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(Yesterday evening)
Scott: I saw your blog post today.
Me: Oh yeah? What’d you think?
Scott: Your post was about a house from a magazine. What’s that got to do with our house?
Me: Sometimes I take inspiration from other people’s homes. What’s wrong with that?
Scott: It just doesn’t show anything about what we’re doing to the house. Isn’t your blog only about our house?
Me: Yes, it is, but how do you think I come up with the color scheme? Or some of the projects we’re working on, like the stairs?
Scott: Ok. But you should post about what we did this week.
By special request (hehe), here are some other things we’ve been working on this week. In OUR house.
Scott has been doing an excellent job in our front and back yards. He’s been doing all of those yard-ish things that I pretend to be dumbfounded by so I don’t have to do. Like mowing. And weeding (in all honesty, I just hate bugs, and therefore hate being outside when the mosquitoes are out – AKA summer evenings in GA). And, before you ask, I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it; Scott pretends to be absolutely awful at painting, so I wind up painting everything in the house. And laundry.
Notice anything different?
Here, I’ll put the before and after side-by-side to make it more obvious.
We’re killing off our ivy! Scott spent a few hours this week hacking away at the thick vines in our backyard. We’re doing our best to prevent the ivy from killing off the pine trees (safety hazard!), so the theory is to choke off the source of nutrients from the ground. Once the vines going up the trees begin to wither, it will be much easier to pull them off and get rid of them for good. Then, we’ll begin attacking the ivy on the ground. If you recall from my awful Photoshop skills, I plan to put a fire pit in this area, so the ivy has got to go.
There are a number of plants back here, some of which I don’t recognize. But, I plan to take a full inventory, save a few that we want to keep (after a considerable pruning job, of course), and then probably give the rest away on Craigslist. Seriously, what did people do before Craigslist? And it’s name is much better than I probably would have called it: “Crap I Don’t Want But I Hope You Do”.
Meanwhile, back inside the house, I have been slaving away on our stairs in preparation for painting them. After filling them with wood putty and sanding them down, I have now begun filling in the gaps along the sides and back of each tread with caulk (which is now one of my favorite go-to items for home improvement; see a tutorial here). Some of the gaps in the stairs are a little too big for filling completely, so I’m planning on a two-part attack to get the job done.
Tonight, I’ll begin the painting process with Killz primer. And yes, it is a process: after doing some online research, I found that when painting stairs, you need to plan it in several steps lest you be stuck either upstairs or downstairs for several hours while your paint dries (similar to painting yourself into a corner). Tutorial on this will be coming soon!
I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!
And that is one reason why i left our treads wood and only painted the risers, LOL! Good luck with the painting and I can't wait to see the final product.
Thanks for the encouragement – I'll be starting with the risers too, then see how the rest of it goes. Considering that our stairs are the first thing you see when entering the house, getting them finished is certainly a priority!
You both are doing such a great job on the house! I can't wait to see the finish product…keep the posts coming! :)
i never thought about the stairs thing…i guess you could do every other stair and then wait till they dry to do the others?
Yep, you're on the right track! Once my stairs are done, I'll review using step-by-step photos! Stay tuned!
Funny how we are in the same place with the ivy. I just wrote about the same thing! Ivy looks pretty but is such a killer–and a pain to remove. I am wondering how long it will be before the rootlets give up their grasp on the trunk. It may be years before we solve this problem…good luck with the fight.