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.