Sunday, Someday

I look forward to the day when we can just sit back and relax and have money left over to travel instead of working on the house every weekend and be broke all the time. The truth is our house owns us, not the other way around.

The forecasted rain never came this Sunday so we got a lot done outside. The one thing that we didn't finish on the "to do list" was clearing out some of the stuff in little D's room, aka the "junk" room.

One project I am happy to finally be done with is the patching job above our living room window. So it only took about 8 months of procrastination to get it done and my excuse is I have a baby. haha.

It took about 3 months for me to get motivated to put in sheetrock, mud and tape.

Then it took another 3 months before I figured out how to sand it without getting the fine white dust everywhere. I cut a hole in the plastic and stuck my hand through with a sanding block. It worked pretty well to keep the dust in.  

After sanding, mudding and sanding again, it looked pretty smooth to me. 

Fast forward another month, we finally bought a quart of paint and put on two coats of the stuff. Looks pretty good eh? There are some imperfections you can see from up close, but that's because I am a perfectionist. Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out. 

Yay! Security system installed and activated. Now we can sleep more sound at night. 

We installed a motion sensor light on the side of the house couple of weeks ago. The conduit is a silvery color and sticks out like a sore thumb.

The lights are very bright and hopefully will deter any thieves from trying to break in through those windows. 

A coat of primer and two coats of paint later, the conduit blends in with the rest of house. 

Looks much better, doesn't it?

There is a weird opening in the concrete walkway that's been bothering me since day one. I thought about just filling it in with cement, but came up with something better. Someday in the near future I hope we'll have enough money to replace the ugly cracked cement walkway. 

I bought couple of elfin thyme from my favorite nursery and some rocks from Home depot. This little hole turned out to be the perfect place to add a little greenery. On a side note, my three hostas are doing great, even after couple months of neglect in their plastic pots before being planted in the soil. 

We bought a replacement fern last week for the one that's dying in the ground. The thing was looking sickly since the day we put it there and hasn't gotten any bigger since. The new fern is a California native and tolerates less frequent watering than other ferns.

I have high hopes for this guy since this fern is supposed to be a lot more hardy. The chartreuse color ground cover has been doing well and spreading out, I think I need to get more of them. 

 Our neighbor down the street offered us his broken pavers for free and I (I meant Justin) brought a bunch home. I wanted to have some pavers down on the dirt to keep the area from getting gross and muddy in the coming rain season. It's a temporary but free fix. 

I kept a bunch of bricks from our old foundation and chimney hoping to reuse them someday in our yard. They were moved away from the side of the garage when the house was being painted. We finally moved them back in place after ignoring the mess for 5 months. This area gets super muddy when it rains, so our construction crew put down couple pieces of plywood to walk on. Yeah, our yard is a disaster. 

The fence in the back there is being held up with the green waste bin. We put down the rest of the pavers here to make it look a tiny bit better than before. I think we've succeeded, what do you think?