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Flooring has been installed

james — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:41:48 +0000

After a very long week, the main floor of our house now has very nice 4 inch solid oak flooring. The only areas that do not have hardwood floors now are the two bathrooms. It was a very long week last week. My boss was nice enough to let me work from home while the floors were being installed. Jen and Emma went to Jen’s parents for the week. I was busy in the evenings, moving things around to getting some of the todo list taken care of. It was a very productive and tiring week (for both Jen and I ). The deck is partially stained. Still have to do the railings, but the flooring is all set. I had a little run in with the power washer two weeks ago. My wrist is healing nicely now. I found out our power washer can take skin right off of a human body if you get it to close.

We still have a few things to move back upstairs and a few pictures to hang. We also want to put a little padding or something under our new area rug in the living room. Still a little bit hard for Emma to play on, or shall we say bounce around on. The floor turned out better than we expected. Taylor did not like it at first but is fine now. We just have to cut her nails and I mean cut her nails. She has already left a few marks from getting startled, but I hope to have her nails short enough that she will not be marking the floors anymore.

New Sliding Glass Door

james — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:56:42 +0000

Over the weekend Jen and Emma went down to see Grandma and Papa in Stevensville. While they were gone for the day we had scheduled to have a Handy man come out and install a new Pella sliding glass door. In the middle of waiting for the door to arrive all of the systems that are hosted in MD for the company I work for went down due to a Oracle db cluster having issues over night. We finally decided to start a full server by server reboot to remedy the problem. By the time this process started the Handy Man had shown up. Luckily the reboot process did not require my interaction so I was able to get the Handy Man all he needed so he could get started. At that point the db cluster just came up and app servers were getting restarted. I cycled a few services on another server and the Point of Sales system and inventory control system were back up. The handy man took a little longer than I expected (also a bit longer than he estimated, but got it for the same prices none the less). I was trimming the carpet by the door and hanging the drapes around 4pm. After a little clean up, the new door is better than we had hoped. Now to see how it handles the winter. Our old door was starting to get very difficult to open an close but in the winter it would ice up so it was almost impossible to open an close. This new door you can open and close with your pinky finger. Hopefully Emma does not want to play with it to much. The nice thing is, is the door is on the outside so she can’t get to it when it is open and the lock is to high for her to reach now. The other door she was just talk enough to lock and unlock, only locked me out once and she unlocked is very quickly after she locked it.

Everything is on order

james — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:29:27 +0000

Last week I ordered a new patio door. Looks like that will be in sometime around 6/16/09. Just have to schedule the installer to come out and replace the existing door after it comes in.

We went ahead and booked the flooring installer for the week of July 6th. He will drop off the trim work the week before so I can get a coat of paint on the quarter round and stain the shoe molding for the kitchen.

Saturday I ordered all of the flooring and drop in flush mount registers and trim for the top of the stairs. Now we play the waiting game. Hopefully everything falls into place.

I want to have the door in before the floors. The flooring was a very good price due to over stock. We got very lucky. We wanted either 4 or 5 inch natural red oak. They had 4 inch red oak from a place in Michigan that we really liked. Now to see what it looks like once it comes in and gets installed. I think we are going to be very happy.

Just picked up some Bona floor cleaner in preparation of the new floors. Got a few packs of felt pads so we are ready to put all of the furniture back on the floors after it is installed. Don’t want to mark up any of the floors with furniture.

Changes to our house

james — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:34:37 +0000

We have decided to stay in our current home. We had been toying with looking for a larger home. With the market the way it is, we really don’t want to take a loss on our house so we are just going to make some changes that we have always wanted. The windows and sliding glass door in our house are horrible. We have decided to just replace the slider right now. We are going with a Pella pro 450. Just ordered it yesterday from Menards. Went with a wood door and a white inside and outside finish. We hope it will be in later this month. We are almost ready to schedule the installation of hardwood floors for all of the rooms on the main floor of our house. We are in the final stages of negations with two different quotes. Amazing what you can negation in a bad economy. Depending on the quotes we go with. We may have talked one local store down just over 4 grand in their bid. Just waiting on the last bid from a local installer. We are hoping to schedule the installation to happen the week after the 4th of July weekend. I hope everything goes smooth as far as the schedule we want for the door and floor installation.

