AirGuitarRockin's Blog

Hey, you! Get off my lawn!!

AirGuitarRockin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:41:00 GMT

Here's a terrifying thought: Not only have I become one of those possessive, cranky homeowners, I have also become my mother. Yikes, I just might need therapy now. (Kidding, kidding, mostly...)

(Quick back-story. My parents moved into their house over the 4th of July. The village parade goes right by their house. My mom's upstairs unpacking when she sees all these people gathering on her new tree lawn. She's ticked - this is HER yard, and these bums better get off it NOW. Dad investigates. They learn the parade's about to go by, and they've sat out with the neighbors almost every year since to watch it.)

Anyway... our new neighbors to the left (not Duane and Joyce) have a boat sitting in their backyard. It looks a little redneck, but it's in the back, it's their yard, whatever. Friday, I'm outside shaking the extra water out of the paint roller, and I notice that there's now a truck in the backyard hooked up to the boat. OK, they're taking the boat out for the 4th. Good for them. But then I realize that the only way to get the truck back to the boat was to drive between the houses - ON OUR LAWN. This is when I start to get a little upset. This is my new yard; our car is in the driveway; the windows are open. It's obvious we're there. Couldn't you ask or give us a heads-up that you'll be driving on our grass?! Grrr.

I tell Andy about this, and he says, "Let's not get them mad at us yet; the yard's dry; they didn't hurt anything. We'll take it up with them later when we're going to plant a flower bed on that side of the house."

OK, fine. I don't want to start a fight with someone that I haven't met yet, especially since we'll be living right next door to them!

But, that evening, Andy's inside finishing up the sanding, and I'm out grilling burgers for us in our driveway. I notice that the truck is back, with the empty boat trailer (they must dock the boat somewhere for the summer), and that they're trying to back the trailer into its spot in the yard. To do so, they're backing it into ours! This isn't just the truck tires being a couple feet over the line; they're backing a good 30 feet into our lawn WHILE I AM STANDING THERE. (Keep in mind that our our lot is 60 feet wide. They're in more than 1/2 our yard.) Then, on their way out, they make the observation, "hey she's grilling!" and they smile and wave. (I did smile and wave back.)

Now this is going to be a problem next year, since we're planning on planting a garden. It's very possible that they would have been driving right over it. And I am so glad it hasn't really rained in a while; can you image what our grass would look like? Since we don't want to pick a fight, we're going to talk to them later on about how we're planning on planting things, and that they'll need to find some other way in and out of their backyard before we get our plants in the ground. Hopefully that works out and doesn't cause too much trouble!

Then, I realized that I had the exact same reaction about my new lawn that my mom did about hers. Scary!

Getting things done

AirGuitarRockin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:27:00 GMT

We're working our way down the to-do list. I have the stairway and the one bedroom wall finished. (2 coats of "Creek Bend," which turned out much grayer than I was expecting. The samples made me think it would have more green in it, but it's very gray. Andy's excited because it's very close to the gray that the Navy and Air Force use for the jets... such a dork.) It looks good with the red though, thank goodness. I still have to put at least one, probably two coats of red paint on the rest of the master bedroom.

Andy spent all day Friday sanding and prepping the living room floor for stain and polyurethane. He put the stain on yesterday morning, and he'll put the first coat of polyurethane on tomorrow night after work. It looks really nice, but it ended up not matching the hardwood floors in the hallway and office. (We picked the color based on the mostly-empty can of stain that the previous owners had left in the basement, thinking that it was what they'd used on the floors.) Nope, turns out that it matches the trim perfectly. They must have just put clear polyurethane on the floor and let the natural wood color show through. Oh well. I'm not too concerned about the rooms matching, since the floor goes so nicely with the trim. Maybe we'll do something about that if we go to sell the house later on, but that's the least of my concerns right now.

I'm still not sure how to tackle the kitchen cabinets. Andy was able to rip out the old, rainbow-checked contact paper that was lining the cabinets, and he also took out the aqua and blue vinyl (maybe? I've never seen anything like them before) fake, tile-like things that were glued to the back of the upper cabinets. Unfortunately, they left some really gross, tacky, glue/adhesive stuff on the backside of the cabinets (or the wall, since I'm not convinced that the cabinets actually have backs). And I'm at a loss as to how to get it off. It didn't budge when he scrubbed it with Pine Sol and Spin & Span. Any thoughts?

The cabinets really need some finish or paint or something, but I can't figure out what color to do for them. And since the kitchen is the room that we'd be most likely to really remodel in a few years (hopefully), part of me doesn't want to put a lot of work into them now. Ideally, we'd like to bump out the front kitchen wall so it's level with the front porch, giving us enough room to put the dining room table in there comfortably, adding some cabinet/pantry space, and adding a dishwasher. Since this project would involve moving/adding exterior walls, it'd be pricey. Just how pricey, I don't know. But if we could say "yes, we're doing this in 3 years," I might be tempted just to scrub the cabinets really well and live with them until then. But if it costs too much, then we won't be able to afford it, and I should just fake-fix the cabinets now. Ugh, decisions.

So, that was our weekend. We did get to see fireworks Thursday night with some friends, and then we had dinner and shot off some fireworks with a couple friends from church last night. I also got to hit up our farmer's market Saturday before diving into our projects, so we're stocked on the fresh veggies (and strawberries!) for the week. Our small group/Bible study is meeting at our apartment tonight, so that should be nice too. I definitely feel like I could use a weekend to recover from my weekend though!

