a bit of alison and tony » Projects

Ice Ice Baby

alison — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:05:14 +0000

One of my goals while I am off of work this summer is to paint all or most of our house. We painted our living room this spring, but had yet to paint anything else until last week.

Dana stayed with Tony and I for a few days and the two of us decided to paint one of the guest bedrooms that I have had a “vision” for for quite some time. The room isn’t put together yet, but here is what we have so far: (I don’t have any specific before pictures, but here is a picture of the other bedroom that looked exactly like the bedroom we painted)

And here is a picture of the newly painted room:

We love it! I could just stay in there all day. My goal was to find a light, icy blue color that was NOT a baby blue, and I we definitely got it right! The color is much brighter in person; the picture doesn’t do it justice. Now I just need to hang shelves and pictures and paint a nightstand to match and the room will be complete!

A day or two later I was still in the painting groove, so I painted our front hallway the same color as the living room. We are really happy with the way it turned out (aside from a few touch-ups I need to take care of!)

Next on my painting list:
~ The kitchen: some form of a burnt orange color
~ The staircase and upstairs hallway: same color as the living room or a shade lighter
~ Our bedroom: some form of tangerine orange

Bring it on!

Problem Solver

alison — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:53:21 +0000

Due to the wicked storms and 16 hour power outage last Wednesday, Tony and I (who am I kidding…mostly Tony) had to keep an eye on the sump pump to make sure it didn’t overflow into our basement. Tony, an amazingly creative problem solver :) , came up with a way to quickly siphon the sump pump using a hose leading from the sump pump outside to the almost end of our yard. It worked like a charm!

Before we got ready for bed, I asked Tony if he was going to set the alarm to check the sump pump in the middle of the night. He casually replied that he’ll just make an alarm that will go off when the water reaches the danger zone. After spending a short 15 minutes, or maybe even less, he came up with a system in which a piece of wood with a light ball attached to the end would raise up with the water level in the sump pump and loudly ring a bell when the water reached a certain point. Here’s a clip of how it ended up looking and working. It’s dark, but fun to watch just the same!

Sure enough at one in the morning Tony woke me up saying, “Alison! The alarm is going off!” He went downstairs, used his hose system to siphon the water out of the sump pump, and came back to bed knowing that he didn’t need to worry about it overflowing. His newly created alarm system would let him know if he was needed in the basement again!

Our Sprinklers are Sprinkling!

tony — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:49:32 +0000

Last week I fired up the sprinkler system we put in last summer. It was very rewarding to have everything work right away without any problems. Our baby hydroseeded grass still has a lot of growing to do, it seems so far the weeks are doing a better job growing… I want to wait a bit before i put more chemicals on the lawn, so for now nature must run its course. Special thanks to Kenny for giving us the lawn mower!

Birthday Weekend!

alison — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:43:35 +0000

Tony celebrated another birthday this weekend! We celebrated by (Tony) completing a couple projects around the house, a dinner at Outback, and a super bowl party with friends.

Our first project was in the laundry room. We unstacked the washer and dryer, and hung two extra shelves to add more storage space. The project only cost $15, but it feels like we gained a whole new room in our house!

Tony then spent some time in the basement installing can lights. They look great, and give a lot of light to the area. We’re still thinking about how we want to do the lighting in the stairway and hallway.

Later that night we went to Outback for Tony’s birthday dinner, thanks to a birthday gift certificate from Jody and Scott! We had a great meal and a great time together!

We had fun Sunday night with friends playing rock band and watching the super bowl. I tried to feel my new niece or nephew kicking, but he or she wasn’t kicking hard enough.

I am at home enjoying my third snow day in two weeks! In the past 6 school days we have had 3 snow days and 2 2-hour delays! Last year I needed snow days to recover from the stress of my classroom. I have a much better class this year, so I can use my snow days to work and plan from home. And watch TLC :)

Light Show!

tony — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:19:49 +0000

After much ado, we finally got our whole ebay/light switch shenanigans worked out! Now we are the proud owners of a remote control fan/light dimmer switch in our bedroom! I installed it last night, and I like it so much Alison thought she might wake up in the middle of the night to find me playing with the remote… Andrea will be glad to hear I turned off the circuit breaker before I installed the switch… no sparks this time… The new switch replaced two analog switches, so until i can find a blank Lutron style rectangle filler wall plate I put an electrical outlet next to our switch… (see photo). It’s not quite ideal, visually, but it works anyway for the time being until Alison let’s me tear a new hole in the wall for a single switch box… neat…

Thanks, Yiayia, for the great gift!

