Tad's Victory Garden

My dad has asked me to show pictures of my garden. Ever since I have been married I have always wanted a garden. For all of these years I have read and collected books about gardening. Rented movies from the library about gardening. Anything that has to do about gardening I have been interested. And for of all these years this is my first proper garden. Next year I am making my garden even bigger.

Sweet corn.

Radishes. That's Peter our English gnome.

Cucumbers

Banana peppers

Sweet Peas

Okra

Big boy, cherry and Heinz tomato's.

Eggplant

This eggplant was eaten down to the stem by those nasty Little rabbits. Luckily they are growing back.

Yellow, green and red onions.

Carrots

Here are the radishes which were the 1st vegetables to be harvest. We just sowed lettuce and they are already coming up.

Basement Phase 2

Ever since the basement has been gutted out, I have had all of the construction junk sitting in my garage which was an absolute mess. When we moved in I was going to load all of the junk into the 26 ft. rental truck but I figured it would of been a huge task. I would of had to load the stuff in the truck and then unload it at the incinerator which would of been more work. So I started to ask around for the best way to do this job. Chris and John Gubbins had told me to rent out a "can" or a "skip" and load by myself. Once it was loaded, the company would take the trash away. So I called 1-800-got-junk and they came over to give me a quote. Quite expensive (around $700 to $800) forget that. Even though they would of done all of the work for you I thought it was too expensive. Anyway I found a company that charged half of what 1-800-got-junk had quoted me.

Here is what my garage had looked like all of this time. It smelled bad due to the pee/hair covered carpet that we ripped out in the basement.

Another picture with Micah. He loved how there was a huge garbage can sitting in our driveway.

Half way done!

I was getting nervous that I would not have enough room for all of the remaining junk. If I ran out of room, I would had to figure some other way to get rid of all of the junk that was remaining in my garage. The company would of charged me another full price if I wanted them to bring another empty can so I had to load it neatly and have everything as flat as it can be. Luckily I had enough room for everything.

Next step is to have the Gubbins come over and put lights in and framing. I will keep you updated as soon as possible.

There has been a lot of request to see pictures of our house so here it goes:

As you can see this is what our house looks like in the front. The only scary part of the house is the upward hill to our garage. Winter is going to be very interesting.



















When you walk in the front door you can either go upstairs on the left. Go straight to the bathroom or kitchen. Or if you go right you will see our family room (maybe not we are still debating on where we will put everything.)





This is the same room as you enter the front door of the house as you turn right. The color is quite nice but it's too dark. You can see the dining room and part of the kitchen through the walk way.




















Here is another picture of the dining room.

















As I am standing in the dining room, you can see the kitchen and another room which we don't know what to call it.
















Here is the dining room.

















The kitchen.

















Here is our free Piano! I guess I better learn how to read music.
















Here is the other room that we don't know what to do. It will be very warm in the winter due to the nice pot belly stove. The door you see on the right goes right out to the back yard and deck.
















This is on of the reasons why we got this house...the backyard. Even though it needs a lot of work it's very nice and quiet.
















I kind of like the pond. Don't have any fish in it yet.

































Here is a wild and crazy movie. Kind of bumpy as Solviej is walking around the yard. Warning you might get a bit sea sick. Just kidding Solviej. Here is another project the entire side of the house as turned a bit mossy green from the shade and rain. Some good elbow grease should do the job.




Well here is my 2nd update on the basement. As you can see all of the ugly wood panel has been ripped off. So right now it's a bunch of mess that needs to be taken away. The next steps is the wiring, heating and a/c, cleanup, scrub everything with bleach and then I will need to buy a dehumidifier to totally dry the entire basement. Once all of the mold and wetness (plus smell) is completely gone the sheet rock will be coming up. This might take awhile due to other projects and budget but will keep you update once this changes again.

















This is a picture where my office is will be.

B4

I have decided to blog again. Yes it's a miracle and yes it has been a long time since my last entry. For those of you who don't know we have just bought our second house. It's a bit scary to be a homeowner but we felt like it was the right time to do it. This house took us 7 months to get which is quite unusual. It was a short sale (which I have no clue why it's called that...should be called a long sale) and had to wait for the bank to approve our bid offer. The previous tenants were going through a divorce and the guy was the only one living there with his two disgusting smelly dogs. I kid you not, when you walk down into the basement you will be knocked out by the aroma of wet dog and strong odor of pee. It still stinks. Anyway the next day after we signed on the house I had the carpets removed from the basement. By the way here are some snap shots of the jungle outside the house. I will definitely mow, water, fertilize, aerate the yard but unfortunately I might have to wait to properly landscape the front and back yard. That is #531 on the to do list.

