Aspiring Carpenters

Dave and I have tried our hand at some woodworking recently.

Here is the tower of a bed that Dave made.There happened to be some excitement his first night sleeping on this skyscraper. As I understand it, Dave was jolted awake around 3am by a monstrous crash. A roommates bed frame failed and the poor guy fell to the floor. Mattress and all. Thankfully Dave's mad skills have kept him and his creation in the rafters so far.

I've got a couple wood projects going at the moment. The one that is functioning is a cover I built for our garbage cans. Even though the doors are not finished it keeps the rain off. This has made it possible for me to move our recycling bins out of our tiny shoebox of a house and retain a sliver of sanity. When I finish the doors I might update it here.

Hit the ground running

Baby and I are back from the lovely Alaska and enjoying a beautiful Tennessee Spring. Details of the trip will come in a later post with pictures when I get them all. For now I will placate you with a picture of the babe and one of my sisters in Alaska. I have so much to tell of the last week that it needs to be recorded before it's lost to the crevices of my memory forever.

The flight from Anchorage was the duration of Wednesday night. Here I need to shout to the world that we have The Best Baby Ever. She traveled like a champ. Better even. A silent champ that seems to do better on 6 hour flights than one hour Sacrament Meetings. What's up with that? Again I will detail that part of the trip later. I'm just pointing out that I did not sleep the night of said Wednesday. The next few days are kind of a whirl wind but here it goes.

• Thursday morning land in Nashville.
• House AC gets running as we are twenty minutes from the driveway. (Cutting it a little close guys. Especially since it was supposed to be done two weeks before.)
• Deal with AC guy for the first 30 minutes home.
• Come to terms with the destruction caused by the dog.
• Hop down to Rural King to get chicken supplies. (A little random I realize. But I needed to get there before all the good ones were gone.)
• Set up chicken brooder.
• Attend Missionary Correlation Meeting at 8 pm. Still haven't slept at this point. Pretty sure most of my comments were slurred.
• Baby still on Alaska time zone had a rough night. Which translates into we both had a rough night.
  
  


• Friday Morning hopped down to Rural King again and purchased ten Rhode Island Red chicks. We now have a wonderful chorus of chirps coming from the laundry room.
• Took the mutt for a swim. It was a glorious 85 degrees.
• Set three packets of pumpkin seeds on their happy little road of plenty.
• Prepared the living room for a life changing paint job.
• Finally showered. But still haven't unpacked as of the writing of this. How sad.
  

• Saturday slept in. Thank you Baby Dearest.
• Dropped baby off at a reputable day care and painted our ceiling with primer. We have a white ceiling! This is the first time our ceiling has been white since I moved in. Dave started the awful task of removing the popcorn ceiling (insert here malicious popcorn invented by the Devil himself) before I moved to Tennessee. Instead of aging sheet rock we have a gleaming white ceiling. It is a marvel to behold.
• Aired the fumes out while the dog and I completed a run to the dump. I have this fear that the truck will fail to start while I'm inside that odorously foul place. Who puts the dump inside a warehouse?
• Continued to air out the paint fumes while baby and I attended the Rivers and Spires Festival downtown with some great friends. Hopefully I can get some pictures of that to share soon.

Sunday. The typical Sunday. Everything but restful yet full of Sunday things, meetings, visits, lessons, the whole works.

• Monday. A package of bees showed up as I was pulling out of the drive way headed for yoga. It's awesome that we have a mailman that has handled bees, doesn't freak out at the mention of them with a can of Raid and delivers them to your door.
• Quickly sprayed the bees with water and left them in the laundry room too. Now I know you are expecting me to follow up with some disaster where the chickens eat the bees and all havoc has transcended my home into Pandora's box. But I'm happy to report that I came home an hour later to a content buzzing from the floor while the chicks were oblivious on top of the freezer. This is where they all stayed for many more hours. Unfortunately for the bees.
• Next baby went to her six month check up. She's 14lbs 9ozs of happy and laughs. She has the greatest laugh. Now that I have a camera I hope to get it on video for all of you to enjoy as well.
• Here is were I would love to say I went back to the disaster on the verge of exploding in my house. But, alas, Sully had to go the vet. On the way home he did a little exploding. In the car! He chose to puke in the car as we were pulling in the driveway at the house. Thanks dog.
• Hived the bees around 4pm. Oh how I wish I could report that had been uneventful. But I did something uber dumb. I left my hair in a pony tail. Doesn't seem like a big deal but, oh, the devil is in the details. I bent down to seal up the last of a long list of to-dos and eight of those girls got caught in my pony tail. Before extracting them all from my hair four of them got me. Three stings on the scalp and one on my jaw. My elephant man impression is super hot. This is the first time I have been stung by our own bees. Dave was stung once when he dropped a crowbar in a hive and then retrieved it with his bare arm. Hopefully we've learned our lesson. We have gear. We need to start using it instead of acting like, "I'm the bee whisperer, watch me fearlessly go into the lair of pain and suffering with just a loin cloth."

