The View From Here

Just another quick fireplace update.  There will probably be several of these in the next week.  We put up the tile on the front of the fireplace this evening.  And yes, that is duct tape.  The two pieces in the top middle needed some support.  Nice, huh?  Anyway, the next step is grouting the tile and then we will be on to the mantle.  I am hoping to have the mantle done this week end.  That’s it for now.  Pretty isn’t it?  Let me know what you think.

Oh, and just for grins, here is a little doodle I did that will give you an idea of what it will look like when completed.  Yes, I used Crayons.

Brian

There have been too few of these updates on what is going on with our renovation projects.  That is a direct result of the speed at which these projects are going.  Very slow.  But there is progress nonetheless and we should be seeing the progress speed up.

As you can see from the picture above most of the white paint that covered our fireplace has been scrapped off and some tile has been laid around the base of it.  We will be putting tile up on the face of the fire place very soon and then comes the mantle and posts followed closely with the fire place insert.  At the earliest this project will be finished up around October 7th.  We have had quiet a few delays but things are going relatively smoothly again.  Yay!  I will have more updates soon.

Brian

Our house has a fireplace.  It has actually always had a fireplace but it has been covered up by an entertainment center that the people who lived there before us built.  We have now ripped said entertainment center off to reveal a fireplace that needs some work.  We were aware before getting into the project.  Here is the sad part.  We tore the entertainment center down on Monday, hoping to get the people from the Fire Escape out there to give us an estimate sometime this week.  Well, they won’t be able to come out until August 18th.  This means that we won’t be able to put the floor down until then also as we don’t know what all redoing the fireplace will entail.  I suppose I can be patient until then.

The fireplace isn’t the only thing being redone.  In the process we will be replacing some of the floors and putting up a new entertainment center (that was bought from IKEA!).  Since the entertainment center is moving I had to relocate some wires (cable and speaker) which meant that I spent Monday evening in the attic.  Yes, this was the day that it got up to 107 degrees outside.  I don’t want to guess what it was in that attic.

So all we have to do is wait until the 18th of August.  Hopefully after the estimate they will be able to get right to it.  I will try to keep pictures posted so that you can view the progress.  I am excited to get this done!

Oh, and here is a picture of our new entertainment center 70% put together.

Brian

Here is the latest from our garden.  Everything is starting to grow very quickly now.  Our cantelope is making great strides.

On another note, some of you may know that I enjoy writing.  Weird, I know, an accountant that likes to write, but I do.  I have really enjoyed writing here on my website but I have always wanted, deep down inside, to write stories.  I have developed several ideas over the past few years but have never known how to get them into story form.  They have just sat as notes in a Word document to be updated every now and then.  I have been doing some research on how to write and one of the suggestions I heard was to just sit down and do it not worrying about exactly how it comes out.  You can always revise later.  Just sit and write, or as the person I heard it from said it, butt in chair, hands on keyboard (BICHOC).  This is so simple right?  Well their advice coupled with talking to one of my friends about his writing and I am about to finish the prologue to one of my stories.  I never thought I would actually have any of this story written. I figured that they would just stay in my head forever.  Well, that’s not going to happen now.  I don’t know how long it will take me to finish this or if it will even get published (that’s a laugh at this point) but I am on my way.  I have officially begun one of my long-term goals.  And with that I will take my bow and leave you to wonder what it is about.

Brian

Here is something else new to us.  At the end of May we decided to plant a vegetable garden.  We had talked about this for a while and had just not gotten around to it up to this point.  Those of you who know anything about a garden know that we squeaked in just at the last moment to plant.  The reason we decided to do this on such short notice was that we came across a way that would be fairly quick and inexpensive other wise we probably would have put it off again.  We tried what is called “square-foot gardening”.  Here is what it looks like.

The next step was planting the plants as seen next.

So here we are with all of our nice and very little plants at the end of May.  The squares you see that have nothing in them are lying to you.  (The beans are hiding there)  Now our responsibility was to water.  And so we did.

As you can see above the bean plants are finally coming out!  This happened practically overnight.  We were getting worried that our bean plants might not even sprout but after about a week they came up all at once.  I came home for lunch and a few had started coming up.  I watered them and by the time I came home there were about double of them.  Amazing!  This last picture is the most recent one (as of a few days ago) and you can really see a difference.  The thing that has astonished us the most was the cantelope plant (it is at the top in the picture above). It had stayed about the same size up until about a week ago.  Look in the picture below (top right hand side on this one and you will see how big it has gotten in about a week.

As you can see we have gotten smarter as we go.  The soaker hose makes it much easier to water.  All the beans are growing up and we are expecting some real vegetables soon.  We have already harvested one jalapeno.  One of our bell peppers that was starting to grow got blown off in a storm we had a few nights ago.  Sad.

So there you have it.  Our first garden.  I will keep you updated on how it goes.

Brian