Day in the Life {12/22/14}

I really enjoy these kinds of posts so maybe someone will enjoy a sneak peek into one of my days!

5:40 am. Ever since we moved into our house in the summer the dog has rarely slept through the night. She wakes up because she needs to go outside or she's decided it's time for breakfast. Today she decides she needs to potty so she half climbs on the bed to wake me up. I follow her and she optimistically stops at the food bowl. This new game has been going on for a few months and we can't figure out how to break the cycle. All I know is I am ready for a kid since I'm not sleeping as it is. My first alarm goes off at 6 so I'm waiting for Sky and trying to be asleep so my mind won't start thinking of work. Lately I have been having a hell of a time falling asleep on Sundays so every minute I can sleep I try to seize it. 

6:10 am. My jawbone starts buzzing. I am sort of asleep and it seems like it's being extra buzzy and I fumble to turn it off. 

7:10 am. I finally decide to get up so I go straight to the shower and start getting ready. M got me a jawbone up24 for my birthday and it can tell you how you sleep in addition to tracking steps and distances. It isn't water proof so I take it off to jump in the shower. When I start "the process" I realize I forgot to turn off the jawbone's sleep mode. This is one of the most interesting things the bracelet can track and I'm always curious what my sleep was like. I turn it to "active" and stick it back on my wrist. I am getting used to the bracelet now that I have had it for 2 weeks so I make a mental note to pay more attention. 

8:19 am. I check my sleep history from last night. Not turning off sleep mode as soon as I got up has thrown off my results and I got up 5 times instead of once.

10 am. It's Monday and a few days before Christmas so the office is more quiet than usual which I like. I decide this week is perfect for all the catch up work I need to do so I start digging into my AFE inbox. I restarted my computer on Friday and did all the required software updates so I feel confident this won't take long because things are "working"

10:20 am. Famous last words. The AFE system is having an epic meltdown and I keep getting these little white screens of death/error messages. I ask the support staff if something is wrong and no one can answer my questions. I send them a few snapshots and bang my head against the wall over all the work I will have to re type later on. I decide to scan and email an operating agreement to my admin staff in Houston with a detailed explanation in my email and hope this will go smoothly. 

11:30 am. Time to go home for lunch. I ordered all of the husband's Christmas and bday presents online and it occurred to me that one shipped but I never received it. I automatically panic and think it's been stolen because it shows delivery on Dec 18th. After checking and asking the husband if he has seen it, it ends up he thought it was from his mom and had it hidden in his "secret present room". I am horrible with secrets and I get home last so I have been having a hell of a time trying to hide my boxes.  Every single one has logos all over it too. I also haven't bought any stocking stuffers. I have no explanation for this stress I am putting on myself. I suddenly feel my reflux flaring up.

2:30 pm. I get an email with my weekly jawbone update. Looks like I got no nights of uninterrupted sleep last week and I went to bed really late on average. The frowny face really cracks me up. I am trying to make my iTunes Radio stop playing songs I don't like and play more awesome music so I blacklist another song and get back to work.

6 pm. Freedom!  Look at this gorgeous sunset. 

6:15 pm. Husband is still Christmas shopping so I get home first. Usually the dog is hiding in my closet which is directly in view of the garage entrance. I don't see her and turns out she is trying to be as flat as possible on our bed to blend in. Something is up so I peek into the living room and indeed...we have lost another wooden spoon. I like how she set up spider to take the fall. 

 

 

7 pm. We start dinner. I personally feel like pizza but only because I am tired and lazy. We opt for meatloaf so I get busy fixing it. I forget to document because I have to defrost the meat and my phone is almost dead. 

8-11 pm. I chill on the couch and semi get into the first batman movie with Christian Bale. He looks super young!  How old is this movie?  2005?!  Wow I feel ancient. I lose interest and flip to Watch What Happens Live. Anderson Cooper is "pleading the fifth" and won't stop giving evasive responses to everything. It isn't as fun to watch when celebrities try to be buttoned up so I check on the Broncos/Bengals game. What happened to Peyton Manning this year?  

