Week ending 2/26/10

This week we didn't make much progress on the renovation because our focus has been on the bed and the sofa. We went shopping on Saturday and spent 4 hours looking at theater seating. It was grueling and unfun and when we got home I was ready to pass out. I hate shopping! I am missing whatever female gene there is that makes women like shopping.

On Monday, I got rid of another box from the garage. You still can't tell I've made any progress except when you look at it over the long haul. It definitely looks better than when we moved in almost 4 years ago but that's about it.

One of the ongoing adventures in this house is the stuff we find in the yard. We've owned the place 4+ years now, and had the yard completely landscaped and sodded and stuff still comes up. Here is a belt buckle, piece of glass and piece of ceramic tile the dogs uncovered:


I also went to a local stone supply store to look at pavers for a temporary patio and stones to replace the bark mulch on the perimeter of the yard. Right now the "patio" is just bare dirt and it makes a huge mess when the dogs chase each other in circles around it. They are wearing a track! It also gets really muddy in the rain and kicks up dust which gets everywhere and in the house. Eventually, we'll do a real patio but in a rare exception to my "no temporary fixes" rule we are thinking of doing something short term.

Needless to say, even limiting my paver shopping to just one local store there were way too many options, each with it's own set of pros, cons and price. I thought by limiting it so much that just one paver would jump out but that's not the case. I'm going to have to bring C into this one.

I also looked at small stone for the perimeter of the backyard. Currently, we have bark mulch and it requires ongoing, constant maintenance. I go to Home Depot once a month and buy 8 huge bags of bark and it doesn't even keep up with the degradation. The chips degrade in the weather, the dogs eat and/or chew them and I pick them up when picking up after the dogs so they constantly need to be replaced. We want to look at putting pebbles around the edge of the yard where the bark is so it won't need any maintenance. But once again, way too many options.

A lot of people ask me why I don't "just do something temporary," and the reason is that over the long haul it wastes too much time. I have hundreds of jobs still to go and best case scenario is that we won't be any form of done for many years. If I allowed us to get sidetracked and started doing temp fixes we'd have a bunch of half-baked fixes and the real fixes would never happen. With so much to do, the only hope we have is to do it once and do it right.