Black and Yellow, Black and Yellow

No, not the Steelers, and no, not the recently popular song.  I'm talking about Cool or Creepy: Part 3.


And this "friendly" spider we found out front.  Or actually my mom found when they were down helping with some more landscaping.  I had seen it a few days before and took a bad cell phone picture.  When I went back with the good camera it was gone.  

Apparently it's a Black and Yellow Argiope -- a friendly garden spider that likes to stay in one place which is why we found it back in the same place just a few days later.

I'll vote cool on this one since we like any type of insect/arachnid that is beneficial to the garden.  BUT, it can only stay on my cool list as long as it stays outside.  This is one scary looking spider!  Did you see those hairy legs?!?  Maybe it came to visit for Halloween.

Curtains and Paint

I've decided that the two things that make the biggest change in a room are curtains and paint.  Unfortunately, we are a little too early in the renovation process to do much painting, but we were able to add some new curtains and at least start planning for a painting project.

In the guest bedroom we took down the tennis racket border, hung some pictures from out bedroom at the townhouse and added some new brown curtains.   

 I will not miss this.

Good-bye tennis rackets and hello new artwork!

New curtains.

We also added some new curtains in the dining room.  They don't block my view of our shirtless neighbor blowing his leaves in our yard, but they still look nice.

I haven't hemmed them yet -- that's a task that I seem to put-off when it comes to curtains.  I don't mind the way they look but I tend to suck them up in the vacuum cleaner and then spend several seconds fighting with Dyson before I think to turn it off.  

Our laundry room looks something like this.  I don't know if there wasn't enough of just green paint or yellow paint when these cabinets got painted or maybe we had a Green Bay Packers fan, but either way they drive me CRAZY!   The laundry room is about the only room that I can paint right now so I scored some new paint during a recent Sherwin Williams sale. 

 This was one of the first visits to the house last year.

 I decided on the gray color on the right for the walls and the cabinets and trim will be white.  We will probably replace the utility sink and backsplash, but for now everything else will stay the same.

One Crazy Weekend

We had a full weekend at home which is unusual and so we decided to make good use of our time.  We managed to remove the railing at the top of the steps and frame out a new wall, create a new flower bed (minus the flowers) along the driveway and in front of the new fence, and tear down the ceiling in the family room.

 Old railing.

 Floor exposed.

 Securing to the wall.

 Securing to the floor.

 The weather was so nice we decided we should finish a few outdoor projects while we still can.  One of those is this grass area between the fence and the driveway.  With the new fence in place it is a pain to mow.

 We planted some daffodil bulbs for the spring, covered the grass areas with newspaper and added mulch.  It needs more plants but that will probably wait until the spring.

 Finished!  And less grass to mow makes me very happy!

 With most of the plumbing and electrical work done in the new bathroom we need to frame out the new closets so that we can hang drywall.  But before we can finish the framing Andy needs to re-route some baseboard heat.  We already removed part of the tile and styrafoam beam ceiling to access the plumbing for the bathroom.  We thought about just removing sections and rehanging the old ceiling.  A little more thought and we finally decided to remove the entire ceiling and replace it with drywall.  We will hang the drywall but hire someone to tape and mud it so the more we can get done with the bathroom, the better.

 This is the area to the front of the house and under the new closets.

 He loves a good demo project.

 But this one led to the first renovation injury.  When he was almost finished he stepped off the ladder and right onto a nail.  STOP READING IF YOU DON'T LIKE THESE TYPES OF STORIES.  I would stop reading -- but unfortunately, I was there.  I heard the scream and ran downstairs to see what was wrong.  I found something similar to the picture above (don't worry -- I didn't just start taking pictures).  He was in the process of removing his sock and said "Come here.  I need you to tell me how much it's bleeding".  Now, if you know me, you know that I would rather clean up the mouse poop that fell out of the ceiling than look to see how much his foot was bleeding.  I was afraid I was going to have to sit down so that we didn't end up with two injured people.  Luckily for me there really wasn't too much blood.  Andy was is terrible pain as we discovered that the nail actually went entirely though the bottom of his large toe. 

He survived and didn't even need a trip to the ER despite my pleas.  And I still got to clean up mouse poop.