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 Admittedly, living in a house that is outdated and like Pandora's box when you get into simple projects is very very overwhelming.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!
No comments:
Post a Comment