Spring Gardening

We've been having some pretty crazy thunder storms the last couple days, so I'm glad I was able to get some gardening in before it hit.  I was also able to get some photos of my backyard before the storm.  

The sad thing is that the gazebo has seen better days.  It looks great from this side, but to my neighbors behind us, it looks like it's about to fall over.  We are having a new deck put on soon minus the gazebo.  Hopefully I won't be sorry.

Looks like I'm going to have a lot of cleanup after the wind and rain brought down all those messy dropping from the oak trees.  It almost looks like moss because there is so much of it.

When you enter through the back gate the aroma of lilac and dianthus is heavenly, or so I'm told.  I don't get to enjoy the wonderful scent due to allergies.  Anyone else have this problem?

Remodeling the Staircase

I just spent hours trying to figure out where my blog disappeared to.  I learned a big lesson from a major mistake on my part.  When I purchased my google domain name last year and dropped the "blogspot", I never thought any more about it until recently when I tryed to get on my blog and it was no longer there.  Finally I realized that I hadn't gotten my yearly renewal reminder for my domain name.  I checked my email again and several hours later remembered that I had to set up a gmail account when I registered my name. Having never used this email account for anything else, there the reminders were sitting in my gmail account waiting to be paid.  It was due the middle of March and after 30 days they dropped my blog from view.  Luckily I found out what was wrong before 60 days when it would have been deleted.  It only costs $12 to renew each year and I now had to pay $112 to restore my blog.  That was a whopping $100 mistake on my part.  Lesson learned!    

In case you were wondering, this is where we are at on the staircase remodel.  The stairs are all in, I filled all the nail holes, and sanded.  They are now ready to be stained and varnished.  I'm waiting for a string of nice weather for at least 3-4 days so I can open the windows for ventilation.

Our Old Home Remodeling Continues

In a previous post I alluded to further remodeling that would be going on in our home soon.  This project actually started several years ago and we simply lived with it for a while.  Our stairs are the first thing you see when you enter the front door and the old berber carpet on the stairs had seen better days.  I have terrible allergies and getting the pet hair out of the carpet was driving me crazy.

One day, while Rick was out of town on business I decided to remove the carpet.  I do these things while he's away and I'm sure he's afraid each time he returns to see what I've done.  Needless to say I was very disappointed to see plywood on the landing and a staircase that was meant to be covered with carpet.  The two stairs at the top were the only two oak treads.

The wood wainscot didn't meet the stairs in severals places and there were lots of gaps.

I filled all the holes the stapes left in the stairs and cleaned these up the best I could and removed the paint spills that were all over them.  

After all this work, I was not going to recarpet these though.  I knew that someday we would get these replaced.  I have no idea what year this was done but we moved here in 2001 and I lived with the old carpet for 2 or three years.

Rick was more than a little shocked when he came home.  But, thank goodness he is good natured about my remodeling efforts.  

They were at least clean and easy to dust away the pet hair.  The lighting in the above picture is deceiving.  They did not look this good.

I generally avoided taking photographs of this area of our home.  I painted the risers white thinking they would look nicer.  Sorry about the Christmas picture it's the only time I took pictures of the railing.

Let's get up close and see how bad these really were.  Nice!

But, there is hope!  New stairs in progress as you can see here.

I was so excited to watch as each new tread was placed into position!  Our carpenter and friend, Patrick Grass did a beautiful job.

This is what it looked like by the end of the first day.  

The stairs are now completely in and I will be painting the risers white one again because I had them faced with wood that I could paint to save a little.  I've been sampling stains on some scrap wood and hope to start staining soon.  I will share more pictures of these as I go along and when they are finished.  My knees will be killing me by then I'm sure!

In the mean time we are still finishing up Rick's listening room on the third floor and my paint room once Rick gets the rest of his office moved upstairs.