Flying Bikes and Squeaky Pipes

tony — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:48:44 +0000

This weekend was a busy one chocked full of good times and fun projects. In addition to bowling with our small group, and my company holiday party, we also got a chance to install one of our Christmas presents, using another Christmas present. And by we, I mean mostly me, Tony, since Alison was off doing other things. The bike hangers were easily installed using my new cordless drilldriver… here are some pix of the final product. It really opens up that corner of our garage and gives us even more room – or at least, will when we finally get all our moving boxes unpacked and out of the way! I also finally fixed the squeaky bathtub drain for good. The last time I thought I fixed it actually made it worse since instead of just the bathtub movement making the drain squeak, the whole bathroom floor did! This time I got smart and cut out a 1″ section of the upper PVC drain pipe and replaced it with a flexible rubber section. No more squeak! Now I just have to re-finish the part of the drywall in my closet’s closet that I had to cut into to access the plumbing… And of course, a picture so you can see what i mean…

We’ve got Gutters!

tony — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:58:49 +0000

We returned from a weekend out of town on Sunday to find that our new gutters had been installed! They match the house so well we didn’t even notice when we pulled in, I went back out to look after we found the bill in the mail! Hopefully now we won’t have so much erosion along the side and back of the house when it rains hard… We also chose to install screens on the gutters since we have so many trees around whose leaves would love to clog up our nice gutters.

payday loans debt collection personal finance loans home mortgage refinancing unsecured payday loans fast cash advances quick cash loans guaranteed personal loans debt consolidation overnight cash loans 1000 payday loans student loans

Nice Grass!

tony — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:24:03 +0000

Only 8 days since our hydro-seeding we have tiny shoots of grass shooting up all over the yard! It’s tough to see them since they are camouflaged in the green color of the hydro-seed mix. Interestingly enough, I also took a closer look at the hydro-seed mixture and I found some print on parts of it… I think it is recycled newspaper. neat! If you think you see $0.25 in the photo, you’re right. I dropped a quarter in there for perspective. The few larger shoots in the picture are not from the seed, they have been growing on their own since we moved in… You can see the new shoots have a darker color base and are greener on the tiny soft tips… I checked out the roots too, they are pretty long already, some over an inch! They say when the grass gets to be 3-4 inches tall it’s time to mow… we’ll see if we get there before it starts snowing. It’s been oh-so-nice to use the sprinkler system to water the yard and keep our new grass happy! It’s funny since even though i don’t have to wake up to turn on the sprinklers at 7:30am, i still like to get out of bed and watch them do their thing.

payday loans debt consolidation debt management home mortgage loans need money fast unsecured personal loans debt management services refinance home equity loans bad credit personal loans payday loans home loan lenders unsecured debt consolidation loans

Rain Gutters?

tony — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:20:13 +0000

I’ve been reading up a bit on gutters, since our builder (apparently) doesn’t put them on houses. We’ve got some erosion going on along the sides of the house where the rain falls. I was thinking about putting some kind of paver stones on the ground where the water hits, but i think gutters might be a better solution… It looks like a few of the neighbors have had them added, so it’d be nice to talk to them about who they had install them. I’m also considering putting some on myself, since there isn’t much to the job. The major challenge would be that the roof on one side of the house that needs a gutter is about 3 stories off the ground… It might be worth the savings to have somebody else to it so i don’t have to buy a ladder that tall! I wonder if I could rent one, hmm. Anyone installed gutters?

payday loans payday loan with no fax overnight cash advance unsecured personal loans consolidate your debt mortgage banking same day cash advances personal loans for people with bad credit quick personal loans loans till payday personal loans free debt consultation

The Sprinklers are In!

tony — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:05:26 +0000

I apologize to those of you who have been following our blog lately since we’ve been so busy we’ve been neglecting to write any new posts… Our latest greatest accomplishment has been installing a sprinkler system! We’d especially like to thank phil & peet for all the help on the project, and Mr. A. for lending us the soldering tools for the plumbing! Yesterday Alison & I finished filling in the trenches and raking out the uneven spots in the yard. I got the controller all wired up and now we are just waiting for the hyrdo-seeding guys to come out and do their thing. Builder Rick said on the phone they should probably be out next weekend… I’m very excited to get our new lawn going!

payday loans need money fast no faxing payday loans credit card application mortgage loans high risk personal loans consolidate your debt 24 hour payday loans bad credit loans same day payday loans credit card offers fast cash advance payday loans