Outdoor fun and finishing another room

Gutter Guards

When we saw a tree growing from our gutters we knew it was time to do something about them. We only wanted a band-aid as we plan on replacing them entirely when we get a new roof, so we decided to get the cheap roll of plastic mesh you jam in the gutters.

Halley worked on the shorter roof (above the garage) while I went up on the main roof. After cleaning out all the gross junk in the gutters, we started cramming the gutter guards in. They fit in with pressure/friction and bow out a tiny bit because of that (by design).

How well will they work? Who knows!  We'll find out soon enough.

Pseudo Landscaping

Before

After ripping out all of the bushes on the side of the house, we decided to move the line of bricks that surrounded the "flower bed" that was already in front of the house. We had already planted some bulbs, various ground cover perennials.

After

We bought about 60 new bricks and wove them in with the existing bricks to lay out a new outline that looked a little nicer to us. Given that we are not professionals there is a bit of "wiggle" to our "straight" lines... I'll chalk that up to "charm". 

Before

After

Bedroom Repaint

We decided it was time to start in on a relatively low cost project and tackle the first spare bedroom.  Eventually a tiny human will live there, but for now it will serve as a guest room.  At some point in the future we'll get the hardwood floors in the house refinished, but that is a project for another time...perhaps decade.  We were clever enough to set up a time lapse for the work on most of the room (except painting the baseboard and trim).  

We followed our now standard procedure for the bedrooms:

• Use oil based primer to prevent the wallpaper from bubbling up and falling off the walls (learned that trick from the debacle here)
• Put up crown molding and caulk our mistakes
• Paint ceiling and crown molding
• Paint walls
• Rip up carpet and remove tack strips and staples
• Paint baseboard and trim
• Call it a day, eat cheetos

Nearly "after", still need to paint baseboard, trim and doors.