Archive for category Home Improvement

Time, Changes, Life Is What It Is…

So, it’s been awhile… Over 5 years since I typed anything here, which is crazy to me because I didn’t think it had been that long, but apparently it has been.

So what has changed? Well a lot really…

I have had 2 different jobs in this time period. One of them was only for a little over a year and it involved more traveling than I would have thought was humanly possible, and the other is way more stationary and in the same office, in the same building, in the same town, with the same commute every single day. Although I did go on two work trips to New Jersey related to a company we purchased, but those were only 2 days each and it was New Jersey so take it for what it is.

I still technically live in the same condo I bought in 2013, but that will change shortly because we just bought a new house and will move in when we have finished some renovations on it.

Notice I said we not I? Yeah, I am no longer just an I, I am now a we since I got married in 2020 to the most wonderful woman who I met about 6 months after my last post here… SO that may be one reason why I have not posted here, just been occupied with that. We went on a couple awesome vacations pre-pandemic, one of which was where the proposal happened and the other was just a relaxing trip together a few months later to sort of celebrate the engagement.

Additionally, the we shall become 3 in a couple months too.

See, lots and lots of changes are a happening… Maybe I will update this a bit more often with those sorts of things.

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Photo 365 – 1/17/2010

Coat Rack a la Ned


1/17/2010

Originally uploaded by Nedster78

I needed a place to hang coats, and such that wasn’t my hall closet. It just doesn’t work well for everyday stuff since it is so full of coats that people don’t wear that often.

I was going to buy a coat tree for next to the front door, but those are ridiculously expensive, so I decided to buld this instead.

it holds up to 12 things easy, and a couple more if I really load it up.

I attached it directly to the studs in the wall, so it ain’t coming down anytime soon.

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Finally…


WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Originally uploaded by Nedster78

This is a photo of a large land carving machine…

This is a sign of things that I have been waiting for since last year, I have all my permits and I have finally got a reliable person who has been able to do the digging I needed done to my yard.

Thanks to Wayne, the digging has been done and I am now capable of actually being able to build my walls. Yes, not just one wall but multiple walls. I have the two tiered wall out by the street, and then I have the wall down the side of the house along the property line.

Both of these are now dug(dugged?) and I have stone laid in the trench along the side of the house, and the first railroad tie laid in the front of the house.

Work is underway! I hope to have all the project done by the end of Labor Day weekend. Once that part of the project is done, I can work on the “finish” work of putting in some flower, putting in some stairs, and having the cinder block wall extension and the side of my front door stairs re-stucco’d.

Then come september or october, Wayne is dropping off a whole bunch of loam for me, and I am going to try to get my front yard back to being a lawn again…. how cool will that be?

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Foot Update

As I mentioned on Twitter earlier, I am both relieved and slightly disappointed this morning.

My foot is slightly sore, only mildly swollen, and it has not turned any funky colors.

So it’s good that my injury doesn’t appear to be anything close to serious nor long term, I was kind of looking forward to a really funky colored foot this morning.

Even better, it appears as though this won’t have any effect on me being able to play in the double header on Sunday. One thing that does slightly scare me is that I might actually be called in to pitch part of the double header, not sure how that’s gonna go though. I’m just glad I won’t be in the batters box!

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Ouch…




Not a good day for feet!!

Originally uploaded by Nedster78

So this is a photo of my foot…

If you look closely you can see a nice big bump forming about halfway up the top of my foot… it’s light blue with some dark red specks all over it… but that is tough to see on a photo taken with a blackberry.

How it happened.

As many people who know me are aware, I am in the process of some major work being done in my yard in a massive landscaping project I took on last year that started out just as me widening my driveway and it has expanded so much further.

I built a wall out of used railroad ties, however the city had some issues with it and I have had some permit problems and had received a stop work order from the town.

Yadda Yadda Yadda… I now have a permit and can continue building my wall.

Well I decided to change the design of my wall through the process, so I have to take down the wall I had partially built in order to put in the new wall that was approved by the city to be built.

My roommate is going to help me, but tonight I was alone and went out to do some demolition of the wall. I am using the new 5ft pry bar I bought to separate the ties from one another. They are about 9 inches thick, 8 feet long, and are attached to one another with 12 inch galvanized steel nails, they weigh variably from about 300-350 pounds each.

I pry a few off no problem, then I go to pry off another one, and this is where it got interesting, I got 2 of the nails out and was down the end with one final push to get the last nail out and have the tie come down.

Well the tie rolled towards me, so I stepped back out of the way so that it it wouldn’t land on my feet. One problem however was the pry bar, it was in my hand and the tie fell and hit it. When it hit the pry bar it knocked it out of my hand.

Pry bar then managed to hit my foot, normally not a problem, except that the railroad tie was still on top of it, and was falling. While the tie was not on my foot, we can all remember physics class from high school and how all that stuff works.

So the accelerated weight of the railroad tie, was distributed along the length of the whole pry bar, but the problem was that my foot created only 1 of 2 points of contact for the pry bar. One end on my foot, and one end on the ground, unfortunately for me, my foot hurts more than the ground does.

So it hurt, and it hurt a lot. I yelled out a string of profanity that would probably make Quentin Tarantino blush.

Oh a light hearted note, my middle aged neighbor was standing at his garage, drinking his Busch Light after blowing any debris off his driveway. He looked at me, I looked at him and he raised his can as a hello and then pushed his electric garage door opener to close his garage, with him inside. So much for helpful neighbors, glad I didn’t cut a hand off or something with the chainsaw!

I am currently using the 2 sock and duct tape method to keep ice on it. One light weight sock to keep the bag of ice off my direct skin, and then a second larger sock to hold the ice in place, with the duct tape around it to put a little pressure to keep the ice firmly in place and applying cold to the foot.