11:16 pm. I hear rain on our solar tube which surprises me because rain was not forecasted. I check outside and yes, it's wet. Yay my flowers are getting water.  I am grateful for any rain we get but Sky is not and refuses to go outside to potty if there is a hint of change in atmospheric conditions. This can last for days so I gear up for battle and head off to sleep. 

12 pm. I feel guilty that I am slacking on blogging again so I start working on this post to hopefully get up for Tuesday. Why am I not tired?  I finally hit a wall and head off to bed. Mmmm sleep!  

High Impact...Hidden in the Shadows

The front yard landscaping is the only project we have successfully completed in this house! The former owners pretty much phoned it in while they lived here and the front yard suffered like the rest of the house.  99% of our front yard is concrete.  We live on a street that starts to curve as you get to our house so we have our driveway and a second way onto our lot that makes it like a circle driveway.  It is ugly as can be but it has been great for extra parking and safety since our street can be dicey sometimes with people flying around the corner.

Unfortunately we don't have any full shots of the landscaping - I am going to make sure we have good "before" photos next project we start.  Everything in the beds was overgrown or dead so it looked like we were living it up with no HOA to hound us about aesthetics.  I cringed every time I drove up!  We were "those neighbors" that we hate living around.  In the summer the sun was beating down on the front of the house in the afternoon so we waited until October to plant some new landscaping.  We didn't want everything to incinerate in the heat.  Our house faces north/south and our last house did as well so we thought it would get some sun.

We tore out everything in the beds and scraped the soil/mulch (yay that was easy) and also were eyeing this random brick wall that was in front of the bed.  The bed is flush with the foundation and driveway and the way the bricks were laid, you could only plant large shrubs and no flowers because you wouldn't be able to see them.  After we ripped the plants out we were brainstorming about what to do and we noticed the bricks were wobbly.  I used my kung fu skills and kicked them...to our surprise, they fell right over.  HAPPY TIMES!  Whoever built that mess did NOT mortar them to the driveway so out they all came.  It was already looking better.  Again, no one will take bricks/rocks so while we step up the dumpster hunt, they are in M's old truck bed.  Once that was done we headed over to the nursery to make our vision of gorgeousness a reality.

We needed soil and plants so we selected our bounty and off to the register we went where we were punched in the face by the ridiculous price tag of the nursery items.  I like to support local businesses but we are on a budget since we have to renovate EVERYTHING on this house.  We will probably stick to a big box store next time - especially for soil.  When we were planting, there is a flood sprinkler system that is in the beds and I managed to hit a line so we had to replace a piece.  It is dead center where we wanted the plants and pretty shallow so it was tough navigating around it.

A few weeks later we noticed that the sun's new angle for winter/fall stops just short of hitting the front of our house with sun...so our plants have never seen the sun.  Surprisingly they haven't died but we did get a freeze and they were hurting.  Some never really bounced back 100% so I'm trying to watch the weather because they don't have the advantage of warming up with sunlight.  Lately it's been warmer and our pansies are flowering so for everything hiding in the shadows...it looks MUCH better!

Keep on a rockin me, baby!

Many people have heard the never ending story of the river rocks in our back yard.  I can't even begin to explain how back breaking this project has been.  There was a pond/fountain and in between that and our workshop, all the grass had been torn out and replaced with river rocks.  Midland is in the middle of West Texas and we are under water restrictions so a lot of people use these rocks to landscape.  It's not like I'm advocating everyone drain the water sources dry by not having any sort of xeriscape but do it so it looks nice!

Pond update here and here

So the rocks.  Midland has a citizen's collection center that is practically our second home but they do NOT take construction debris like bricks or rocks.  We were super lucky that one weekend the guy working there let us drop off two truckloads of rocks and he just kind of stirred them up into the ground.  We were able to scrape out almost all of the rocks that way and it was awesome.  But we still have more rocks and we need to tear out the fake gutters around the shed...but those are filled with rocks too.  We put a bunch of rocks into a big blue tub to try to get to a solid progress point and then the project died because you are not supposed to dump the rocks into the alley dumpsters either.  We also have rocks in the front yard that need to be torn out.  *sobs*  These rocks were turning into the bane of my existence.

