Let's play with my Snazzy Garottage project
rredpenn
10 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
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samoken
4 days agoRelated Discussions
While husband's away I'll play project
Comments (11)Mentha, You just have to get creative. My husband (bless his pea-pickin'-heart) is a slug at home. We've lived in the same house for 21 years and to get ANYthing done takes forEVER because he feels HE has to do it (he IS in the construction industry, after all), but will he get out of the recliner and work on a project? Heck, no! So, for example, we talked and talked and talked about remodling the basement (for YEARS, mind you!!) Saved our money, HAD the money, but he never had the gumption to get it started. I finally started bringing contractors in to give me bids, which scared him into getting started. It still took a few months to get it done, but it got him off his butt!! As for my GH - and a lot of you have heard this one - I just waited until he wanted a "big ticket" item and negotiated that I would go along with HIS Harley if I could have a GH of equal value. Result: he was a little smarter about how much he spent on his Harley (because it did, in essence cost him twice as much!) and I got my GH. You just gotta know how to manipulate them - just do it with a big kiss-kiss and love-darts in your eyes! Here's another... I got a little inheritence when my Dad passed away - it's been sitting in savings for nearly 3 years now, earmarked for a complete remodel of the bathroom in our 88 year old house. My plan: as soon as I have a couple days off, take a sledge hammer to the walls while love-muffin is at work, then proudly show him how "helpful" I was to get started on our project when he comes home from work. He'll do a bad job of hiding his irritation (after all, he CAN'T be mad 'cuz I was being helpful!!), but then he'll kick into gear and get going on it, OR he'll concede to let me hire a contractor to get it started. It's all about the "win-win"!! Denise in Omaha...See MoreLet's play a new game called...What IS that?
Comments (23)OOO ooo oo, I guess it's some sort of way-to-big ant mound? I've seen that picture (one similar) on one of these forums and was amazed at what critter built it. Ah, Sherry! I was being slow and just understood your answer. Okay, I change my answer from ant mound to the same as Sherry's--"mother earth" Haaaa, LOL! Carla...See MoreLet's play a game, name the approximate price! LOL...
Comments (25)SE - I will definitely enjoy the garage and now I can enjoy the basement too, since we will store all our crap in the garage. coldnose - our home is 2025 sqft + about another 800 in walk-out basement. My experience with the panelized package is both good and only OK. Good - lumber was awesome awesome quality. Got the package from farwesthomes, who own their own mill. I have some large beams and posts. Walls went up fast and were square. We had a gable wall (31' peek) with picture windows that went up in a day, my carpenters said it would have taken them over a week to stick build. Lots of left over lumber from packaging (and miscommunication about walkout basement). Price was with-in 10K of other lumber yard quotes (Meeks, 84, Moss Lumber). Able to make custom plans, change their stock plans, use stock plans. The only OK - Still have to stick build floors. not huge deal. Had two miss cuts in posts where beams were to slide in. We fixed it fairly simple, but it took a few hours of head scratching. Had to get engineering separately and then have farwest build plans. Some miss communication between engineer and farwest. It would have been nice if they had an in-house engineer. I was/am not happy with my engineer. Roof rafters suck. Took a month to stick frame the roof. Mislead on difficulty of the whole thing. We were told it would be about 6 weeks to get the whole thing shelled-in. Perhaps with a crew of 10, it took us over double that with a crew of 3-4. No room for play. The walls come square, if your foundation is a little off, you cannot "fudge" the walls. Lay-out (16" on center) gets screwed up do to how the panels fit together. Not a huge deal, but slows you down during siding. All in all, i am happy with it. If I ever do this again, I may or may not use it again. Definitely not pissed or stoked about the whole thing. I am about due for more pictures. We just had a framing pre-inspection today (we were not ready with elect or fire sprinklers). She could not find one thing wrong and was really impressed. We are wrapping up elect on friday and sprinklers go in over the weekend. We will get framing, plumbing, elect inspection on monday. Insulation next week and then sheetrock end of next week and weekend. 12 hour days are getting old. I start summer school on monday. that should be fun....See MoreNovember 2018, Week 2, Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow....
