Home Improvements

Time has been zipping by, as usual, and now it is May. It's a pretty eventful month for me this year, with the work being done on the house, Mother's Day, our five-year anniversary, and our vacation to Savannah just around the corner. It feels like we have stretches of time where nothing much goes on and then bam! there's a burst of activity or events to balance everything out.

We're having work done on our house, again. I'm excited, though, as the improvements are ones visitors will actually be able to see and experience all year round. After all, last spring was when we had our air conditioning installed, and though the summer was far more tolerable it wasn't anything a visitor could see. Visitors couldn't necessarily see the new furnace in the basement, either, or the insulation in the attic. But this time the home improvements are pretty obvious.

First accomplished was the removal of the unsightly built-in air conditioners we had in our family room and kitchen. Yes! Not only were they ugly, they were incredibly energy inefficient in that if you held your hand up in front of one in the winter you'd feel a distinct breeze. I always had them covered in plastic, I figured I didn't want any cool air escaping to the outside in the summer, either. I practically jumped up and down with joy the day we saw they were gone.

Next was the replacement of pipes and plumbing work all throughout the house. Note to would-be thieves--we do not have copper pipes. As much of the old, galvanized steel pipes that could be reached have since been replaced with a kind of plastic tubing all throughout the house. It is amazing the difference this has made to our water pressure, and to getting hot water quickly from the faucets. The sound of the shower still scares me, it's so loud now compared to before. It'll be much easier to water the lawn, too, an improvement Edwin has especially been looking forward to using.

Currently, we have a painter who will be refinishing and painting all of the textured ceilings in the house as well as painting our stairway. It's been a slow process and we're still not sure when he'll be able to finish the work. Right now, just about all of the furniture from our dining room and living room is now crammed into our family room and porch, making just about all of the rooms on our main level unusable. Hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to get our dining room and living room back, but mostly just to shift everything from the other rooms into them until the end. I'm pretty excited about this home improvement, since I hate textured ceilings and from the thoroughness of the painter it's become obvious there's no way we could have done this work ourselves.

Throw in some new light fixtures in the kitchen, a new faucet in the downstairs bathroom, painting the kitchen, and me hopefully painting more trim around the house and we'll have hit a lot of the big things remaining in the house for work. Exciting.

I hear Anna crying ...