The solution is to rent a dumpster.  The City has dumpsters for rent but I swear they only have two because every time I call they are unavailable.  They are first come, first serve so I'm pretty confident we will never be able to rent one.  Then I started looking into dumpster companies and WOW!  To rent a 10 cubic yard size one is a minimum of $400.  3 tons of debris weight is built into that cost but once you exceed that, it is another $65/ton of weight to dump

Honestly that one company I talked to was maybe $150 more than the City cost when you really think about everything but the husband was not pleased.  The part that killed me was even the dumpster people cringed when I said it was yard disposal like rocks.  EVERYONE HATES THESE ROCKS!    I feel like I'm going to end up being Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption where he takes little handfuls of dirt out every day into the yard for his tunnel project.  I'll just start dropping handfuls of rocks into other yards of rocks when Sky goes for walks!  

The other issue is that there is not a facility where you can drop waste off and they charge you for weight.  Killeen had a dump where they weighed your vehicle on entrance and exit and that was awesome.  When I was renovating the rental to sell it, on my way back to DFW I had to stop by to drop off my trash since I couldn't leave my trash can out in the street for infinity.  

The plan right now is to call more dumpster rentals for price checks.  I really don't feel like spending $400+ to get rid of these rocks but at this point, our yard looks ridiculous and we need to finish so that when it's warm enough, we can lay sod and call a sprinkler company.  The "after" picture below isn't going to blow people away with it's beauty but considering the amount of back breaking labor we have done in the backyard, it has come a long way!

December Update: House Exterior Punch List

The husband and I used to really enjoy doing yard work so it seemed logical to dive into the thing we liked the most to get our feet wet on this house.  Given the sheer amount of holes/cracks/popcorn/paneling issues with the walls inside, painting seemed super overwhelming.  Every season I would plant almost 200 annuals in our flower beds, we were on top of mowing/weeds, I would trim our little oak tree like a boss....just generally we took pride in our house appearance.  We don't have an HOA in our neighborhood so maybe that's a lot of why we haven't tried enough...or it could be the rocks finally broke our spirit.

When we last left off on the pond adventure we had completely torn it out and filled the hole with 20 bags of soil.  Then we declared it too hot to do anything else and quit for about a month and a half.    Then one day it suddenly got a little cooler, we got some pep in our yard step and got the brilliant idea to keep going for about 3-4 more weekends.

Here's the running list of action items for the exterior:

Gutters on house and workshop
Tear out pond
Remove all the rocks - 60% complete
Remove fake gutters around workshop & fill in with soil - 33% complete
Tear our bricks in front yard plant beds
Landscape front beds
Trim oak tree in front yard
Tear out pond electrical
Tear out little tree next to pond electrical
Replace fence & bring one side towards street for more backyard
Tear out melon plants/lattice on side yard
Tear out lattice/vine plants in back yard
Lay sod on side yard & back yard
Run new sprinklers where pond was and tune up existing (too much overspray onto fence)
Paint front door
Power wash front porch
Replace numbers on house with something more modern
Replace front door light fixture with something more modern
Possibly tear out some concrete in front yard (long term)
Add some flair to house facade (long term)
Install horseshoe pits in backyard (this requires not being hermits)
Replace brown roof for "weathered wood" shingles (standard roof color - crossing fingers for hail - long term)

Looking at that list...it's a lot of projects.  Some are contractor jobs that we just haven't handled or it's the wrong season (laying sod).  Either way, the current state of the backyard is way better looking than it used to be.  My parents came up for Thanksgiving and we actually had a nice little spot to sit outside and get a fire going in our chiminea.  The front yard is also looking better but with a sea of concrete, it is really tough to have curb appeal.  I think we need some colorful ceramic planters by the front door and our roof line is also very flat which doesn't help with visual interest.

Stay tuned for an update on how the backyard is looking and why this blue tub of rocks is STILL in the way for four months and counting...

Nest Energy Report: November

We've had the Nest thermostat for almost six months now and my opinion of it hasn't changed since my last post.  Mine is tucked in the hallway with the guest rooms and we never walk by it so it thinks we are never home and tries to adjust to reflect the "absence".  We turned off the learning/sensing features and manage it manually now.  I find this to be frustrating for how "smart" it is but oh well!

