Peter Kupfer's Blog

Fixing Up the House — Changing the Landscape

Over the past few days, Gina and I have embarked on a quest to change the front of the house by updating the landscaping. The main tasks include:

• Replace Black Plastic Flower Bed Lining with Bricks
• Remove the Three Bushes and Tree from the Right front of the house
• Remove the rest of the red rocks from the flower beds
• Trim the bottom six feet of the tree to the left of the driveway

We started by pulling out the black plastic trim that used to sit in between the flower beds and the grass. The first half of the trim was still pretty well buried, so that took a little more work to get out, but it was pretty easy. While I did that, Gina started to dig a small trench for the bricks and started to put in the bricks.

While pulling out the second half of trim I started to also remove red rocks and place them into a garbage can. They end up being very heavy after a while. We found some little fire ants in the soil in front of the house and put down the insect killer where ever we saw the insects. We then added some bricks we picked up at Menards to the front of the flower bed.

Once the trench and the bricks were finished, I started to trim back the bushes so we can start to think about removing them. I had one little accident and I got a little careless and ended up cutting through the extension cord. Oops! The hedge trimmer I have was insufficient for the job and I think I will have to borrow a chain saw from someone.

Good Thing #13 – Baby Proofing

Today I was able to get up the baby gate on top of the basement stairs and put latches on the kitchen cabinets.

Good Thing 7 February — Taking the Long Way Home

I thinks today’s good thing is taking the long way home. We went to a pancake breakfast for the Grayslake Youth Baseball at the Grayslake Firehouse and afterwards we walked the long way back to our car. This was nice because we were able to get a quote for Gina’s hair that she wants to have fixed up (the price of this would be a whole different post) and get some information from the heating people that work on our furnace. Neither of these were realy pressing needs, but they were issues we had wanted to address and would not have remembered to otherwise.

This reminds me something my friend Alex said to me once. He told me that he was going to live hiss live to always say yes whenever he wasn’t sure if he wanted to do something or not. This is how he ended up taking ball room dancing lessons and ultimately falling in love. I don’t always live by this theory, but it seems to make sense.

New Couch

I spent a lot of the day watching the Golden Girls to relive Estelle Getty’s humor. I didn’t know she was actually a year younger than Bea Arthur, crazy! That was a fun show, even though I wouldn’t think that I am an anywhere near their target demographic.

The new couch arrived today (at least part of it.) It has a chaise lounge on one end, a love seat in the middle, and it will have a “cuddler” on the other end. They didn’t have the correct configuration in stock, so the last piece will have to come later. Isaac insisted on sitting on it first. He look soooo small on it even though he is growing very fast. I actually just held him for a while tonight after he fell asleep because I didn’t want to put him down.

House Projects…

The last week has been full of many exciting house projects.

First several shelves have been installed in the house. We purchased these floating shelves from Home Depot. They are nice and they look good because there is no extra visible hardware. We wanted black shelves (and we kind of thought we were buying black ones) but they ended up being espresso.We hung two in the living room and two in Isaac’s room.

I finally fixed the garage door. It was trying to go a little too far when it closes and would reopen. I change the range of the door and now it works.

I have been spraying the lawn with Spurge Power (a post emergent herbicide) in order to kill the clovers that are growing out there. It seems to slowly be working, so hopefully the clovers will be gone soon. They seemed to be taking over the yard.

Lastly, the most important project was adding a cat door to the back screen door. This is so that Belle can go in and out without Gina or I opening the door. I ended up installing it in a bad spot. I put it in a location to cover where Gina burned the screen door when we pulled up the asbestos tile, but I should have put it by the handle so that we could crack the glass door to let the cat in and out in the winter. Jenny Glinka trained her in how to use her door and we greatly appreciate it.