We are two very different people...

AirGuitarRockin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:27:00 GMT

...and our differences never come out quite as strongly as when we're working on projects together. (If you needed an example for "opposites attract," look no further.) Andy and I have different ways of going about things, and we are starting to drive each other nuts with our various projects.

We have 3 things that we really want to get done before we move into the new house - paint the master bedroom, refinish the living room floor, and refinish/paint the kitchen cabinets. Just about everything else can be done little by little once we're moved in (and after his parents come to visit at the end of the month... again!). So tonight, we go to Home Depot and buy the paint for the bedroom and the ladder that Andy's been wanting. (I didn't think the ladder needed to be bought right away... which probably added to my frustration.) We also wanted to check into renting a sander for the weekend so Andy could take advantage of the long weekend and get the floor done. Turns out this particular Home Depot doesn't rent tools. No big deal; there's a small hardware store just around the block from our place, and we know that they do. But Andy doesn't want to go there; he'd rather just take the ladder back to the apartment and check out the gutters. He'll go tomorrow night, he says. And I'm thinking... great, so he'll be no help with the painting then, if he's running errands all night. Things just snowballed like that all evening. In all fairness, I'm sure that I am just as aggravating to him right now as he is to me. Here's hoping that tomorrow goes smoother!

Thank goodness we only have 3 projects - can you imagine if we'd bought a real fixer-upper?

It's official!

AirGuitarRockin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:33:00 GMT

We closed yesterday with no problems! We now have the keys, and spent yesterday evening checking out the new place. We also met some of the neighbors. It looks like we'll be living right next to the cutest older couple, Duane and Joyce. They gave us a quart of fresh strawberries from their garden as a "welcome to the neighborhood" present!! (And we all know how I feel about fresh strawberries.... mmmmmmmm.)

We're going back over tonight to show some friends the new place, and then we're heading back to Ohio for a wedding Friday after work. So it'll be next week before we can start tackling projects, but we're excited about it.

5 days away!

AirGuitarRockin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:56:00 GMT

We drove past "our" house tonight, and they put a sold sign out!! I want to go back and take a picture of us next to the sold sign. How cheesy is that? We went on a "date night" to Home Depot tonight, since our Saturday morning date to the farmer's market has been postponed. I picked up a ton of paint chips, and Andy checked out the lawn mowers. We must be getting old and boring, if a trip to Home Depot is a "date." We finished off the night at Dairy Queen, does that count for something?

Aww... there go my weekend plans.

AirGuitarRockin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:22:00 GMT

This Saturday is the opening day for our town's farmer's market. I've been looking forward to it for the last 6 months or so (I have a thing for fresh produce, especially strawberries!), and so I told Andy I wanted to go first thing Saturday morning. And then, depending on the price of the strawberries at the farmer's market, I was thinking about actually going strawberry picking Saturday afternoon. (I have a fresh strawberry obsession; I blame my mom for this. We'd pick close to 100 pounds when I was a kid, eat some and freeze most of them. "Fresh" strawberries all winter, yummy....)

But this morning, we get an e-mail that some friends of ours are moving Saturday. (They were renting a house, but the owner sold it, and they have to be totally out of the house by the end of the month.) Andy and Joe are really close, and so I know he's going to want to go help. And I want to help too, I really do, but I want my strawberries, dang it! (Maybe we can stop in at the market first thing, and then go to Joe & Kandi's right after, or go out and pick berries tonight...)

OK, that's my selfish rant for the morning. I guess I'd better get going to work. TGIF!

Closing has been moved up!

AirGuitarRockin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:20:00 GMT

Our realtor called us last night, and wanted to know what we thought about moving the closing date up to the 25th. We'd been going back and forth with the seller about running a ground wire into part of the house, and they offered to do that if we closed early. So it looks like we'll be home owners in eight days!

I'm really excited about it; I made a list of things I'd like to do to the house before we move all of our stuff in. (We have 60 days before we have to be out of our apartment, so we have some time.) It's nothing major, mostly just some painting, but the look on Andy's face was too funny. I could see him thinking, "she's giving me to-do lists already, and we don't even have the keys." Haha, poor guy. We've never done home repairs together; he has NO idea what he's in for.

Andy's home!

AirGuitarRockin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:59:00 GMT

I picked him up at the airport this morning at 8 a.m. As much as I liked getting to do my own thing, I really missed him, and it was great to have him back home. We relaxed in the morning, and then took care of some phone calls to our realtor (ugh, when will the home-buying process be over?!), and then went to see the new Indiana Jones movie (finally!).

I liked the movie well enough, but it's nowhere near as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark or the Last Crusade. I still can't decide how it stacks up against the Temple of Doom. I just didn't like the aliens in the movie. (I blame George Lucas for this; I think he got his Harrison Ford characters mixed up.) Indiana Jones does not discover aliens. He digs up buried treasure, finds lost artifacts, that kind of thing. UFOs and aliens just don't fit. I could have bought into almost any other story line, I think. So that was kind of disappointing. But, I did like how Indy and Marion got back together - she was my favorite heroine from the original three.

We spent the rest of the evening just relaxing and watching the US Open. (How great is Tiger Woods?!) After being apart all week, it was nice to just be together and catch up. I'd thought about going to the Flag Day parade here and getting together with some friends tonight, but we needed some quality Andy and Beth time, especially since we have small group tomorrow night.