin tool shed, which really amounted to little more than a mouse house. Randy has been itching to trash it for awhile and finally had the time and motivation (you can also see Waylon's hind legs and tail - he was running around while I took pictures):

And this is the pile of tin from the shed. Randy says there is no way this could have been put up by one person - it took most of the day for him to take it apart! But it was worth the effort, because now we can plant new grass and let our yard revive itself (it's a terrible dirt field because of how the previous owner treated it, and we're only now getting around to fixing it.

He also found time to put in new light fixtures downstairs. We've had these AWFUL 80s-style brass-glass combos in the front entry and in the "hall" in front of our bedroom. As some of our friends (the Kirks come to mind) know, battling the 1980s decor in one's home is a full-time job.

Here is the old fixture (this one's in the upstairs "hall" and is still there until we can go and get another fixture at Lowe's):

And here is the new one, complete with Energy Star lightbulb or whatever, so we're all "green":

And what did I do with my home improvement time? I did some major cleaning. The kitchen floor was in need of mopping (easier than it sounds - the advantage of hard tile flooring in the kitchen, and wood laminate in the living room, is that a microfiber mop and spray cleaner are FABULOUS), I cleaned out more of the pantry (an ongoing project), vacuumed/cleaned the blinds, and did some redecoration (see below for the new colors - and please excuse the horrid plastic blinds on the window and on the sliding door. We're saving up for wood blinds, and I'm going to put in a valance on the window. The long-term goal for the door is to replace it with French doors, and to get rid of the vertical blinds altogether (which are already coming apart - several blades are staying up thanks to staples). I then moved into the bathroom, armed with a grout brush to tackle neglected tile staining in the shower. I also cleaned out my dresser completely, and got rid of about two 13-gallon garbage bags of clothes that didn't fit or that I'd had for more than three years, and put all of our old campaign t-shirts (kept for sentimental value) into a storage bin until we can decide what to do with them (probably going to use Campus Quilts to get a neat memento made).

(note the clutter on the wine/china cabinet - this is an ongoing struggle for us, and to be honest the table is never this clean unless we have company. I moved Randy's computer bag, and the piles of loose photos and paperwork that usually clutter at least one end, just for this picture. Unfortunately, the space is very small, and the table is really too big - a circle shape would work better than oval. We inherited this piece from Randy's bachelor pad and I like it a lot, so I'm not interested in spending the money to replace it, but it is bulky and our "dining room" is more of a nook than a room)

I made dinner on Sunday: pork chops in sauce (my mom's recipe - I'll post it some time), corn-on-the-cob, and garlic mashed potatoes. We had all that with glasses of Llano Estacado gewuertztraminer, one of our favorite wines, picked up on our Panhandle Trip.

I also got started on my recipe collection project. This consisted of gathering up all the home living mags I had collected since we moved into the house last year, going through each one for the recipes we had liked or wanted to try, and cutting them out. Tonight I will work on pasting them to recipe cards and putting them in my book. While I went through the mags, I also saved some of the handier tips on food storage and preparation, which are going in the book as well. I trashed a huge pile in the end, which was a great clutter-reduction move for the weekend.

Here's my stack, ready to work on tonight. Note the small stack of paper - compare that to six huge Real Simple issues and one Country Living issue, which were residing either in a bedroom pile (with other mags that got tossed this weekend) or on the bookcase.

Today, we went to the last Round Rock Express game of the season (free tickets, courtesy of my sister!), getting a start on our Christmas shopping, and Randy went to his weekly softball game. I'm spending the evening working on that book, and possibly on my desk in the office (the office is a project that will take us at least a weekend on it's own).

Whew!