House Diaries - Week 3 & 4 Recap

Decided to roll Week 3 and 4 Recap together since there isn't a whole lot to report.

Lots of progress in the yard. Both lemon trees, both orange tress, and the kumquat tree have all been tamed AND sprayed.

Scott took out a couple of the rose bushes and rebuilt one of the planters to make room for an eventual-pathway. He also took out some random tree that was planted in a really awkward spot- we had no idea what it was, but we knew it attracted a lot of bugs. I have decided that when the time comes, I will empty out the planters entirely and plant from scratch- front and back (which means no more rosemary bush). I'm not sure what kind of flowers I'll put in instead. I think I'd like to put lilies in the front under the window (where the rosemary bush is now). Maybe snap dragons along the driveway. Scott is pretty adamant that he doesn't want any climbing vines- so no jasmine or honey suckle :\

The lawn is finally looking like a lawn again! Scott had to fix the sprinklers (a couple of times). Luckily he is Mr. Handyman and it was no big deal for him. We haven't even done any reseeding or fertilizing yet, so once we do hopefully it will be really gorgeous.

Measure Twice, Cut Once. Or even better: make sure you have all the parts you need before you take apart the bathroom sink. Scott got really ambitious last week when I was taking my final and decided to replace our bathroom faucet with the nice one my mum sent us. Unfortunately, he didn't know that we were missing the base plate for it until AFTER he had taken apart the existing faucet.

We went to look for it on the manufacturer's website, but it said that they didn't make the part in the finish we need. Scott was really annoyed, and emailed them about it. He got a very apologetic response the next day and was assured that they would send out the needed part at no cost: which is Sweeeet. Until we get that part though, we do not have a working bathroom sink. (It would have been way more work to put the old one back on than it would be to just brush our teeth in the kitchen for a few days). Hopefully it will be here soon!

Repaint? We've been using those paper temporary blinds since we moved in and I've been putting off getting real curtains. It makes sense to paint first, so you only have to hang the curtains once. The temporary blinds, however, are starting to metaphorically wear thin.

The living room technically is painted. The only problem is Scott really does not love the color. It's too yellow for him. Something more tan-colored would be much better, and I am feeling the same way. BUT that would mean repainting the living room (which means moving my 20 gallon fish tank AGAIN, and repacking the bookshelves that I just unpacked this weekend AGAIN, and uninstalling the washer and dryer in the kitchen to get in behind it.)

Whatever we do though, we need to get started soon because the bathroom needs to get finished ASAP. We have unpainted sections of the wall in there (where the old broken mirror was) and the repeated exposure to moisture is not going to be good. Not to mention we really need to get new cabinetry so we can finish unpacking the bathroom (there is no place to put any of our stuff right now), and get our new hardware hung.

I think I'll swing by Home Depot and pick up some of those paint cards and we will deliberate. Maybe we can pick out our new colors and go wall by wall rather than room by room- and get the walls with windows done first.