To-do Lists Archives - Page 2 of 2

The Iron Fist

May 23, 2011 By Shannah Leave a Comment

5.22.11

Our to-do list has a lot of projects that are focused on decorating and personalizing our house. Of course, there are some items on there that are just “must-dos” to keep the house in tip-top shape. We started tackling one of them this weekend: repainting the basement egress railing and bricks.

The exit to our backyard from the basement has bricks on each side and black iron railing. Though the house is only a few years old, that whole area looks pretty terrible. The railing is rusty and the bricks have a lot of the rust residue on them marring the pretty white paint.

I finally made it to the store a few days ago to pick up the Rustoleum and masonry paint needed for the project. Quite surprised to have been asked for ID when buying spray paint but maybe that is just showing my home improvement naiveté. With supplies gathered, I set off to start this project figuring I could get the railing piece done in 2 evenings after work…famous last words of course.

The first step was to sand the railing to remove the rust and prepare it for the paint. Mathlete hubby supplied me with some sand paper and I set my muscles to working. When the sun went down, I had made a little bit of progress but was definitely nowhere near ready to paint.

After a week of monsoon like rain, we finally got back into the project yesterday. Wanting to speed things up a little so that we had even the slightest chance of finishing, I did a little bit of research and decided to buy a new tool:

The brush was just more efficient at cleaning off the rust so I was able to ~~speed~~ move along a little faster. I was no match for Mathlete Hubby with the wire brush tool though. He had one entire side done in the time it took me to unload the dishwasher (we were switching off time with Baby E).

Baby E was busying himself with his new pastime – straddling the air conditioner vent so the air will blow his hair around.

Baby E went down for his nap so I headed outside to start the painting on the sanded side. We chose the spray paint version versus the brush on version strictly in the interest of saving time. I was pretty efficient until I ran out of paint forcing me to go to Home Depot looking quite possibly the worst I have ever looked when out in public! I picked up some brush on Rustoleum while I was there too for touch-ups and the lower railings.

While Baby E took his second nap, I took H up for a little moon-bounce fun to stay out of Hubby’s hair so he could finish sanding and painting the railings.

Next up was painting the bricks with the masonry paint. I volunteered to start this part of the project so Hubby could ~~take a break~~ play with the kids. So, with my gigantic roller I set to work.

Rolling on the paint wasn’t quite as easy as I imagined as the roller quickly became filled with paint and got HEAVY! I was making good progress though when I switched off to cook dinner for our family Sunday dinner.

It took us until 9pm (including stops for lunch, a small rain shower and dinner) but we finally finished it.

Sell, baby, sell

May 18, 2011 By Shannah Leave a Comment

5.17.11

The aforementioned ~~monsoon~~ steady rain I mentioned yesterday has put a damper on my current to-do list project: sanding and repainting the railings and basement egress bricks. A rational person would just move to something else on the to-do list that doesn’t require being outdoors. I’ll never claim to be rational though and my brain just can’t move though the list like that because then I wouldn’t make it back to the “scheduled” project. Type A much…maybe just a little. So, I did what any irrational person would do and started a project not found anywhere on my list!

Much of the furniture in our house is old. Not old in a fabulous antique sort of way but old in a “I’m too cheap/lazy to put in the effort to buy new furniture.” Actually, that isn’t true. We do have a good reason for the oldness of our furniture. Up until the last year, we’ve always lived in an interim home…somewhere we didn’t plan to be for more than a few years. This interim home thinking kept us from buying new furniture because we didn’t want to drop a bunch of money on something that may not fit into our more permanent space. Now that we are in that more permanent space, I think we are ready to start replacing some of our older furniture. First on the list is the master bedroom furniture.
Our master bedroom furniture was a gift from my parents after college. We bought it used and it has been well used be me (when I was single) and then by Mathlete hubby too after we got married. This set consists of a bed and a long dresser with mirror. (Pardon the mess you see here in the pictures! We were working on emptying the dresser and pulling the stuff from under the bed when I snapped these pictures.)

Our bedroom isn’t really set up in a way where this size furniture works too well. The length of the dresser makes it only work in one space (unless we move it to the sitting area) forcing us to put the bed between the two windows on one of the walls. (I am sort of scooping myself with the pictures above because you can obviously tell the difference in the wall color and drapes!)

I don’t really mind the bed on that wall between the two windows and, quite honestly, might leave it there even when we get new furniture. However, because of the windows, I feel like a lower bed would look a lot better so it doesn’t crowd the windows so much. Something along the lines of:

I’ve been working up to getting rid of this bedroom furniture for awhile but never really made a move because I didn’t have anything to replace it with. Then, I decided that, if I sold the current stuff, I’d buy new stuff sooner. Yeah, I know, there goes that irrational thinking again! So, in the midst of our rain showers, I had Mathlete hubby move our bedroom furniture into the garage and promptly posted it on Craigslist. It is a great set just begging to be refinished and updated by someone with more time and patience than I have right now. So, with a little luck, this furniture will be gone by the end of the weekend and I can start working on purchasing the replacements.

To-Don’t List?

May 16, 2011 By Shannah Leave a Comment

I must have jinxed myself by putting up my to-do list because I haven’t had to time to really work on anything from it. We’ve got one project in the works but keep getting hampered by the constant raining. It doesn’t look like it will get any better until Saturday…

By then, it will probably take another week to mow our lawn because it is likely to look like this:

Even though I haven’t tackled ~~any~~ much of the to-do, I have been really busy. Our neighborhood had a community yard sale this weekend and we participated. I love the feeling of purging our house of unwanted/underused items. It was cold and drizzly that day too but we stuck it out and managed to sell a good bit of the items we had out there. What we didn’t sell went straight to Goodwill.

Sunday, we had back to back birthday parties. One was for a good friend’s one year old little girl. The other was a four year old’s Princess tea party. The tea party was so fun that I only managed to snap one quick picture of the table.

Lots of fun but not very productive!

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