What we've been doing....

It's been a while since we've updated the blog with what has been going on at the Hall house. Rather than a quick pic and a post....this is a full blown update of what...and why.

So, the deck. The deck was in super rough shape. The pic below doesn't really prove the point, but it just looked bad. Old and gray and...just ucky.

 Sure, we dressed it up and kept it with flowers and potted plants and so on. But it still looked bad. So...I decided to stain it. I had to go solid stain since last coat applied was like a semi-transparent and alot of times folks associate solid stains with the redwood stain that everyone thinks of for decks for some reason. Well, we went lighter and when we did that....we decided to replace all of the spindles and really dress up the deck....voila!

 

Ok, so the next thing to point out is that we needed a gate on the deck....in all reality the gate started the whole thing. Not long ago when I took a day off work because I cracked my noggin, I decided that I would measure the opening for the deck steps and draw up plans for a gate. Couldn't be too hard right? Turns out, it wasn't that hard but I peeled back idea of replacing the spindles with these black aluminum "decorative" spindles and had I reeeeeeally thought about that in depth and analyzed the cost. I would have put wood on the gate.

 

The gate can lock closed or lock open which just makes perfect sense with a little one around. I didn't want the gate to be slamming around the place or closing during the day with Baxter....but I did want to lock the gate closed to keep in Reese and keep out Baxter if we decided to eat on the deck. This one little item really started this whole train wreck but a very necessary wreck to spruce up the house.

 

 

I think it looks SOOOOOO much better than it did. I still need to add a top coat just to finalize the process and clean up some scuffs from moving the furniture back on but that really shouldn't be that big of a deal. We're so excited to have a nice deck now....I've never stained or treated any deck we've had so this was a major deal for me in admitting a previous homeowner mistake by not taking care of our decks. 

Next....the fence.

With Bax sort off locked of the deck for a while - to prevent dog prints all over everything - our little, friendly, able to be adopted and sent to a new home Beagle decided that he should find a way out of our yard so he literally started busting old pieces of fence down so that he could get into Barbara and JRs yard behind us. JR feeds him cheese and he loves that so JR encouraged the behavior but the fence was in bad repair anyway.

So about two Saturdays ago, JR and I decided to fix my dog's handy work and we put up a new section of fence. Keep in mind that this is just a section of the whole but it looks decent to us. I think we decided that if need be...we could be fence builders. I mean this would be a worst case scenario of the economy really tanked. But then we thought about this harder and come to the realization that if the economy tanked...there probably wouldn't be alot of fences being built. Oh well....

 

I mean you couldn't even tell if the new wood didn't stand out like a sore thumb. So that keeps the destructive, lovable, so ready to have a new home wouldn't you like to adopt him right away.....dog in check.

Ahhhh. Owning a home is blissful. The next projects seem to be more interior related. Paint...new stuff to the kitchen? Maybe. Some new furniture? Possibly. It's sort of hard to say what we'll do next but what isn't hard to say is that Kim got creative recently as well and decided to bake some banana bread.....mmmmmmmmm. We took a tried and true recipe from Aunt Norma and Kim worked her magic with the baking gods. I'll have to say...as good as I think the deck turned out. The bread turned out better. Kim is an awesome cook and it was just to die for. Note the controlled chaos that is happening in our kitchen but the bread was amazing.

Whoa!!!! That is some daggone good bread folks.

So that's what we've been doing at the Hall house. And here is a pic of Reese to cap off the post. Thanks for checking in!

What a face.....