I’ve always been interested in the design aesthetic of houses. But now having built one, I notice a lot more. Take this one a mile or so from ours for instance. I always thought the plantation style columns were odd for this area. The aesthetic is especially strange with the columns being so tall andRead more about The things you notice[…]
Much of our paint is still in great shape. Most of it is between 3 and 4 years old. But we had a few areas that needed touch up on the outside. As you would expect, some of the wood used for the exterior trim, expanded or contracted over the first couple of years andRead more about Exterior paint touch-up[…]
Count it among the little things we are doing to make our house more usable; we added a small bike shed in our back yard. True to pandemic form, the shed was out of stock for quite a while before it was available again. And it took two guys 7 hours to put it together;Read more about Bike shed[…]
The last bit of actual construction we had to do was to build a shed. We wanted to have a place to store all the stuff that was taking up space in our garage. We build it where our wood rack used to be, in the far corner of the yard. We used an oldRead more about The shed[…]
We got chickens in two batches last year. The first batch was three (one for each child) but one of them turned out to be a rooster. So we got two more, 7 weeks younger than the first two. In January first one, then the other of the first two started laying eggs. This month,Read more about The chickens and the eggs[…]
While our pool was in progress in early 2020, we started planning our outdoor furniture. The pandemic delaying things somewhat, but by late 2020 we had all of our furniture in place. The furniture really makes the outdoor spaces livable and enjoyable. Around the pool: Back patio Pool house: Front patio Front yard: Decks: ItRead more about Outdoor furniture[…]
Almost a year since the pandemic began, and 7 months since our last post. Life has been mostly about living in and enjoying our house, at a time when we really appreciate having our house to enjoy. After finishing our pool, outdoor BBQ area, chicken coop, doing some landscape refreshing, and adding more solar inRead more about Living in it[…]
When we installed our solar system in 2018, we installed a little more than half what we had the capacity for on the roof. The idea was that we didn’t want to over install solar, so we thought we’d sit back and see what portion of our usage the initial array offset. In the yearRead more about More solar[…]
Our front lawn had never really thrived. It looked stressed and started developing some brown spots a few months after it was installed. And it showed striping, with rows of greener and browner areas. Given that our watering system was in rows under the lawn, this meant that something with the watering was wrong,Read more about Lawn redux[…]
We added an audio system to our pool area. Visible there are 3 of 6 speakers, and the sub-woofer that will get buried in the ground except for the mushroom cap. It is driven by this system in our pool mechanical room. It integrates with our whole house audio system such that we stream musicRead more about Outdoor music[…]