Some actual completion and kindling hope of finishing

This past weekend we CONTINUED to deal with issues because it wouldn't stop freaking raining. Seriously!?! This weekend we needed to tackle the lawn, but the universe seemed stacked against us. Either the wet grass bogging down the mower and burned up the batteries or the skies deciding to open nearly every time we said the words "ya know, we should really try to finish mowing". It took a long time to reclaim our meadow into a lawn, we didn't even finish it by end of Sunday. (notice the random patch of long, dark grass with clover flowers amidst the sections actually mowed short)


One really visible thing we did was to clear out a lot of the low branches on the tree in front of the house. There were many times we drove up, especially when it rained heavily and the leaves were wet and heavy, that branches would slap the tops of our cars and pluck the antenna. So, this weekend, out came the chainsaw. Morris got up and cleared out a lot of low branches that amounted to a fairly intimidating pile for lawn debris collection. 


I still feel bad for the collection team and thought a few times about leaving them a note saying "I'm sorry that this all came up at one time instead of us being reasonable and setting out a little at a time", but figured that would be both an admission of guilt and would further slow down the team. Plus there was a large pile of grass clipping bags. Pretty sure they hate us by now.

 
Inside the house, the big ticket items for the week featured continued work on Morris's MASSIVE island counter (no one is looking forward to moving that into place), and finishing the floors downstairs. The living room and sitting rooms had their hardwood floors finished up, and Morris was very pleased to have a snazzy little Dremmel tool to do the detailed cuts around the vents instead of the circular saw. Takes longer, but the control really helps. Isn't that always the trade off: speed or control.

 


This weekend ended up blurring into the week as Monday, Tuesday, and now Wednesday have involved at least one of us heading out there for x or y or z. Morris has been working on more electrical surprises while I worked on cleaning the grout from the kitchen floor tile, and we finally have the guys coming in to work on the HVAC - hooray for not melting! 

For a couple nights, he's been stumped by some of the wiring set up because standards changed between the time the house was built and more modern stuff that he's worked on in the past, and apparently it's not always the right fit for the initial switches he got. At one point we had some sparks jump from one of them. The following ensued and I was cracking myself up: 

Me: After all this time, I'm glad that we still have sparks flying.
Morris: Huh? Oh, *groan* hahaha
Me: I hope you realize you're in for many long years full of puns
Morris: Is that a threat?

I'm here all week, folks!

BTW - if you are low on steps for your Fitbit, feel free to clean some grout! I got to the house with 6k steps for the day and left with 16k! Also today I can hardly move my arms, so.... you win some and you lose some.

The best news is that we're really seeing things come together (even if the photos aren't super impressive at this point) and it's really rewarding. Soon we're planning to start moving our things from the apartment and the storage unit into the house and start really making it ours.

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