We like it Hot Hot Hot

Our heater/AC unit does not handle separation anxiety well. As a result it died a couple days before Dave deployed. Died, gave up the ghost, croaked, kicked the bucket, puffed it's last warm breath. Speaking of warm breath, JD, Caitlin, you are champs. Please visit again. Please. You won't see your breath in the house next time you come.

I am happy to announce we have replaced the wimpy unit with a pro. It was located quite a road trip away by Tennessee's standards. We actually left the Nashville mission! Now that's a trip. But I had my dutiful helper to keep me alert and assist in the heavy lifting.

We arrived at our destination to discover that our newish unit comes from the home town of Jack Daniels. Interestingly enough the guy we bought it from works for Jack Daniels. But, oh, that's just his day job. He's a bondsman as well. I wonder who his high school career counselor was?

To celebrate our warm house Squirt started rolling from her tummy to her back and then to her tummy. Again and again and again. She is noticing it's a little hard to roll when the mutt wants to join in. He has a thing for diapers. Unfortunately.

"No, Jim, I use a bad apiarist."

"I say we fill Michael's office with bees. My apiarist owes me a favor."
Thanks, Dwight Schrute. That was a highlight in our week. However, you may not extract our queen and place her on a flushable wipe. She's too valuable for such petty things.

Ah, Bees! We have had our bees for a little over a week. Check out how awesomely unaware and inexperienced we are at keeping them. We checked on them for the first time this Saturday and they haven't all flown off and ditched us yet.
In fact to our delight and surprise they had already started making honey! Apparently, they need to work their bee magic on it longer before it can be applied to toast. Thankfully, we knew this or we'd be having an unpleasant week of restroom familiarization.
Our little workers even started making their own comb. See the honey inside? The comb was so light and fragile. We stuck some in the freezer for show-n-tell for our friends. Thank you all for humoring us. You've been great. If we get a little too excited go ahead and tell us so. Then we'll proceed to tell you how awesome it to have bees and that everyone should jump on the band wagon. When they fly off into the setting sun shouting insults and we cry on your shoulder then you can proceed to tell us how awesome it is not having bees mess up your emotional stability.

It would appear that dogs like honey. As well as honey comb. Who knew? Yeah, probably not the best idea to get them addicted to it. At least we have this kick-butt pest control fence. The dogs are actually part of the pest control management. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a case of the fox guarding the hen house.
Instructions were relied on heavily from our trusty Beekeeping for Dummies during the installation process. We each hived a nuc and made Harrell modifications when needed. Good times!

Our bees did not arrive in the mail, as is the usual manner of delivery. We'll have to try it someday to see the reaction at the post office. Bet that delivery guy won't skip us for having a motorcycle parked within 10 ft. of the mailbox that day. Our lucky bees were picked up from the supplier in Alabama and drove overnight to arrive in our hands by 8:30 the next morning. See all those boxes of bees! We were last on the list. This guy had already stopped at three other towns before he got to us.

The Harrell's are bee owners! With a lot of first timers luck by next year we shall be official beekeepers.

"Always go to the bathroom when you have a chance." King George V

Here is the much requested unveiling of the new Harrell Bathroom:

This may not appear as much of anything to those that have not been in our home as of yet. But when compared to the baby diaper yellow abomination that was our previous shower of despair;

it is the transformation a butterfly envies.

