No matter how amazing a house is, there are always ways to improve it.
Sigh........ My husband and I love working on projects together (by this I mean that we find something to do so I can stand by, watching, and complaining that it's taking too long.) When we were first married, renting a basement apartment, our projects were limited to rearranging the furniture every Friday and re-stacking the boxes in our Harry Potter Closet under the stairs. Definitely nothing that would merit a blog post.
When we bought our house, we were overwhelmed by the amount of "stuff" we suddenly needed to do. I remember making a huge list of projects, estimating their costs, and prioritizing them. I eventually threw the list away because, well, we didn't have any money. No funds=no projects. Keep in mind our ridiculous lack of money as you read on. (We're both teachers...no further explanation needed, I'm sure...)
This project was not fun. The summer we moved into our perfect home, we noticed a not-so-perfect problem with our lawn. The grass around the hydrant (our only exterior source of water) was flooding. We were both unsure what to do about it so we just ignored it for a few weeks. As is often the case with home improvement projects, we were eventually forced to face the problem. Our water bill came back so high we knew there had to be some kind of nasty leak going on. Neither of us had any experience with lawn hydrants, so Jonathan just started digging.
This photo doesn't do justice to how deep this hole really was.
When Jonathan finally got to the bottom where the pipe curved toward the road, he found this. It turns out the pipe had cracked and was leaking water like crazy.
It took two shovels, a car axle, a wheelbarrow, a post hole digger, and a sanity-saving Shopvac to accomplish the task. After replacing the pipe Jonathan had to put all the dirt back. Surprisingly, almost as difficult as digging it our in the first place. Not that I would know, of course!
I didn't know it at the time, but the home improvement journey was just beginning...
Stay tuned.
The chimney comes apart into several smaller pieces for easy take-apart and put-back-together. After my husband did all of the dirty work of cleaning the pipes, we attempted to put the chimney back up. Unfortunately, they wouldn't stay! In one last effort to get them to stick, Jonathan pushed hard on the side of one pipe. The whole thing fell apart and came crashing down. One of them happened to land on my exposed foot (note to self: flip-flops always =injury) and sliced it open.
