After the baby got sick, I got sick. Then we went to visit my little sister for a few days down in So Cal. Mike had the place to himself to work on a few little things. Mainly to fix the sprinkler system.
He ended up having to pull up and replace more pipe. He got all the sprinkler heads working and to a height he liked. He ran wire from the irrigation control in the garage under the house in the crawlspace out to the new irrigation valves at the back of the house. He's got everything wired up and working automatically. We're still doing some extra hand watering trying to bring the lawn back. Unfortunately a lot of the time the sprinklers weren't working had very high temperatures. Even our gardener hand watered when he came almost a week later; that's when you know you have to work on your lawn.
Mike also reattached the wooden baseboard trim in the kitchen. Some of it had been removed so that the painters could remove the wall paper in the kitchen. In the front yard he hung up a wrought iron hose holder onto the brick. With the new irrigation valves in the front the hose couldn't go where it was before.
Another project while we were gone was the entry way wall. The newells that were on there were the first things he removed in the house. He had to sand down the top to remove the depressions then he painted it to match our baseboards and put some trim around it. It still needs to have the edges caulked and the nail holes puttied but its a start. It really lightens up the entry way.
Since we got back from our mini vacation, we've just been trying to clean. Whenever the baby naps I try to get through a box. All of our clothes are put away, I found the last of our sheets and blankets and I think I've got all of our pictures. We're still discussing what goes where. We decided for sure where a few pieces are going to go but then we couldn't find our hanging brackets.
We also couldn't find our second remote, the charger for my camera, the laptop battery (meaning it always had to be attached to the wall) or a working flashlight. Mike had torn through some boxes looking for them to no avail. One day while the baby was napping I got to go through a few "misc" boxes. It had everything from pens and pencils to things that had been on our fridge to cook books, jackets, frames and everything we'd been looking for. All in a bag, under another bag in the bottom of a box, that had drop clothes and a flower Halloween costume on top of it. I don't know why he couldn't find it before. ;) So now we have multiple phones, we don't have to run the remote up and down the stairs and the laptop can actually be portable.
Mike was also working on the garage door. Apparently the garage door remote openers we got for the first door didn't go to that door. It does open when you use the wall button but not via remote; and if it doesn't work via remote, you can't program your car to open the garage door. Details details. He worked on it for awhile, even managed to find the manual online and followed the instructions "forwards and backwards" and it didn't work. He researched a little and found out that that particular remote doesn't actually work that particular door. He found a brand new remote that would work online and got it in a few days. He got it working really quick so now two of our three garage doors work from our cars. Mike loves eBay. The third stopped moving within a week of us moving in.
And then there's the thermostat; which, if you come to visit, will probably be the first thing Mike shows you for awhile. The thermostat was in the family room downstairs and didn't really heat or cool the house the way we would want. The downstairs family room stays cool in the summer so the thermostat doesn't realize that the upstairs is hot and the air should come on. He moved the thermostat to the landing at the top of the stairs so that it more accurately read the whole house. The old one was also replaced with a brand spanking new one. Its so cool, it has its own app. Not only can you set a low temperature for the heat to come on at and a high temperature for the AC to come on at (which compared to our old one is cool), it can be remotely controlled. Via the app you can check efficiency, the temperature, turn it off or on, etc. You can use presets for efficiency, then adjust it from there. Mike thinks its very, very cool, just ask him about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment