Inside Jobs

In addition to watching the trees come down in the back yard, we also have been keeping busy with inside jobs.

As I mentioned earlier, we are putting 5/8 inch firewall drywall in the garage.  We have lived here for 28 years and never noticed that there was nothing between the garage and our house except 1/2 drywall on the interior walls, a bit of insulation in the walls, and 1/4" paneling inside the garage.  That seems to have been the way of building houses in this neighborhood in the 1970s since many homes still have their garages lined with brown paneling.  While we painted the paneling a light yellow years ago, we never made any other improvements.  We were long overdue to bring the house up to code by adding the firewall drywall in the garage.

For the last couple of weeks, Rick has been hanging, taping, mudding, and sanding that drywall.  Yesterday we actually were able to put a primer coat of paint on the south wall between our garage and living room.  By tomorrow, we hope to be able to finish the sanding of the east wall between our garage and family room.  Rick worked on it early this morning, but it just became too hot outside to continue that task.

We stated the day delightfully by meeting Lindsay, Christopher, and Owen at the Botanical Gardens.  They have a Lego Exhibit there staged throughout the gardens.  What amazing things engineers and artists can do with just Lego blocks!  Each exhibit listed a fact about what was constructed and how it was connected to the garden.  The placard also listed how many blocks (literally tens of thousands) were used in each exhibit and how many hours (think: hundreds) the builders took to complete each work.

This purple peony-- complete with a bumble bee--
was at least four feet across.

We were trying to figure out what kind of internal
structures were used to keep the Lego hummingbird
suspended above the yellow trumpet flower.

Workers used tens of thousands of Legos to build this magnificent peacock.

Even two gardeners and their wheelbarrow
were constructed of Legos! 

Once we came home from the gardens, we decided to get started on renovating the family room into our new laundry/ craft room.  Down came the crown molding, off came the baseboards, registers, outlet covers, and window coverings.

The dark family room awaits renewal.

We start the transformation.  The blue will work much better
for a laundry and craft room.

After Rick and I cut in around the edges of the room, he really started to transform it by rolling on our new light aqua coat of paint.  The color is Antiguan Sky, and the room definitely will need two coats of paint to cover the dark umber that has been on those walls for many, many years.

I think that I am going to love this room when we complete it.

I am pleased with the results so far.  The room looks larger, brighter, and more clean.  We needed a change, and this certainly is creating a new look for that corner of the house.  With the trees gone in the back, we will get more morning light in that room, too, so many elements are affecting the look of the room.  I hope it becomes a bright, welcoming place to not only do laundry, but also to create new items on the loom, on my sewing machine, and on my computer.  We have a long way to go yet, but if that room turns out as well as the laundry room at Gladys did, I will be very happy indeed.