Waiting for the Floormen

I'll start this blog by sharing a few more of our garden and Epcot pictures.  I would love to have the money to do some gardening and landscaping of Gladys (curb-appeal she does NOT have!), but that is in the budget for about...h-m-m... maybe 2016.  For now, plain is all that the neighbors get.  I just go out, see everyone else's garden, and dream.  With that said, perhaps that is why I do enjoyed the topiaries and the garden fun at Epcot.

"Flowers" made of flowers line the banks of a lagoon in Epcot.

This butterfly of flowers is visible from one of the bridges
in the World Showcase.

Captain Hook brought back childhood memories.

Peter Pan stands hight over the crowds on the top
of a building.

Lady looks disgusted by the attention and the flowers that
she received from The Tramp.

Our budget this year, however, is limited to a few small projects.  Rick and I sat down today and made a new list of what we have to complete both inside and outside the house.  To support my opening paragraph, the "outside" work we have listed involves things like patching the holes in the house, painting the house and windowsills, and repairing the fascia boards.  Landscaping did not even make an honorable mention on the list.

The bleach at the front door will make Gladys beautiful again.

We actually got a start on the new list.  Yesterday the flooring folks from the Finish Line Floors came in to grind down and to polish the floors where the old doors were removed.  The kitchen doorway is now fine, but the living room floor under the old door was badly stained, so they ended up grinding down part of the floor and then adding a thick layer of bleach over the surface.  That has sat overnight, and we are currently waiting for the workers to return today to remove the bleach and to patch the holes  by the doorway before they finish and polish it.  I have to admit that what they did yesterday really helped to clean up a messy-looking strip, so I am excited to have them return to finish the job.  Right now, the bubbled up bleach across the front of the door just looks silly; however, like all old dames, I suppose Gladys deserves a good peroxide rinse once in a while, too.

Rick adds cement to the old dryer vent hole
to make the garage wall secure.

While we are waiting for them to appear, Rick took care of cutting the moulding for around the door in the kitchen.  He also mixed up some cement to patch the two "holes" in the house.  The first hole was where the former owners of the house had drilled through the back of the house to vent the clothes dryer.  That vent was all fine and good except that it was highly illegal since it positioned the dryer right in front of the electrical box.  When we moved the dryer back from the garage onto the platform for the washer and dryer, we just stuffed tin foil into the hole and taped it shut until now.  (Yes, duct tape does work well for a myriad of problems!)  Rick  put up a temporary board on the outside of the house to hold in the cement that he used from the inside of the garage to fill the hole.  Once that dries, he will be able to add stucco to the outside of the house and mud over the inside of the garage where the hole used to be.

The other hole was the one the electrician drilled from the garage into the kitchen wall to put in an outlet box for the repositioned refrigerator.  As noted earlier in this blog, when we added cabinets to the kitchen, the outlet was both too low and too far to the left, so Rick had to cut a new hole and run a new line to the refrigerator. Now both walls are solid and will prevent the admission of any two, four, six, or eight-legged creatures from entering the garage or kitchen of Gladys.

We are happy with what we have accomplished so far.  We still have to complete the floor and the doorways in the laundry room.  Small projects that will fit within the budget still need our attention this year, but we are almost at a point where we can stop the hard work and can enjoy the sunshine and the downtime that await us here in Florida.