Finished up most of the details on the outside of the shed just in time

james — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:57:28 +0000

Man that was just in time. Last night we got a bunch of rain. I was glad I was able to get a second coat of paint on all wood that had external exposure on the shed. I also think I sealed up any cracks and what not in the trim work along the fascia. Now if I can get to the last few details and get everything moved in and organized.

Shed pretty much finished

james — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:22:26 +0000

This weekend I was able to finish up much of the finish work on the shed. It is ready for winter. I was able to finish up the siding on the sides and the front and built the doors and got a second coat of paint on all wood on the outside of the shed. I bought one more sheet of sofit so I could finish that up and caulked all corners of the fascia. There were some notches that we had to cut out of the floor to fit around the frame of the shed and some of them are quite a bit larger than they needed to be. It made fitting the floor much easier. Now that it is all together I need to fill these wholes somehow. I bought a roll of roofing tin and will roll that out and cut very tight fitting notches out of this and that will fill all of the holes. I just don’t want animals getting into the shed if possible. I plan on putting some mothballs under it to try to keep as many animals away anyway. After I take care of this last item I hope to get most things out of the garage and into the shed. This will take a few hours probably. I also bought a few 2x4s today. I plan to build some shelving and also some brackets to store the chairs from the deck in the winter. So a bit more to do but if I can’t get out to do any of it due to being busy with Emma, no big deal. The shed is weather proof I believe and ready for winter if it has to be.

Coax cable finally run into the attic

james — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:30:44 +0000

Over the weekend my brother-in-law came over to play some ping pong but also to help run a coax cable from the utility room up to the attic. Took awhile to get setup and figure out the best way to run a cable. We quickly found out that it was going to be close to impossible to run it down the wall that all of the other cables were run when the house was built. So we moved on to how to run it outside but out of sight. We found an easy way to run it out of the attic down a corner peice of the siding and into the same hole the cable from charter and the cat5 cable were run into the house(still have to fill the hole so rain can’t get in). So now the cable it hooked up in the basement and I am testing to see what I can get with it and a cheap antenna I had. It is a powered antenna but does not seem to get all channels I would have hoped. All channels are there and coming in, just 2 of them are weak enough right now that they will probably have problems later. I am in the process of moving the antenna around in the attic to see if I can get a better signal. If not I may go out and get a bigger antenna from radioshack. Probably won’t do that for a few weeks though. I will see what I can get working with this first.

Furniture has been delivered

james — Sat, 13 May 2006 14:48:45 +0000

I will have to say that the whole art van experience pretty much sucked. But in the end, the delivery and delivery crew was the best part of the experience. All three items are here and they are all the same color. I think they look very nice in the room. I will plan on posting some pictures of them this coming week. No damage to the furniture or house during the delivery. Over all I am very happy with the new furniture. Much more comfortable than the futons. Now we have to move the futons to other rooms.

Verified, all 3 items will be delivered on saturday

james — Wed, 10 May 2006 17:02:26 +0000

I called art van this morning and verified the special order recliner sofa, love seat and chair are all in and ready for delievery. I said that a message left at our home machine said that the sofa and love seat were in. I asked if she could tell me what items were going to be delivered on saturday. She listed all three items.

Now we just have to wait to see what shows up and make sure they are the items we ordered. Then I want to go over each item to make sure there is no damage and that they do not damage anything bringing the items into the house.

Just got a call yesterday, furniture is in and ready for delivery

james — Wed, 10 May 2006 11:51:07 +0000

Art Van called yesterday to let me know they are ready to deliver the furniture. Setup saturday and the delivery date. Got home and there was another message. Said the special order couch and loveseat are in. That is great and all but we ordered a couch loveseat and rocker/recliner chair also. I will call today once they open and find out if all 3 are in. They messed up the original order so I would not be suprised if the chair is not in yet.