Now there are few ends yet to tie. Such as towel hangers, toilet paper holder, light above the sink, etc. There's just so many options, what's a girl to do? Soon I shall settle on one and we will stamp it complete. As much as I love the newish bathtub I think my favorite feature is the window and the natural light it brings in.

With the added floor space we gobbled up from one of the bedroom closets there is now direct access into the master bedroom.

I accepted an offer from our ward missionaries to lend a hand for their service project this week and they were so helpful! It was amazing the work we got done. I have door handles in the bathroom! Locks are great! And there was some ceiling scraping going on. See all that dust! I was able to scrape off the rest of the popcorn torture/texture this evening. That's one more room down four more to go. Ceilings that is.

The elders hacked a path through the back jungles of our property as well. See how out of control this Tennessee landscaping is? Any suggestions on how to keep it at bay. Besides not running away to Alaska (which reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon) for five months in the middle of summer. I already thought of that one thank you very much. The elders are behind that growth somewhere with a weedwacker.

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

There have been lots of goings on at the Harrell home. In the last 24 hours we have taken that incredible List and all the goals and plans we constructed over a year- and figuratively burned them to the ground and danced in the ashes. This is a good thing.

Valli got back from her 6 month stay in Alaska and immediately went to work cleaning, repairing and improving our home. We wanted to sell it around the new year and get into a larger better home with a big yard and room to do all the great stuff we’ve been dreaming of since we got married. We had injected a lot of stress into her life with so many things going on at once. I’ve been doing what I can to help; calling our bank and getting pre-approved for a loan, searching for real estate online, but Valli was doing almost all the work. And with things moving forward so quickly, I really got caught up in buying a new home. We even narrowed down our choices to one place that we both really liked.

Then we got to the task of figuring out how to pay for it all. Valli has retired from the engineering realm for a while. We haven’t finished remodeling our current house yet. We might not be able to even sell our place once it once it’s ready. The home we were thinking of buying will be wonderful (and finished) and huge, but will not leave much room in our budget for unexpected surprises. And as luck would have it- we received an unexpected surprise three days ago.

The transmission on our 1982 Benz 300D tanked. No one in 100 miles wants to touch it, so we will have to buy a new (read= rebuilt. Like we could really find a new one) tranny. Luckily a guy in town bought one a while ago from a company in Arizona. So we won’t have to find one ourselves. We are prepared to deal with things like this. But once we jump into a new house we won’t be. That experience really made me think about some things that Valli has been trying to tell for the last week. Mainly- are we sure we are doing the right thing? Once I really thought about it, the answer was a clear and resounding “NO!”

Enter the paradigm shift. We are still going to get the goals we want. But we decided that the plans we had made was the wrong way for us to get there. So, instead of buying a house with a big yard, we are keeping our house and just buying a yard. You read right. Once the house is finished we are going to start looking at land for sale. No one wants to develop now with the current state of things so it’s just sitting there, depreciating. That will be our big yard for keeping bees, raising pigs, planting a big garden, making bonfires, playing paintball, shooting things, whatever.

Instead of paying of the last of our debt with the money we’d make from selling our home, we are using the down-payment we’ve saved for to do that. Instead of buying a house with a big basement and storage space, we are going to excavate under our own house. Eventually.

And instead of buying a motorcycle we are buying a transmission. It was my idea. Valli wouldn’t ever ask me to give up a motorcycle after all the pathetic behavior and drooling and waiting. But it’s for the best. Since we are not moving 20 miles further from the post, we can easily afford me driving my big awesome truck to and from work until I figure that bike situation. Since we won’t be stretched to the breaking point, we will have plenty of dough at the end of the month for savings, dating, heaven willing my motorcycle fund, and anything else that breaks on the old car.

Birth of a Bedroom

O Holy Crap. That was the theme of our "get the bedroom ready for company" Christmas. So much work and so little time. The week before my Mom and Dad came to visit was one renovation headache after the other. The most traumatic phase was just agreeing what color, style, texture, combination, paint, carpet, ceiling to go with. It took multiple trips to Home Depot amounting to several hours of looking at different samples, tiles, colors etc. Compounding the frustration was my endless indecision paired with my normal good-natured wife's deteriorating patience. And no thanks to the paint desk dudes discreet martial advice. 

