June 2006

We closed up the wall on the house side of the den and left a little surprise for the next person who opens up this wall.

After the initial taping of the joints in the archway dried, I installed the flexible corner bead around the curves.

We put up a new mailbox recently and finally got around to replacing the front porch light. I think it's a big improvement over the previous version. Unfortunately, I don't have a good before picture, so you'll just have to trust me on this one.

A little more joint compound the archway.

And the first of the wallpaper comes down in in the living room. I can already tell this is going to be a very slow process.

We're removing the brick patio from the back yard and reusing the bricks as a border between the flower beds and yard.

Finally, we have some grass seed to repair part of the yard that was killed last summer by heat, drought, and grubs. As you can see, this is only a small part of what really needs to be repaired, but at least it will get most of what is visible from the street. At least if this turns green, I won't feel so embarrassed about the appearance of the yard, and we can work on the rest of it later. In the second picture, you can see the landing at the bottom of the side porch steps that I made from some salvaged concrete pavers and bricks.

I recently started removing the harder-to-remove tiles from the basement floor. About half the floor tiles popped up easily, but these are securely glued in place. I found that it was possible to get them up with a heat gun and scraper. It's slow going though. I can remove maybe 25 tiles in an hour.

Later, I tackled some more patio demolition. It was pretty hard to move these timbers and cut them up. The larger pieces were really two peices nailed together. I finally ended up cutting them with the saw and breaking them. I had to set the saw blade to cut as deep as possible, then make a notch about an inch or two wide all the way around, then snap what was left.

Mostly clean now.