Much Better

It seems like since we bought our house one year ago, most of our efforts have been focused on the exterior of our home. With the help of friends and family, we've painted (although not quite done), replaced the windows, replaced the front door and storm door, redone the landscaping in front, removed about 60% of the overgrown bushes in the backyard, and cleared a garden spot. And so it looks much better than it did one year ago. Here are some of our last projects of 2008 before the snow and ice comes:

The first picture is our project of yesterday. We have this spot in the front where the grass is long gone and consisted mostly of goathead-producing weeds. It looked truly awful and I neglected to take a good "before" picture. What I have posted is an "intermediate" photo. A few weeks ago we did some weed killer. And then yesterday we tilled and pulled out all the old dead weeds. We put down a walkway between the driveway and the front porch using pavers we dug up from all over the yard. And we put down grass seed in hopes of making the front a bit more attractive. The heavens erupted with approval for our hard work and rained a lot yesterday, so we haven't had to worry about watering it yet. So hopefully we can see some progress in the few weeks. But even with just the dirt patch it looks much better than it did with the weeds.

The second picture is of our new rain gutter. The old original gutter was kind of trashed due to a basketball hoop once being mounted over the top of it, and it leaked water all over the place. So I tore down the old one and installed a new vinyl gutter. The hardest part was probably figuring out how to do the bend from the gutter to the downspout. I decided to save $10 by keeping the old metal downspout, which was just fine. The trick was getting the right number of pieces to link them together, and I also wound up having to remove the downspout from the house so that I could hack about six inches off the downspout in order to get the angle right. But it looks much better than what we had, and what's more important, it works much better.

On the last picture, it's hard to see what we did. The original seal on the bottom of the garage door was in shoddy condition and all sorts of water would leak in whenever it rained heavily or when snow melted and ran off our crappy rain gutter. So we put on a new one - this was our general conference project. We would run out between sessions and work on it. Somehow, it still leaks slightly, maybe because the garage door isn't clamped down super hard, but it is much better than it was.

So we're almost ready for winter and next summer we should be able to focus on getting more things done on the inside of the house.