Which didn't help either of us in the get-in-a-good-mood category.

And then there was the real work.

This room has been the storage area for the past year. Everything was pulled out and relocated (in a very optimistic sense of the word) in other places in the house. Because of the shortness of time I was trying to mud, tape, sand and texture all at the same time. It doesn't work. But I did the best I knew how, even though I sometimes sabotaged Valli's well-laid plans. My hope was that we would have the room cleaned out, have the floor prepared for carpet, and have the walls painted just in time for the carpet installers to show up Wednesday morning, pick up and assemble the bed Wednesday afternoon, and have dinner ready for the folks early Wednesday evening. And something like 4 days to do it. Okay- no sweat.

And then we decided to use leveling concrete on the floor. More trips to Home Depot. Which we discovered had to have a primer coat. "Oh, and by the way", needs to set for 12 -24 hrs.

Then we found that when an aerosol can of spray-on orange-peel texture says 110 sq. feet it really means just 10 sq feet. So we figured it would cost about six hundred thousand dollars to buy enough cans of texture. So we needed to find an air compressor to borrow, and learn how to use it, and buy mix-yourself texture, and learn how to mix it, and buy/learn to use a texture gun. Which means more trips to Home Depot.

When we were about halfway through leveling the room we simultaneously ran out of auto leveler AND discovered that not only are these "square footage per bag" also hopelessly optimistic, but so is the term "auto" in auto-leveling. So, the result was more scrambling to fix the newest disaster and of course, more trips to Home Depot as the first couple batches were drying and being put down by Valli.

Next came the texturing of the walls- before we finished sanding.  But I didn't care.  I just wanted the room to look done.  I could go back and fix that stuff later.  So on went the first batch with our brand new spray gun and borrowed air compressor (note- one trip to hardware store to but adapters, another trip to return them and buy the right adapters).  The first batch went on really nicely.  I was actually really buoyed up by this- that something actually worked the way I wanted it to.  Did I mention that this is the night before the folks get here?  I thought maybe- just maybe-  I could finish texturing in the next hour, let it sit for 6 hours with the floor fan on high blast, spray on the primer, let that sit for 6 hours, and spray on the base coats of the actual paint right before the carpet installer show up Wednesday morning.  Oh yeah, and somehow go to work, too.  But the next batch of texture was too runny and started sliding down the walls.  So Valli and I trowelled off everything and started over after we went back to Home Depot and bought more texture.  The next time, only a quarter of the texture ran off the wall.  And it had to be removed again, and more texture mixed again (really good at this by now).  But the problem was that the wall was too wet by this time and nothing would stay on until it had dried for at least 6 hours.  But if that was what the box says, then it probably meant to say six days.  Anyway- I finally had to concede that it just wasn't going to get finished.  The only positive thing now was that at least I didn't have to stay up all night, and no more trips to God-Bless-America Home Depot.

The next morning Valli called me at work to announce- with happiness and joy that rival the angel of the Lord, long ago in Bethlehem-  "(Hey! Unto you a Child is born!) Honey, we have carpet!"  The bad news is that since that floor has been raised by cement, pad, and carpet, the bedroom door no longer opens or closes.  It's an acceptable compromise.  

Once I got home from work i spent the rest of the day picking up and assembling the bed, wiring the new light fixtures wrong so that neither of them work and plunged the room into darkness, and making a last trip to Wal-Mart for floor lamps and a new lock set for the bedroom door- to install once Valli finishes cutting an inch or so off the bottom of it.  Turns out the door was built with a metal sheet in it.  That explains the slow process and black smoke billowing from the circular saw.  Oh well.  We threw the last bits together with an hour to spare before company arrived and haven't done a productive thing since.


It's as finished as it is going to be for a good while- and its beautiful.

And we love you Mom and Dad!

 

The finished product!

So helpful.

I called my wife on the way home from work earlier this week and she told me that she had a surprise waiting for me when i got home sitting on the living room table.  My first thought was that it was candy.  Because I love candy.  Then I thought it was some mess I made and didn't put away that she moved to the foreground, thereby helping me to remember to clean it up.  She is very helpful.  But what to my wondering eyes should appear, but an altogether different species of what-the-crap.  It was a cute little bird nest about the size of a softball, with two little peanut M&M-sized eggs.  A note next to the nest said that she found this belated Easter surprise in the dryer vent.  Hot freaking dog.  That explains why our clothes were not getting dry.  She is so helpful.