Here are some more pictures of the outside house. The neat thing about this house is the fence which I can scratch off on the "to do list". It's in pretty good shape as far as I can tell.

Here are the pictures of the ugly basement. There are three rooms to be exact. There is the main room which will be a play area for the kids.

The second room below is the washer/dryer/sewing room.

And the third room will be my office. As you can see does not require much TLC.

After the carpet was removed I had started taking junk out underneath the stairs. The owner had paint cans, old bowls, opened food cans, etc. As I was taking this out I noticed there was a piece of carpet that was soaked with water and mold. When we had the inspection on the house the inspector told me that I would have to replace the water heater but I don't think we realized that it was leaking water for a long time. It was leaking with water so long that the paint cans were rusted to the wet carpet. As I was removing the paint cans the bottoms ripped off and paint was poring out. After I got that cleaned off I removed the carpet and the lovely aroma of mildew and mold poured into my sense of smell. I had to stop due to the fear that I could get pretty sick from that. Even with a mask I could still smell it.

The two pictures below is the ceiling. We are going to get rid of the drop ceiling and put sheet rock up with some nice ligting.

As you can see to the right how much of a mess that water heater had made. This is after we had to cleaned out the sludge and water. That is where the old water heater stood. So next set of pictures should be completely different.

NYC Trip!

We had the opportunity to spend a couple of days in NYC. Solviej and I have been there before but it has been a long time. I went when I was around 11 or 12 and Solviej used to be a nanny near the city so it was exciting to go back and see the big apple. As most of you know we have 2 kids and we had no desire to take them to the city. Sounds harsh but this was a birthday present for Solviej plus hauling your kids around in NYC did not seem fun to me. So I had my mom fly up from Texas to watch them while we were gone.

We left early Wed. morning before Mailei woke up. We weren't sure how she would react if she saw us left. Micah was up and early as usual and said good bye to us. According to Grandma they were good the entire time. The drive was about 3 hours and we were planning to drive to a city called Bronxville. It was the city that Solviej lived while she was a nanny. I was a bit nervous driving in the big city as we got close. Luckily with Solviej's eyes and our gps we found the train station with no problem. It was pretty hectic as we drove into Harlem but we made it. The one thing I was nervous about was parking our car for a couple of days. We called ahead and found out that they had over night parking at the train station. So when we arrived we saw that you had to have a permit to park. All of the other available parking had meters which you couldn't for over 24 hours. Luckily we found a garage that had available parking. So we parked and got on the train and headed to Grand Central station. Once we arrived downtown we started to look for time square. We kind of gotten lost so we bought one of those small cheap maps. By the time we got into our room I was already exhausted. We had a really cool view from our room as you can see below.

So once we got settled and rested we headed right back out into the wild and had some lunch. Once we ate we found the Gershwin Theatre to watch the Broadway show "Wicked." We got there the right time because people were already going to their seats. We had pretty good seats which I was worried that we wouldn't. It was a pretty small theater to think about it. Overall it was my 2nd Broadway show and I liked it a lot. Solviej loved it. She read the book before we came to NYC. I think she said the show was way better than the book.

After the show we decided to go on top of the Empire State building. It was kind of far away for walking so we kept seeing all of these rigshaws on bikes so we decided to go in style. It was pretty fun and scarry as we almost got hit by a couple of cabs. Once we got to the spot the man told us it was $30!!! We only went about 5 blocks. I couldn't believe how much we got robbed. Always ask how much before you get on anything. It was about 5 or 6 pm and the line was about an hour wait. We looked at each other and set forget it. I kind of wish we went up but we have both been up there before plus I was getting hungry. So we started to walk back to Time Square and as we were walking back we were both looking for a place to eat. We stopped at a couple of stores that Solviej wanted to shop and by the time we got to Time Square we found a little pizza place. I had a lamb gyro and Solviej had pizza. Time Square has a lot of stores and we didn't want to go in just yet even though my legs were numb and my back was throbbing. It just shows how much I am in shape. We went to the Virgin store and the new Toys R Us store. By the time we got to our room we were done. I even had a bath just to make the pain go away.