The First Night in the Brown House

The stucco guys showed up at 7:00 AM. They were done by 2:00. We like the color. We've spent the first 17 years together in a yellow house. The next 17 (give or take 10 or 15 years) will be in a brown house...

The Last Night in the Yellow House

The 2009 Summer project is just about to hit its climax. Last year the priority was replacing the fence. That was a lot of work, and relatively expensive. The next priority is the stucco. It's not quite as much work, because we are going to hire someone to do it. But it is more expensive! We've got a fair amount of damage to the stucco at the base of the house. Plus we're not to thrilled with the yellow color of our house. Those issues brought it to the top of the priority list.

Here's a shot where you can see how badly the stucco is coming off at the bottom of the walls. This was just after I went around and knocked off all the loose stucco the day before Joe, the "Stucco guy", came to do the patch-work.

All the patch-work was done last week. Joe wanted to get that done a few days ahead of time so it had plenty of time to dry. In this shot you can see some of the patch-work Joe had to do.


Since we are going to re-dash the house, we also plan to re-paint all the trim, doors and gables. That means we have to do something about the gutters. They were in a sorry state so we've decided to rip them down and put up new gutters. So I pulled all the nails out, and they fell right off the house! That was easy...




We also had an old dog-pen at the back of the garage. That was another Saturday project. The dog-pen fence was held in place by five steel poles in concrete. I bought a saws-all and cut off all 5 poles at the concrete. We cleared everything off the back patio and away from the house. This is the most clean the back of the house has ever been!

Last Saturday's project was to put trim around the sliding glass door on the patio. We replaced that door 7 or 8 years ago. I've been waiting for the 'stucco-project' ever since. I wasn't sure if the trim needed to be installed before or after the stucco work was done. The final answer was, it needed to be installed before the stucco was done.

Here's the 'before' picture -


And about 4 hours hours later (I'm getting familiar with this trim-work) here's the 'after' picture -

Today I dug a couple of inches of dirt away from the base of the house and checked Joe's patch-work. There were a few spots that needed further touch-up (I know, I'm an anal-retentive detail-fanatic). So I did some final patching before the big day. Here's a sample of my patch-work. It's the darker gray area below the drain spout.


We had a 'sample page' showing the different colors of stucco we could choose from. We wanted a medium brown color, so we picked that off the sample page. Joe picked up samples of the specific colors we selected and put a small patch of each on the side of the house. After 2 tries and 5 colors, we still hadn't found our medium brown color. Finally we told Joe, "We just want brown!" He came with two more samples and finally, one was brown. 'Canyon Clay' is third from the left...

Tonight will be the last time we sleep in a yellow house. Tomorrow night our house will be brown.

4/24/09 - Avocado Tree Removal

We had some guys remove one of our Avocado trees. It always gave us small avocados that weren't very good to eat. And to top it off, there were hundreds, maybe even a thousand of them some years - a lot of avocados to clean up every week. So I hired a tree company to remove it. They also trimmed our Juniper trees.

Here's the before picture -



I'm glad I didn't try to do it myself, it would have taken the whole weekend. These guys did it in a couple of hours.





These guys had some manly power tools. My testosterone level went up just standing near them...



Here's the after picture -

4/18/09 - Yard Sale for Malawi

Nick is going to Malawi, Africa this summer with the Youth Group from Northside. He leaves on July 22nd and he'll be gone for 2 weeks. They are planning on helping out at an orphanage a few days. They will also run the church services on the weekends in a village, among other things. Nick has to raise the money to go, and so we decided one thing we could do was have a yard sale.

I stopped parking my truck in the garage a few days before, and we began gathering all the yard sale fodder in my parking space. By Friday night, Tracy couldn't park her car in the garage either. I was surprised at how much fodder we gathered. We just had a yard sale a year or two ago, how do we accumulate all this stuff?



We got up at a little after 5:00 AM, and began moving the fodder to the driveway. It was only 5:30, and still dark when the shoppers began to arrive. One lady had a flashlight she used to get a good look at the fodder in the dark (she was obviously a professional yard-saler).



Another couple from Northside brought over their fodder to see how much money they could raise for Malawi too. The husband (John) is also going to Malawi this summer with the Youth Group. There was an ad in the paper for the yard sale, so we had a pretty good turn-out.



At around 1:00, Nick and I delivered an old exercise bike to an older lady who wanted it, but didn't have a way to get it home. She was trilled to get it, and even more thrilled that Nick was going to Malawi this summer. It's weird, I'm not a people person, I'd rather get together with two friends than go to a party, but I kind of enjoy doing yard sales. There are some very interesting people that come by, and there are interesting conversations that are shared as the shoppers look through my old junk. It was hard work, but it was fun. Nick raised about $275 for Malawi!