Week ending 3/30/12

On Saturday, we finally finished unpacking from out move 5 years and 10 months ago!  When we first moved in, everything had to go into the garage except a small suitcase each.  As areas of the house have gotten done, we've unpacked little by little and as of today every box from the move has been unpacked.  Yay!

Week ending 3/23/12

Still very little progress this week, but here's a funny shot of Danny making his own beach in the parking lot by the actual beach.  Dogs aren't allowed on the sand, but he found a way around the rule:

Week ending 3/16/12

Not much progress this week, but here's a neat shot of the ocean and pier:

Week ending 3/10/12

On a Saturday, we spent another 3 hours on the garage and picked up the shelving material. We put the first shelf up, which took about an hour and a half. When I did the prior section of shelving, I found that it's best to start from the top and work down so you aren't trying to work underneath the shelves you just put in. There's a big learning curve here, so we expect the remaining 4 shelves to go up in about an hour and a half. I cannot wait to start putting things away!

On Sunday, C spent 3.5 hours putting up the remaining shelves up while I was out having fun. He's much more motivated than I am to get things done fast. I'm burned out on home renovation and can't sprint anymore. So now the shelves are up and yay, that means it's time to do some more work and put stuff away. I can't wait to see what a difference it makes.

Here is the result of all our hard work, before being loaded up with stuff we want to put away:


The plywood paneling makes such a difference! You can see in the back corner the area that isn't done. It's yucky studs and black tar paper. The front section is a section I did a while back with plywood and slatwall. It holds all of our recreation equipment. That pile of plywood in the back is the next target to get rid of once we put away some things on the shelves.

On Monday, we did a spontaneous 1.75 hour garage session. I went out just to set up my pantry shelves, and C wandered out and started working. We got a lot done, and this is what we were going to do tomorrow. I'm so excited to have my shelves set up so I can get to things like paper goods, cleaning supplies and bulk food purchases. YAY!

On Tuesday, we did a half an hour session on the garage since we worked yesterday. We worked on getting rid of excess construction materials, of which we have a huge amount! I swear every person that worked here left something. We cut up two unusable pieces of plywood into small pieces so they could go into the trash. Some of the plywood we'll try to give away, but this stuff was dirty and water damaged. I also got a piece of door threshold material offered up on Freecycle.

By Wednesday, I had 7 people that wanted to take the door threshold material already.  Freecycle is amazing!


On Thursday, the threshold was picked up.  Can't believe the stuff you can find a home for on Freecycle!


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Week ending 3/2/12

On Saturday, we spent 2 hours removing 2 shelves that the prior owners of this house installed. I swear, every time I touch something done by them I hate them more! When the stakes are high, as in electrical and plumbing, they did a half-add job. When the stakes are low, as in garage shelving, they did a job that would stand up to an attack of marauders. Fortunately, by this time in our remodel we've removed just about everything they've touched so there should not be too many more times where we need to remove their "handywork."

Some of the screws were stripped, others were in so tight they broke when we tried to unscrew them. Some I just took a hacksaw to. It was a really unfun job, but it's done and we are ready to put the wall panels up next.

On Monday, we spent an hour and 45 minutes getting the first wall panel into place. The bottom one is the hardest because it has to be level, then the other 3 just sit on top of it. What makes it really tricky is that nothing is level, plumb or square or even straight in the garage. Because the whole wall generally slopes upward, this column of wall paneling doesn't line up with the first one we did. But we're pretty sure our plan is to knock the garage down and rebuild a newer, nicer one in the back so we're not concerned with making it super-nice. Nice is just fine.

On Wednesday, we got the rest of the wall panels up in this section. It only took 2 1/2 hours to do all 3 compared with 1.75 hours to do the first one.

On Thursday, Habitat for Humanity picked up some construction materials we aren't going to use. They took a lot, including full sheets of plywood and baseboard trim we aren't going to use. It felt great to get rid of that much stuff in one shot.

Here are some shots just for fun. This was taken Saturday night after we worked on the garage. We went to the beach and caught the sunset.

This was from later in the week. We had some wind and rain which make these sticks fall from the palm trees. I don't know what it is about these sticks, but the dogs go absolutely insane for them! They shred them and Danny eats them. One stick will keep the busy in the yard for hours, and they bug us to go outside if they know there is a stick out there.



Check out my business blog at http://www.michelechristensen.com/blog. You can also sign up for my FREE e-course "5 Essential Skills for Solopreneur Success" at http://www.michelechristensen.com.