Comments (42)Lots of lady bugs made it into the mudroom Friday, and there's some in the sunroom. A few made it into the house. I told the girls Friday night that I was going to vacuum up the lady bugs and put them back outdoors (I use the shop vac and they survive being vacuumed up, so no harm is done to them) and the 4 year old was very upset. She told me I couldn't vacuum up her favorite 'pets' in the whole world and send them back outdoors to die in the cold, and she said she wanted to play with them and talk to them. (sigh) So, I told her we'd let them stay indoors for at least the weekend, meaning that as soon as she leaves Sunday afternoon, I'll have the shop vac out, searching out every one of those little beetles and returning them to the outdoors. I'm not sure what good it does---on every sunny day they are swarming around all the doors, trying to come in every time a human, dog or cat goes in or out. I don't really want to spray any sort of pesticide to keep them away from the house, so am resigned to them continuing to fight to come in and to me having to vacuum them up and put them back out until it finally gets so cold that they stop swarming. We even had a couple of them in the car yesterday. Oh, and true to her word, the 4 year old will pick one up if she finds it, carry it around and talk to it. She wanted to catch some and have them sleep with her, but we overruled that little plan. I think somehow they are even getting into the mudroom around the exterior door frame, which I thought Tim had re-when we repainted the exterior of the house 2 or 3 years ago.....so, we need to examine that area and see if there is a gap somewhere that isn't filled. I am so happy to see lady bugs of any type outdoors in the growing season, and they surely do eat tons of small pests because I rarely have any issues with things like aphids. However, their garden usefulness still doesn't mean they are welcome to come into our home for the winter. They can overwinter in the garage or greenhouse all they want, but I don't want them indoors. We still have butterflies, despite multiple heavy frosts and nights as low as the mid-teens. At this point, I'm not sure how they're surviving, but the garden does still have dianthus and salvia farinacea in bloom, so at least there's that. I've seen various butterflies flying low over the now-brown pastures searching for something, but I can't imagine what they're finding there, if anything. Even the native autumn asters are frozen and gone, as is the native blue sage, the helenium and all the other late-season fall wildflowers. We have the girls all day today, and then a funeral in Fort Worth tomorrow, so my brain hasn't even thought about Thanksgiving much yet, except the meal is all planned and taken care of. So, really, it is just a matter of cleaning house Tuesday, and then spending Wednesday getting ready. Oh, and squeezing in a trip to the grocery store sometime, perhaps Monday on the way home, before the stores get too crazy. The house has been decorated for Thanksgiving ever since the day after Halloween, so at least that part of it all is done. I know some people have Christmas trees up already and all that (why? why so early?), but I redecorated the mudroom's pencil tree, changing it from a Halloween tree to a Thanksgiving tree on November 1st, and I love that Thanksgiving tree with its Thanksgiving decorations. I think it looks a lot prettier than the somewhat scary Halloween tree did. The girls adore having a holiday tree in the mudroom, and both they and Tim have lobbied for me to keep it up year-round, changing the decorations with each holiday and season, but I am not inclined to do that because I am not crazy, At least I don't think I am crazy. It is one thing to spend a little time decorating an autumn tree for Halloween and Thanksgiving, when the rain is falling almost daily and I cannot be outdoors anyway, but it would be another thing to let decorating a tree seasonally pull me away from gardening time any at all once the gardening season starts, so after Christmas the tree goes back into its box and into the attic. Winter is my least favorite season, unless we have snow on the ground (which we almost never ever do) and it already looks like and mostly feels like winter here. I have tried to learn to appreciate the subtle variations of color in the wheat-colored, brown, and tawny golden fields, but I just cannot. All I do is look at those fields and long for the green plants and flowers of the growing season. When we drive past a field of winter wheat or rye grass and I see the green, that makes my day. Our dog yard does have a nice carpet of winter rye, and it is the best-looking part of our property at this point. It looks awesome, undoubtedly because the dogs fertilize it daily. It is small enough that it is easy to mow in winter, which isn't true of the yard in the years when we overseed it with rye grass, which we didn't do this year because the rain never stopped falling. It is hard to overseed the lawn with free-range chickens because they'll run around and spend days eating all the rye grass seed before it can sprout, and I'm not inclined to keep them cooped up in the chicken run for a couple of weeks until winter rye can become established. After Thanksgiving is over, I'll take down all the autumn decorations and put up the Christmas decorations. That's how I spend Black Friday, as I simply refuse to step foot in the crazy stores. Oh Lordy, I do not want to sound like my mother or grandmother talking about how things were different back in the olden days, but I remember how, way back in the 1980s when Black Friday was a big day, there were truly great sale prices you never could get on any other day of the year---and people still were civilized and didn't fight over the last Christmas Barbie Doll or Cabbage Patch doll or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy. We'd run into friends while out shopping the Black Friday sales and would stand and chat and be perfectly relaxed and in no big hurry, trading info on what gifts we had found in which stores, and I miss that sort of thing nowadays, with the way Black Friday has become more like a competitive, winner-takes-all battle of some sort. I refuse to participate in it at all. This year I've noticed a big trend by the retailers to be pushing us all to go out and Christmas shop this weekend for the Pre-Black Friday Day sales in order to beat the Black Friday crowds. Oh, give me a break! The retail world drives me nuts any more. We try really hard to keep the Christmas gifts simple and to focus on Christmas as a time of togetherness and making memories apart from the gifting. I feel like we often lose the spirit of Christmas if we pay too much to the retailers and their endless pushing of the "hot toys" or "hot gifts" of the current year. If the retailers want to get me into their stores at this time of the year, they need to have big displays of potted, growing amaryllis or paperwhites, Christmas cacti, etc......or maybe they could be sneaking the spring-planted bulbs into a corner of the Christmas-oriented garden center madness we have now That, at least, would get me into a store. It is deer gun season now, and even though we don't allow hunting on our acreage, it is a scary time with people firing off guns everywhere. We try to make a point of wearing red or orange every time we step foot outdoors during deer season so that nobody hunting on adjacent property will think we're a deer and shoot us. I had a bullet whistle by my head one day years ago, so close I could hear it go past me and am grateful to God to this day that the bullet, fired by a teenager two properties away from ours, missed me and our next door neighbor both. It was very scary, and our next-door neighbor immediately went next-door and read that family the riot act about irresponsible firing of weapons in such a way that the bullets are a threat to innocent people on their own property. Since that day, we keep the dogs indoors as much as possible because Jersey is the same color as a white-tailed deer, and she runs like the wind and leaps like a deer. Fortunately, gunfire terrifies her so it is easy to keep her indoors in deer season because she doesn't even want to be outdoors. The two smaller dogs probably have learned their gunshot anxiety from her, so they cheerfully trot outdoors to do their doggie business and they run back, pawing at the back door and barking until I let them back in as soon as they hear gunfire, no matter how far away it is. As far as we're all concerned here, deer season cannot end soon enough (the current deer gun season ends December 2nd, if anyone is wondering). The garden still looks pathetic and will for several more months, but at least the rosemary, sage and parsley remain green. Oh, and the onion chives and garlic chives, dianthus, salvia farinacea, autumn sage and malva sylvestris 'Zebrina'. The asparagus still is green too, which is quite vexing. I like to cut it back to the ground after it turns brown, but so far it is refusing to help me out by turning brown so it continues to live on, green and billowy, swaying gently in the wind....See Morekcooz07
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