After finally going to the huge transfer station 2 towns away earlier this month, I made it to our local transfer station today. Last year our neighbor chopped her lilac tree down to almost nothing, and this year it was covered in so many gorgeous, bright purple flowers. Ours, which I don’t think has ever been trimmed, had about 4 very washed-out flowers. This morning I grabbed my hand saw and chopped ours back to almost nothing.
Birdie, despite being super sweet, very opinionated, and a good girl all around, is a disaster in the litter box. So I decided to create the litter box enclosure I’ve been planning in my head for over a year, which is designed to enclose a much larger litter box. Think “the size of a small boat” sized litter box.
I’m on a roll lately! First I built a screen door, then I went to the dump, and now I’ve replaced the window screen in our front hall using the spline/roller method. The window in the front hall has never been open, due to the old screen being ripped out before hubby bought the place. All that was left were the remnants of the old spline and the dregs of a metal screen.
Last weekend hubby was on the phone with his favorite Aunty and was telling her about the screen door I made. I heard him say “Alison’s philosophy is ‘why buy it when I can make it?’. My philosophy is ‘why make it when I can buy it?'” – that made me LOL 🙂 I do buy some stuff, but a screen door seemed an apt challenge for 2016.
Progress with the screen door has been slow. I kept messing up and having to backtrack to fix my mistakes, but that’s the beauty of learning. 2 weekends ago I painted the frame. The outside is black like our other outer doors – I used the same exterior semi-gloss black that I bought for the front door. I also redid the molding covering the edges of the screen.
One more item from my 2016 Projects list has been completed! Painting our new front door black. When I was at Home Depot earlier this week I picked up a quart of black semi-gloss exterior paint. After three coats it’s done!
One of the things on my 2016 Projects list is to build a screen door for our bedroom door leading out to the deck. It’s a non-standard size, so if we bought one it would have to be custom made. So why not try to make one myself? I wanted to use the Kreg Jig that Abbie & Briggs got me for Christmas [love you guys!] and I found an awesome tutorial on youtube.
I have posted twice about our hard-wired fire alarms. The first time was to admit I’d painted them [which you’re not supposed to do], and the second time was to share a story that led to me nailing numbers to the front of our house. I realize now that I should have replaced them instead of painting them, but back then [2013] I was very new to DIY and knew nothing about wiring. Now I know that replacing hard-wired alarms is almost as easy as replacing battery-operated ones!
There has been a large gap between my last post and this one, mostly due to being in Hawaii for 10 amazing days, and unfortunately being sick the entire time with a stomach flu, which continued for a week after getting home. I am mostly fully recovered now.
Last March I went to IKEA and bought a bunch of stuff including new lighting for the master bedroom and girl cave. I installed the master bedroom lights right after my trip, but didn’t install the girl cave ones until today, over a year later… oops. This was one of the items on my 2016 Projects list.
