All about the house

Here it is the CO (certificate of occupancy).


I’ve learned a lot while building the house.
Here’s just a few.

1. I learned I don’t like heights. When we got to working on the second floor and there where no walls up yet. It made me queasy. When it came to working on the roof, Rudy was on his own. I can stand on ladders fine but the roof was a different story.

2. Rudy is a perfectionist. I never realized the extent of this till building the house. I could care less if it’s a 16 of and inch off. It looks fine, go with it.

3. I love tools. I now know why a lot of men admire a nail gun, a miter saw, a table saw, a palm nailer. I’ll never forget the Valentine’s Day when my friend was telling me about the jewelry she got from her husband. I told her I got a palm nailer. She gave me a funny look. Little did she know I love that thing. At the time we were still in the framing stage. I was putting the hurricane straps on, trying to hammer them in and then Rudy gave me the palm nailer. It’s an air tool that is able to get into tight places and does the hammering for you. You just line the nozzle up push on it and it bangs the nail right in. Then there is this screw driver gun. It is worth its weight in gold. Ok, the list could go on and on but you get the idea. The right tool makes things so much easier.

4. My Dad is a wealth of knowledge. I already knew this but it was obvious when we were building the house. He’s also a lot of fun to be around. When we were putting up the floor trusses, we finally got to the last one. He looked at us and said, “there it is!” We looked at him like what, there’s what. We are always misplacing things, the tape measure, the nails, the screwdriver etc. There was always a hunt for something. He then said, “There’s that piece we have been looking for all day, the last floor truss.” LOL. When we got to the drywall stage I was so excited. This was the stuff that made the rooms look like rooms. After about a month it was no longer exciting. It was like the project that would never end. Think of when you are making a sweater and you get the body done and you feel so glad to have that done but then you realize you still have the sleeves to do. The drywall gave me the same feeling. I put up the last sheet when Rudy was at work. I had to tell somebody that I was done so I called my dad who was in a different state and told him, I finally found that piece I was looking for the past few months. He didn’t quite understand me and then I told him, I found the last piece of drywall. He got a chuckle out of it, and knew exactly how happy I was to have found that piece.

5. I learned it hurts a lot to have a hammer fall on your head. Always look on top of ladder for objects before moving it.

6. Tyde and Dax can only handle 30 minutes, 40 max of painting at a time.

7. Tyde likes power tools as much as I do, he also likes banging things and construction machines.


8.Rudy should get a trophy for jerry rigging things. If there was a problem he could make or find some way to fix it. One problem that I remember is that during the framing, we could not pick up a wall with just the two of us. He made some kind of concoction to do it for us. I just had to turn the handle and it went up. Only one of the many things he came up with.


9. Make sure the power is off before trying to wire a socket. Nothing like being bit by electricity.

10. Gloves are a girls best friend. Used them to avoid splinters when picking up wood, helped when hauling drywall upstairs, and saved my skin from being ripped off when doing the pavers.

11. The last thing I can think of for now is that through out all this I truly believe knitting saved my sanity.


I hope everybody has a great week and if you get a chance pop open a bottle of champagne to help us celebrate.

Wizard Hat

I finally decided to go to the book store to preorder the next Harry Potter book. I wasn’t planning on doing the book store party thing for the release, but Dax talked me into it. So, one of my craft projects is a wizard hat. I saw these hats and really liked them. They are crochet. Hmm, this might be a problem. I have very little experience with crochet. I had no idea how to make them. I started looking on the internet and found this pattern. Ok, I think I can do this. Since my confidence was low I picked some ugly. cheap yarn and started hooking. (Is that what it’s called?) And this is what I have so far.


I don’t really love this hat; it’s the color that I don’t like. I also don’t like the top part of it. Regardless I will try and finish it. The main reason is because I don’t have enough time to make another one before the book release. The fabric the hat is sitting on is for a cape. Dax told me she would like a cape to wear to the festivities. I told her she has a cape and she said it doesn’t fit. I was determined that she was wrong. I mean how much growth can a person do in one year. Well, she was right, maybe it’s been two years since the last time she wore the cape. We will be cutting the fabric today. Not only will she get to wear it to the book store party but she can where it to the Harry Potter paint your own pottery party to. Tyde on the other hand has no interest in wearing a cape.

On the house front. We got our last inspection approved. It wasn’t exactly that smooth. They came out and said you need to put a small hill here with some plants on it, so we did. They came and approved our new plants and hill. The neighbor then came out and said he didn’t like the plants. They were to close to the property line. So we left the little hill, moved the plants to the back and put some grass on the hill. Hopefully everybody is happy now. The inspector told me to give her a few days to process the paper work. I will be heading to Vierra tomorrow to pick up the CO (unless they have something else they want us to do). We can then officially move in.

We do still have the wall cabinets to put up in the kitchen and carpet to put down in the bedrooms. The cabinets are sitting in the hall way. See:


Rudy and I will get those up this week. Since we did about everything else on this house we decided to let somebody else do the carpet. We ordered the carpet from home depot and they are suppose to call Thursday to set up an installation time. Once that is done we will be furniture shopping. (Yeah)

Yard

First sorry for the lousy pictures but I'm tired (remember that's one of my frequently used words).

I think our spring break visitors did not know what was in for them, yard work and lots of it. We managed to get the grass down and put in a few shrubs and trees. I got a new key lime tree to replace the one that I miss so much, and a new orange tree.

I have no before pictures but here is a during picture. There was a lot of clearing out that had to be done, including moving the RV, the fence, trash and a lot of dirt. Dad had came down to help with this part. It took them about a week to get it to this stage. Rudy and Dad also got most the sprinkler system installed.


When Rudy's parents arrived we had 17 pallets of grass and two days to get it down before it would "start to go bad." This is what the back looked like when we were done.


Here is the front.


I really really like the new yard and one of my favorite spots to hang out now is here.


Here is another family member who is enjoying the back yard.


We still have more work to do. The fence needs to be fixed and adding some other colors would be nice, like flowers etc but for the most part it is done. I really appreciate all the help we got in getting the yard in the state that it is in right now. There is no way Rudy and I could have done this as quickly with just the two of us.

Next post a finished object.