So a couple of house projects have been completed this year, and as usual, I meant to post when they were done, but better late than never, right?
Earlier this year a simple started out simple enough, but then progressed in classic “scope creep” fashion:
- Fill in the scrapes and dings and repaint the hallway.
- Well, since we’re repainting anyway, let’s found out what it might take to have the unused swamp cooler.
- Well, since half the ceiling has to come out, what would it take to take the rest out and put in recessed lighting?
So…we ended up with a new hallway, with no swamp cooler and recessed lighting 🙂 A bit different than the original version, but well worth it. We paid someone to demo the swamp cooler, and I mean demo, as it was so rusted out it came out in pieces. They fashioned and installed a cap for the hole left by the cooler. Angy and I tore down the rest of the ceiling, installed the cans, and put the new sheetrock back up. We tried our hand at doing the mud ourselves, but that turned out less then optimal. After a fantastic referral we had someone else come in to clean up our mess there and they were able to match the existing ceiling texture perfectly! There’s no way we could have ever made it this good:
As for the second project, it’s a work in progress since it’s pretty much the whole of the back yard. Angy has made fast friends of our landscape architect neighbor and she has given us some great ideas for a backyard redo. These include cutting/extending the beds so that they’re wider and have more curves. Restyling the pergola (and rebuilding, as it’s about ready to fall over due to shoddy construction the first time around), several ideas for doing a deck over the backyard patio, and the focus feature: a flagstone patio with a fire pit.
After a lot of research, a lot of work, and a fantastic KSL classifieds find for the fire bowl, we’ve got our focus feature! Like with the hallway, we got to a point with the patio where we were out of our league and it wasn’t fun to do the work ourselves anymore. So we decided to pay someone to finish it up and once again, we’re very glad that we did as it was completed far better than we could have ever hoped:
So, that’s house projects so far, there are more in the pipeline and the yard will be continuous for years to come I imagine. The biggest thing I’ve learned so far: when it stops being fun it’s ok to bring a pro in to get it done right!