This is the picture she took before extracting the nest.  It was about a foot in from the duct cover.  The cover flaps were melted by the intense heat of our last dryer.  We only used it once because we thought it might have a meltdown or explode.  Then our new posh dryer blanked out for a while and sometime during that episode a little bird build its nest
...of death.
Anyway- Happy Labor Day everyone.

Master Bedroom

...such as it is.
Just displaying some of the slow progress we have been making over the last few weeks.  The Wife's assistant quit after wrecking a company truck while on post, while talking on a cell phone, while stoned.  My boss is out of town and I am left in charge of the Aid Station.  So we have been justifiably sluggish about home improvement projects.  Still- we do have something to show.



This was how the front half of the under-construction-master-bedroom looked at the beginning of the week.



Now more of the prep stuff is done.  We got the last of the wallpaper and popcorn ceiling (may you burn in hell for eternity) off, yanked out a couple more studs, and tore out the carpet and padding.  Hopefully the next pictures of this room we send out will have the beginnings of a closet framed up.  


Here is a little treasure we found when pulling down a little piece of wall.  A 40 year old 7-Up bottle.  It was covered in cobwebs and dust when we found it.  It weighs at least a pound.  Cool huh?



Make 7 up yours!

Our Cheap Heap.

This one is about the house.  We decided to put some focus on the attic today.  Our house gets so hot during the day, and its just a puny little thing anyway.  We figured the roof is the culprit.  We figured right.  We discovered the our attic has no vapor barrier between the ceiling and the woolly blown insulation.  There is no outlet for the vent in the bathroom- and it was covered with black, moldy insulation.  The insulation ranges from 10 to zero inches.  There is no mesh under the spinny roof vents, so we found lots of bird "evidence", and most of all- no soffits.  Soffits are vents along the eaves that allow outside air to enter the roof space, and replace the super-hot air inside the attic.  Our house doesn't have a single one.

My wife was able to secure a 6-foot wide roll of fiberglass from a job site that we used to cover the bathroom- after digging out all the nasty molded stuff- and a couple other bare spots.  She spent the most time working in the attic.  Hours.  It was easily over 100 degree and really humid.  But she made a lot of progress.  I didn't do very much work.  We started out trying to do it together- but ran into creative differences.  In the end she threw me out.  I still got to help with cutting up the new padding, forcing my wife to drink an occasional glass of water, tinkering with our chainsaw, and setting fire to a bunch of junk in the back yard.

Like most projects ion this house- we start a "small" job and find ourselves up to our eyebrows.  As my dad puts it- "The joys of owning a home!"

Little Did He Know...

... that pretty much sums it up.
I think that the first post of a new blog should be funny, unique, interesting, and whatever that word is that means something like- incites discussion, conflicting opinions, and scandal. Sadly this is none of those things- even if you are a close friend or family. This is for y'alls benefit as much as mine. I am posting again because I like to write stuff and I think I'm funny. I feel left out on the attention spawned by my siblings' creations, see SavvyMom and Nemesis. And I think its fun.
So- here's what you might expect to find here:

• Updates on the slow improvement of our house.
  
• Updates on the slow deterioration of our house.
  
• Stuff that happens to me I think y'all might find amusing.
  
• Rants about stupid people, ideas, institutions, laws, animals... the list goes on.
  
• Pictures of stuff- eventually, our camera is not working right now.
  
• A commentary of my own personal efforts to make the world a more better place.
  
• 
  

And with that I would like to take this time to share a few things. Blackberries are in season so go pick some. We got our on the side of the interstate where they are growing like crazy. I recommend wearing thin work gloves that you wouldn't mind turning purple, and long sleeves and jeans. I didn't remember this from years and years ago, but I turns out the thorns are prolific and exceedingly sharp. Also, look out for the spiders, fire ants and ginormous june beetles that fly up your arms and into your faces and make your freak out like a sissy in front of your friends. Otherwise, have a blast. We did.

Okay folks, talk amongst yourselves. Everybody leave feedback so I have warm fuzzies.