Project City

So the last several weekends have been full of projects. Oh the joy of home ownership!

We've had lots of problems with flooding in the basement of both our house and for our next door neighbors the Michaelson's. It finally got to the point where we needed to put in a French drain. We spent several days digging a four to five foot hole and trenches that were all later filled with gravel so that the water would have a place to drain.

Our neighbor Adam and two of his boys in our enormous hole.

Scott hauling dirt to the field down the street.

Me taking a well deserved rest.

Now our next project was not an anticipated one. You see, we live where there is an HOA (Home Owners Association). Basically they are there to help keep the neighborhoods looking nice and to keep people from painting their fences some crazy orange color. Who would paint their fence a crazy orange color anyway? Oh wait, we did. Any part of the fence that is visible from the street needs to be a particular color, we'll call it HOA gray. That we did, but I wanted the inside to be more of a natural cedar color when we first put it up about three years ago. I went to Home Depot and picked a color I thought would be a burnt cedar kind of orange. Scott went out one Saturday morning to paint and when I came out to start helping this is the color I found. NOT what I had wanted. But, money was really tight then and since Home Depot won't return anything that's been tinted already we just had to suck it up and paint the entire fence so that it at least would have some kind of protection from the weather and the sprinklers.

After Scott's brother Doug said "at least it makes to grass look really green," it began to grow on me and over the last three years it's toned down a little (see the difference between pictures?) and I've grown quite used to our orange fence. A little while ago a different company took over the HOA and they have been much stricter. A month or so ago we got a letter saying that our fence needed to be re-stained the approved HOA gray.

I was a bit disappointed that we'd have to get rid of our beautiful orange, but such is life in an HOA community, so this last Saturday we spent the day painting our fence.

Although it doesn't make the grass look quite as green I must say that it does look better.

Now for the ongoing big project around here, the basement. A couple weeks ago we began drywalling.

Before.

And halfway through. My brother BJ will be coming this weekend to help finish it off. All of the ceilings are done and most of the top part of the walls in all the rooms. We love how it's coming together.