Ode to the Handy Man

I grew up in a house with a handy-man. My dad worked on everything, whether he wanted to or not. He could build fence, re-wire houses, sheetrock, put in windows, do plumbing, put in new drain fields for the septic tank, fix the water pump, build tree-houses, pretty much anything that needed done he did it. And he taught me how to do a lot of things too, I remember being in the garage when I was about 5 hammering a nail in a board and hitting my thumb. He turned and laughed and said "keep practicing." When I was in drivers ed. we all had to change a tire at home and have our parents sign off on it. Many of my friends parents signed it even though they didn't change the tire. I had to rotate the tires on my car. I thank him all the time for teaching me that, I have at least one flat tire a year!

I now know that a lot of the things he did he learned to do because it saved the family money. He may have wanted to pay somebody else to do the re-modeling but he and mom could do it much cheaper. I dated a guy who couldn't do anything, couldn't even drive in a stick shift (hence he couldn't drive my car). I knew that the guy I married would be able to do things. Bryce has learned a lot about remodeling houses from his Grandpa, I feel so lucky that he can do so many things! It saves us a lot of money!

This week he found out that the serious leak on our "new" truck was going to cost $600 to repair at the shop. A $12 part and hours of labor. The guy at the shop, a good friend, said he wouldn't attempt to do it without a shop. But we don't have $600 for the truck and we need it to get a lot done around the house so:

He spent almost 8 hours yesterday under this truck on the cement getting the oil pan and oil pump off the truck. Today he will put the new ones back on. He is sore and tired but he is taking care of us and our house, and our money :) I would like to show a picture of me taking a nap while he layed on the cement working in the 90 degree weather, but I can't take pictures of myself sleeping. I did some work on the house last night, but I know that I am one lucky girl to have married a man who can do so much around our house.

Thorns

Next to our garage are some very overgrown, mostly dead rose bushes. And a whole lot of weeds. We are planning on turning this area into a parking spot for the yellow truck so last night we faced the dangers of these thorny giants and after much spilled blood they were removed.

Bryce using a saw to cut through the 6 inch wide tap root.

We cracked the handle on this shovel.

Ta-Da! All gone! It is much cleaner now and after we cover this area with gravel, add some fence, and fix the siding, it will be done. You will have to wait a LONG time before you see a post showing those things.

The doors

We often spend our time working on the house and cursing the people who did these horrible things to it. Like painting perfectly good doors and trim ugly colors like grey and black. They didn't even finish, half of the door frames are painted on one side but left natural on the other, as are all of the doors. Since we aren't quite ready to spend the money on all new doors I decided last night to take all the doors off and take them onto the deck to enjoy the 80 degree weather.

Bryce has been studying for his LEED examine, which he is taking today, so he was busy doing that while I took everything outside and painted. I also managed to drop the paint can and got paint all over the deck, fortunately it looks really bad already, so I just added to it.

While the paint on the doors dried I painted on the trim on the doors in the house. NEVER paint trim (if it's in good shape of course). I actually saw in a magazine where they were saying if you are afraid to paint a whole wall, just paint the trim a fun color. NO NO NO! Repainting walls is easy compared to repainting trim. Don't mess with the trim, unless it's already been messed with or is really bad already.

After the doors were dry, I brought them in and Bryce hung them up. I should have been paying attention to what doors I was giving him because clearly our doors are not all the same size:

The doorknob is even covered by the trim, the bedroom door does not fit on the bathroom!

And what's with the big gap, that would be the bathroom door on the bedroom. We will have to take care of that tonight after the drill is charged back up!

Craigslist!

This weeks craigslist find is a full size freezer for our garage! Yay! Our new fridge is awesome but the freezer is not very big. We needed some more freezer space and as Bryce likes to tell me when we have the starting line for the football team as children you need to keep a lot of food around. We bought this from a guy graduating from Whitworth, thanks Kyle for the great deal on the much needed freezer!

Why would you want one of these?

Why would you want one of these:

So that you can spend Friday night before friends come over doing this:

And coming home to this:

Caused by this:

As well as these burn spots in the lawn:

And we will never have nice things again...

Lava Hoes

Much of our yard has been "landscaped" (I use this term lightly) with lava rock. Now, no offense to anyone who loves lava rock, but it does not float my boat. So this evening I decided to tackle the lava rock lining our driving:

Down to mostly just dirt. Of course there are still some rocks in there, but I think I have dug it down enough that a fresh layer of dirt and some grass seed and the lava rock underneath will not matter.

The two little bushes you see still in the dirt will be transplanted after I figure out my landscape "plan" and know where to move them.
For you lava rock fans I have three boxes like this free to good home! And that's just from beside the driveway, I have much, Much, MUCH more! (and yes these boxes are still in these spots on the driveway because clearly I can't move them and Bryce is gone at Church council).
Today's reason I LOVE our new neighborhood: As I was out shoveling lava rock the nicest policeman stopped and asked me if I had seen some kids around causing trouble. I haven't seen them, but they did do this to our power box on the corner of our property before we moved in:
A Garden Hoe you might ask? If you are going to do graffiti you should at least learn how to spell. Anyway, this also recently happened to a neighbor's fence and apparently someone down the road got in a profanity strewn fight with a couple of girls who are the most recent suspects. So the police are trying to find these troublemakers and stop it. Do you know that in our old neighborhood when my car was broken in to all I got was to talk to someone from crime check who took down my information and of course I never heard a thing back! In this neighborhood the police spend TIME looking for a poor speller! Now, on to the amazingness of my new cleaner that I was coned into buying from the carpet cleaner guys. It got that spray paint right off! No more HOES at our house!

Weddings and Flowers

Over the weekend we attended my beautiful friend Deanna’s beautiful wedding at Girl Scout Camp! I had never been, even though I’ve been working at GS for a year and a half now. This will be back memories for all of my aunts who spent summers at Camp Four Echoes. We had a good time and got back late on Saturday

Notice the camp sign behind us in the main lodge:

On Sunday morning we took mom out for mother’s day breakfast and mimosas. Then I drug mom along to teach me about flowers. She helped me pick out a few pots and some to plant in pots. My next goal is to make a landscaping “plan” so that I know what to buy and where to put it. Here is a pot I did myself, I have one more that matches it but I didn't have time to do it yesterday:
Here are several pots I bought pre-planted to help decorate our front steps:

This is a picture of one of two beautiful trees in our front yard. The grass looks terrible but at least we have a few nice trees to work with.

Bryce decided to clean out the dog kennel in the backyard. He found an amazing assortment of bricks, concrete, balls and blankets buried in the dirt. It’s starting to look much better now that it is level and the junk is out, here is a pile of said junk:

Bryce got a new handle for the tailgate on the truck mom let us borrow indefinitely. He was so excited that I found him working on it by the time I got home today:

A boy and his truck, now all his dreams have come true :)