So for November (let's just skip over the other months) we mostly used the heater.  We keep our temperature settings lower because despite the fact that our system is 20 years old, it surprisingly works well.  Nest has three options for cooling/heating.  It has A/C, heat and a mix of A/C and heat.  November was cold so we did 100% heat.  December has been much milder and we have been using the mix setting the past two weeks.

How did we do?  We keep our heat temp around 69-70*.  If it's really cold, we will bump it up to 72* but then go to sleep with it around 69/70.  For November we used 56 hours of energy and according to the weekly report we get from Reliant, we average about $3.50/day in electric usage.  Nest's suggestion this month was to turn our temperature down another 2 degrees but that's our max cold tolerance so maybe not.

Anyway, a month or so ago I did turn off the "auto away" feature on Nest because of the hall issue and it thinking we are gone all the time.  Turning that off killed my leafs so usually we earn a leaf a day and instead ended up with 5 for the month.  The leafs used to be a game for me - see how energy efficient I could be...but now I am more interested in how long the system runs.  On heat, it usually will run for maybe 45 minutes the entire day.  My favorite thing is still being able to control it from my iPhone!!

Here is a snapshot from our report...have you taken the plunge with the Nest yet?

Hello....anyone there?

Sooo....it's been several months since I got on here and it appears I have lost my audience...all 4 of you!  But Christmas cards are going out this week and if people look at the back side of the card, they will see our blog address.  I actually enjoyed blogging and I recognize I will never become a millionaire off this but it has been tough trying to find my "niche".

Truthfully we are pretty boring (my friend described us as hermits the other day which is completely true) so the only thing we really had to write about was our home projects.  When we started getting into the rock situation in the backyard and had no where to dump them, we completely ran out of steam.  Our backyard looks like it's about 40% complete and we still need to hit up the entry way with a 3rd coat of paint to make it look more even.  I've got 5 cans of paint in the laundry room waiting to go up on walls.  Admittedly, living in a house that is outdated and like Pandora's box when you get into simple projects is very very overwhelming.  We are at a point where we need to get a contractor to come in here to tell us what the overall scope is going to be and how to break this up into phases.  We constantly go around in circles about ideas for the larger projects like the kitchen and master bathroom/closet and obsessing about things we are not willing to throw money at (or have any idea of cost) is getting exhausting!

Oddly enough the thing we need first and foremost are gutters.  One would not expect to need them out in an area that averages 15 inches of rain a year, but when you drive around and look at houses that don't have them (which is the majority), the rain is eroding away the bottom half of the brick veneer when it falls off the roof and splashes.  Our house is 30ish years old and a significant amount of our bricks are very fragile and chip off if you brush up on them.  We also have issues with the rain trenching a "moat" around our house, there's no diversion over doorways and our front bed planter is ground zero for plant pummeling when it rains.  We got new gutters at our old house thanks to a terrible hail storm and I think replacing all of them and the downspouts was about $1500.  Everything in Midland is twice as expensive and twice as slow but we definitely need to look into this project.

Number two (this and gutters is a toss up, really) on the priority list is a whole house water softener and a R.O. system in the kitchen.  The water out here is....not good.  It is undrinkable (very salty and has a dirty, thick mouth feel) and it constantly fails federal regulations on things like particulates, toxins, etc.  Nice, huh?  The water is heavy with chlorine and my skin has never been worse since moving out here.  When we bought our refrigerator we had to get a plumber to re-plum the water line to the fridge area so we got an estimate on what we need.  It will be about four thousand dollars (yikes) to get everything installed.  Our dishes come out clean but not streak free, my skin might be happy and my hair might look good, our appliances will last longer and we also will not have to go once every 1.5 weeks or so to refill our 5 gallon water jugs at the RO water stations.  That isn't a big deal at all to me and Sky likes to go, but getting a RO tap installed at the sink will be nice!

So those are some of things we are eyeing pulling the trigger on.  We have been going through a ton of transition and loss over the past year so I am ready for 2015 to be here so we can start fresh.  I also am going to work on blog content so I do not ignore my little space on the interwebs anymore!