**Note, I wrote this post four hours ago, and when I went to take pictures, I had to clean…and organize…and clean…and organize. I guess it was time for me to get on my duties. 🙂

Remember how I mentioned yesterday that I came home and C had randomly decided that he would clean the kitchen and vacuum the floors because he’d been rained out of work? Shocking, I know.

Seriously, in general, we divvy up the duties in the ole’ fashioned style of inside = my duties, outside = his duties. For the most part, it works. Lately, though, C has been upping up his game with some pretty time intensive (and impressive!) projects.

Exterior Jobs

First, he decided it was time to take care of our wooden fence (I blogged about this on beta #2 day!). We live at 7,000′ elevation and it gets absolutely beat on by the sun, so it was time to give it a fresh coat of stain before it rotted away. I actually did help with this project (though he definitely did 2/3 of it *grin*).

Then he built me a new partition fence/gate to keep the dog contained in the back yard instead of having the run of our front yard. This is key because it keeps Chief from barking at random passers-by, plus it will keep toddlers from wandering to the front of the house when Mom & Dad are enjoying a cold beer out back. 😉

While he was at it, he dug up the crappy, weedy, non-grassy part of our lawn. The year before we bought the house the owners had converted it to natural gas, and the gas company basically dug a long trench, ruined the grass, and the homeowners never bothered fixing up the lawn afterwards. Well, my hubby is a green grass freak, and no amount of fertilizer and seed was fixing the problem. After digging up the soil & weeds along the side and front of the house and putting down some sod (not to mention 2x/day watering for ages), it’s looking better than new!

Then C decided it was time to tackle the rest of the wood on the property. First he sanded down our covered front porch and put two coats of some highly toxic and discontinued smelly stain on it, and then he decided to replace a bit of water damaged siding. He stained that portion… but after stepping back and looking at it, he ended up re-staining the entire house. This project took days and days.

Looking at this photo, you can see the 2-story wall on the left looks a little darker – that’s because he did two coats of stain on it. It’s south-facing, and it was decided that it really needed the extra protection. Someday maybe we’ll do another coat on the rest of the house. In the meantime, our close friends are the only people who can even see that particular wall, so we’re fine leaving it as-is. 🙂 We have a ton of reclining lawn chairs folded up against the house in this photo as well – as soon as friends come over, those all get drug out into the lawn in a pow-wow circle of beer drinking and fun. Good times!


Interior Jobs:

The faucet. Oooooh, the faucet. I don’t think I ever mentioned it here, but WOW, did you know that when the rubber inside an extendable kitchen faucet breaks, it is startling?! We had one similar to this:

Last but certainly not least, we have not had a dining room table since we moved into this house. That means 15 months of eating at the breakfast bar counter top (while sitting on too-short stools) or while sitting on the couch. We have been searching and searching for a bar height dining table (that means 42″ tall instead of the “gathering height” of 36″ or the regular height of 30″), and it has been absolutely impossible to find. We wanted one that sat up to 6-8 people and was preferably black, and it just wasn’t happening. The whole point of this was that we wanted the stools to be interchangeable between our bar-height breakfast bar and the dining table, since it’s a pretty small space. Well, C finally decided to take matters into his own hands, and after talking to the guy who custom built our cabinets in the kitchen remodel we did pre-move-in, we have a deal! Originally when we talked to him about this (six months ago), it was going to be super expensive and not possible for us to afford. This time, the guy remembered he wanted a shed built, so he is going to buy the materials for that, we’re going to buy the materials for the table, and C is going to build his shed while M builds our table. It’s a win-win!! This means the table will match the rest of our kitchen perfectly and be built exactly the size and shape we want for the space. This makes me inordinately happy! My only request is it be finished by the time the baby comes. Another first world problem, solved. 🙂

Chief, hanging out where the table will go (under that row of windows). It will be about 5′ x 3.5′ and seat six people comfortably… 8 people if you squeeze!

Cost Recap:

— Stain (for fencing): $160
— Wood for gate: free, because we had some old 2x6s laying around the west side of the house that C had saved for just such a purpose.
— Hardware for gate: $10
— Seed & fertilizer: leftover from last year in our garage, so free. We have definitely spent our fair share at home depot on this though (Scott’s Turf Builder – $37/bag, Seed – $50/bag)
— Sod: Supposed to be .50/sq.ft., but Charlie helped our buddies build some raised vegetable garden beds, and in exchange they gave us our sod for free (they ordered extra b/c they were sodding their own yard at the time)
— Stain (for front porch): $1. It was in the “sale” bucket at the hardware store, and now we know why. WOW. Definitely won’t use that again, but it does look good and did the job.
— Belt Sandpaper (for front porch): $10
— Siding: Free. C scored a bunch of extra cedar siding from a job last year that almost exactly matched our existing siding. He had to rip it down a couple of inches (it was wider than our existing siding), but he decided to store it at our house in case we needed it some day. Score!
— Stain (for the house): $120…though we do need another gallon of this to finish the west side of the house, so let’s go ahead and add another $25 to this total.
— New Kitchen Faucet: Free.
— Installation Hardware for faucet: $50
— New picnic table: Free.
— Sanding & staining of picnic table: Free (using sandpaper and stain that’s in our garage already)
— New dining room table: material cost $$TBD

That’s only $375 out of pocket so far, though we did have seed & fertilizer on hand already. Not bad for a long list of projects that have been completed (or nearly completed) this summer!!

Have I mentioned how much I love having a handy hubby? I think this is his form of “nesting.” 🙂