I’ll repost a photo later if I get some nice funky colors that appear later.

I will be out working on my wall this weekend either way, only thing this really does is put my double header baseball games on Sunday in question… I hope I can play!

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w00t w00t

So the new things going on with me….

I forgot to mention before that I got a new lawnmower a couple weeks ago, WITH A BAG ON IT!!!

Also, I got a new cell phone today, I am officially caught up to date with a phone that has both bluetooth, AND a camera as part of it!

And then the biggest news of all!

I AM PREGNANT!!!

no, not really, but the actual big news is that the new windows I purchased about a month ago will be installed this Friday in my house!! WOOOOOHOOOO!!!!

Hopefully this will help keep the heating bills down this up coming winter, as well as help reduce the number of bugs that like to fly in through the terrible screens and holey windows I currently have.

yay yay yay yay

ooooo I also had the new couch and chair delivered last friday, so this will be 2 fridays in a row of new stuff at my house!!

so exciting!

Now if I could only get that flower bed area finished off and the brush cleaned up…..

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All kinds of things going on….

ok… so lots has been going on lately, so I am going to sum it all up for you…. a couple of big things, and a few small things…

big first…

I have decided to actually put new windows in the house, not just 1 or 2 but ALL the windows in the house. I went with NewPro, they are a bit more expensive but their warranty and the fact that they build, install, and service all the windows, as well as being a local company were factors in the purchase from them. I hope to have them in before the week of the 4th of July, and hopefully you can see them at a 4th of July BBQ I will have…

I just bought my second piece(s) of brand new furniture for my house, the first was a bureau I bought 4 or 5 years ago for my room, this new stuff is a couch and a chair for my living room. A nice shade of green that grew on me over time, and the best value that I could find in something that I actually liked. I should have it sometime in the next couple weeks. I went to Bob’s and got that set you have all seen advertised, yes, I know some of you have issues with Bob’s and I apologize, but it really was the best stuff I could find after going to 3 or 4 places to scope it out. I got the full size couch with that movable chaise lounger cushion along with the chair that you can put the chaise cushion and ottoman on to make a long chair instead of a short chair. I was a bit annoyed at Bob’s since I wanted to buy a second ottoman and long cushion so I could leave one on the chair and one on the couch all the time, but they wanted over $400 for it!! What the hell! You know it doesn’t cost that much. They gave me some lame excuse, but it was a total lie, since I am well aware of how logistics work and what would need to be done. So off to CL to see if someone got one they don’t want anymore.

I ripped out all the bushes in front of my house on the left side near the garage, and I am in the middle of screening all the dirt to get out the rocks, and putting in some awesome looking flowers, next summer my yard will go from the hated ghetto to envied by my neighbors. I rule.

I am 99% sure I am going to Buffett in September thanks to being the first person Lisa, aka pumpkin, thought of when she could get 4 tickets to the show for a non-sell your first born price. Now I just need to figure out who to bring with me!

I have not done it yet, but I will be getting a new cell phone, with a camera on it!

I have my flickr up, lots of pics on there and more to come, just taking a short break from pics the past few weeks.

I bought a new wide angle macro lens as well as a higher powered zoom lens for my already kick ass camera, so more pics to come! Filters will be next…

ummmmm

I have a bunch of computers, P4 1.6 with 256 or 512MB of ram and like 20 and 40 GB drives, if you or anyone you know would like one for cheap, let me know.

ummm, I think that is all right now… if I think of anything else I will add it later on….

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Advice to all…

When you buy a new lawnmower, and you need to put fuel in it.

Make sure that you are actually putting unleaded gasoline into it, and not diesel fuel.

I had forgotten that I had a canister of diesel in the garage and was a bit throw off when I saw the gas was blue as I added it to the new lawnmower I bought last night.

OOPS

then it wouldn’t start and I remembered that car diesel is blue, and home heating fuel is red…. shit…

so I flip it over, drain it out, and add new regular unleaded fuel to it… and then holy crap…. talk about an arm workout while pulling the starter pull cord for 50 or 60 starts to work out the little bit of diesel I wasn’t able to drain out due to it being primed into the fuel lines….

damn

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YAY, It’s the Small Milestones Sometimes…

So I finally finished off around the window in the kitchen, no more rough sheetrock corners and nasty looking area around the window.

It is now smooth nice wood, with trim too!! and a proper window sill, with a rounded front edge that I did with my router, yes, I bought a router, but I will be using it for many other things as well. I have more work to do around here and I will be using it.

fun fun fun!

Tomorrow I will be seeing if the white primer I have is still good and priming the wood tomorrow during the day, if not time to toss the primer and go get some new stuff at Home Depot and then prime it.

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85% Complete!

Ok, so the kitchen is like 85% done now….

This is what is looked like when I got home last night…..

These are shots partially done with today….

And this is what it looks like right now….. The woods sticking up are just bracings holding the back splash tight against the wall while the “Liquid Nails” dries, they are not permanent.

This is a close up of my counter top….. “Butterum Granite”

So…. tomorrow I will finish up the sanding of the areas I had to joint compound, and then try to get some of it painted and probably work on the lights a little. I have 6 small recessed lights that will be going into the ceiling and that hideous light in the middle will be coming out, I am putting a ceiling fan in there and then gonna get a hanging light fixture of some sort to go over the sink…. I will also be putting in the sink tomorrow, and hooking up the plumbing for that – FUN!

Any suggestions are welcome, I am not totally sure what to do for a back splash under the upper cabinets, laminate, tile, or just paint… it is up in the air right now and will just be primed and painted in a nice white color.

This really is like the coolest thing I have done so far!!

Now for the rest of the rooms………

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