In The Weeds of my Neighbors

After we come home after Christmas, we noticed some strange occurrences with one of our neighbors. There were a lot of bags on the curb and at first I just thought it was stuff from Christmas. After about two weeks of it sitting there I notices that it had a lot of cloths and house hold items. I started thinking, I had not seen my neighbors for a few weeks. Then the next day a crew came in and cleaned out the house. I don't know if the people left or if it was rented and they were evicted. For months now the house has sat empty and a small forest started popping up. When I last mowed my yard the grass was up to my waist.

The Wife has been freaking out over snakes and other things being in that yard. I was waiting for her to mention that she thinks chupacabra was in there. I was about to sit down and find out Wake Forest's policy on grass when I hear a large lawn mower. It was Denmark Properties out mowing the yard. I guess the neighbor on the other side complained finally.

I'm just trying to figure out what they are doing with this house. There is not a for sale sign anywhere and with the tall grass I guess they are not trying to rent it out either. I know everything involving the economy is bad, but it's not that expensive of a house and what's the point of sitting on it.

Crafty

When we bought our house one of the things The Wife liked was the previous owners had a old window hanging on the kitchen wall. I also thought it was kind of cool and we have been looking for a similar window at a price we could afford.

While at a strange antique store we find a window frame for five dollars. Oddly enough that is in our price range and we took it home. With the money from the government we bought some paint and sanding paper. Now for my non married readers, you will not understand this, I am not the most crafty of people, I am creative, but I am not good with wood or paint. So of course guess who is doing this project... I am of course. It's one of those things that happens. I am doing the work and The Wife is supervising.

So far the project is going pretty well, I have sanded and removed most of the old white paint and put one coat of paint on the exterior side. While working I do get little "pointers" to make on how to paint or sand better. Will this window frame ever win an award for awesomeness... probably not, but my goal is to make it look good on my wall.

Handy Man

We have been in the house for three weeks now and things are slowly getting back to normal, yet there is still a lot of work to be done. I've started taking up a few projects to make the house a little better.

The first project was changing a door lock. Mind you, I have very little experience at fixing things so I'm doing a lot of this for the first time. For some reason there is a door in the bonus room that we could not lock because we didn't have a key. We searched the house and never found a working key so I had to replace the locks. Truthfully, it was pretty easy. A lot of the parts already in the door worked so I just needed to change the lock part. After 15 minutes we had a working lock and now we don't have to worry about people being able to walk in. I'll be honest I was quite happy with myself.

The next on the list were shelves, and I mean a lot of shelves. So far I have put two more shelves in the storage area, a cabinet and shelf for The Wife's area, and four more shelves in the office. I have done shelves in the past, but it generally ended up slanty or with extra holes in the wall. Since I now own the walls and shelves I thought I might want them to be done right. I got the leveler out and even measured at least twice. I did have a couple of problems. Once shelf bracket does not want to stay in place, it keeps fall out. I got it to stay, but I don't think it's 100% secure, but it will do for now.

Hopefully by next week The Wife and I can get the boxes out of the office so we can start to hang pictures. That's when the house will feel like its done.

It's a Done Deal

Today I was forced into helping with a "it's hurricane season" special when I get a call from the mortgage company, I was worried till I heard the words, "what time of day do you want to close." Those were the greatest and scariest words in the world. We are now home owners. We got the house and we sign the papers on the 27th! We have a lot to do over the next few weeks, no more free time for me. I'm either going to be packing or working. Crap we have a lot of stuff.