Doing it All at Once

I haven't been on my blog as much as usual. The reason is that we have had several projects going on. A couple of months ago we looked at a waterfront house. We were really interested, but it didn't seem like the right house for us because it was a duplex, and I have a drummer and two trombone players. The location was great though. We also realized we need to get our house paid down more and also make some repairs.

The list of repairs was long, but mostly things like new flooring in the kitchen, new decks on both sides, replacing woodwork that is water damaged and so on. So I decided to use my birthday money (today is actually my birthday, but we bought the tile three weeks ago.) We also sold our wooden swingset and bought boards for one of the decks.

About this time, an adoption caseworker from the state called to say he was coming on January 6. Yikes! That gave us less than three weeks to do the decks and flooring. We jumped right in with the flooring and the first part went pretty well, but cutting the tile to fit around door frames and the little pieces around the edge got crazy.

When we pulled the old linoleum, we wrote our favorite verses on the wooden floor before we laid the tile.

First tile laid.

Replacing water damaged bottom piece.

We also started pulling apart both decks thinking it would just as easy to do both at once. They are both very small. One deck was built under Jessica's direction a few years ago. The other was here when we bought the house. It has steps up both sides, so we left one side so we'd have a way to get into the house. The problem was, it turned out the risers were rotted on those steps. Risers were $200 each so Rick made a pattern and cut the risers himself. We also decided to have just a single set of steps on that side.

So the past couple of weeks we've been laying tile, cutting wood, building steps and so on. Also during this I've been dealing with an injured elbow, so didn't get to do much of the building. So I did a lot of waterproofing boards and painting woodwork. We didn't get everything quite done, but did a good job of hiding it!

I don't have pictures of everything finished, but I do have a few of the inside of  the house in general.

My office that I share with everyone.

I will get some of the finished projects next time and also share the cool part of the adoption home study visit.