We became homeowners!

April

After our morel hunting adventure, we ended up making an offer on the house. They accepted our offer and we were set to move in when we got back from Puerto Vallarta.

May

• 

We moved our belongings over a week. Avery used 5 Amazon/Cisco equipment boxes and filled and emptied them over several trips. On our last day of moving, James, Katy, and my parents helped us load and unload our rented truck. We moved our bed, washer/dryer, tables, chairs, and our couch. Rusty provided supervision. The moving straps were key for the big items!

June

Garage Resurfacing

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Since the garage was going to be Morgan’s office, he decided he wanted the floors epoxied. When he found out how much it would cost to pay someone to do it, he said he was going to do it himself. It took him a week to prep the floor and lay the first coat of epoxy. Then he forbade Avery from walking in there for a whole week. This was frustrating because the pilot light got blown out during the process and we had no hot water.

The epoxy wasn’t mixed well enough (or something) and didn’t cure in a week. The gap under the door allowed critters and leaves to get in and stuck near the door. RIP lizard. Morgan had to redo several sections that wouldn’t cure. He laid out a pathway with random garage items to mark where we couldn’t put our moving boxes. We ended up with a lot of dirty spots from accidentally touching the epoxy before it dried.

If we were going to do it again, we would have paid someone to do it.

Playground Refinishing

• 

• 

• 

• 

Morgan removed all the hardware from the play structure and re-painted. Avery sanded down all the splinters with 80 grit sandpaper. Morgan painted on the stain with a brush, but it was so laborious- he bought a Breaking Bad cooking jumpsuit and a paint sprayer to finish the job. On June 13 we get our first kid visitors to try it out! Mia liked the monkey bars and Hayden liked crawling around on the picnic table.

July

She Shed Construction

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Avery claimed the backyard shed to store woodworking tools in. The whole thing is made out of plastic and the shelves in the back sat on these thin plastic ribs. The boards were sagging with barely any weight on the shelves.

Step 1: Cleaned out the shed, disinfected it, and covered the hole that rats could sneak in through.

Step 2: Framed the inside of the shed.

Step 3: Added some pegboard to hang my tools

Step 4: The sled that my lathe is attached to happened to fit perfectly across the shed. So that is just sitting on top of two beams screwed into the frame. The next shelf has an added a frame under so it could hold more weight without bending the board. The grinder is really heavy!

Hot Tub Cleaning

• 

Morgan drained the hot tub, vacuumed out the water that wouldn’t drain, scrubbed the whole thing, refilled with clean water, and balanced the chemicals. We set it at 100 deg so that Avery could sit in the hot tub without cooking our baby.

Garage Racks

• 

Avery and Aaron measured the roof angle and we cut the wooden spacers on Avery’s new table saw. After spray painting them white, Morgan and James mounted them on the ceiling with supervision by the puggles. Then they adjusted the height of the base to be juuuust about the garage door chain.

Air Conditioning

• 

Due to the climate change in California, we decided we wanted to invest some money into air conditioning for the house. We have been having more heat waves and wildfires and having filtered cool air in the summer with the windows closed was really desirable.

During the inspection, we found out we had asbestos tape on all our duct work. We got scared into doing asbestos abatement and duct replacement as well since we didn’t want to take any chances with the new baby in the house.

We paid a company to do this job- out of our comfort zone!

August

Backyard

• 

• 

• 

There was a succulent pond installation thing in our yard. There was no pump so the water sat in a plastic tub just waiting to become a mosquito breeding ground. I felt bad cutting down all the succulents because there were some really nice established specimens in there, but we didn’t have room to keep them. After we got rid of the plants we found out half of it was built with pavers and half was rocks cemented together. We took apart the pavers and added them to the little retaining wall by the fence. We pulled out the black plastic tub and revealed about 1 billion ants crawling over every square inch of dirt that was covered by the tub. Morgan said he could feel them on him and we should get out of there. We dropped the tub and ran. We hired a junk service to break up the rest of the cement and haul it all away (along with a bunch of other house parts that the previous owners left us)

• 

• 

• 

One of Morgan’s big ticket items was to put in turf in the backyard for the baby to play on. He wanted it to be super plush so it wouldn’t hurt if she fell down. We weighed doing it ourselves, but with one pregnant person we decided it was too much labor and paid a company to do it for us. Morgan wanted the tallest, darkest grass available and Avery wanted shorter limier grass. We compromised with something in between.

California Turf Supply did our installation. They also fixed the irrigation lines that ran under the grass and helped us set up an area to put our planter boxes and pavers.

[Update June 25, 2023] The backyard turf is one of Brooke’s favorite places to play. She currently likes to play with the water table on the grass. It gets hot in the sun, so we have to put up a shade tent- which is fine since the baby isn’t supposed to be in the direct sun anyway.

• 

• 

• 

When we came home from the vet where we had to unexpectedly put our dog Rusty down, we were really sad and depressed. We thought a good way to cope would be by working on some projects. We got 10 ft redwood 2x6s at Home Depot and loaded them into our Rav4. They were so long, they went from the back of the car all the way to the windshield. When Morgan shut the trunk, it nudged one of the beams just enough into the window shield to crack it. Our bad day only got worse!

The plan was to lay pavers around the planter boxes. The turf company had already prepped the area for the pavers and run pipes up to the center of the raised beds for irrigation. Avery built the frames and then they sat there unfilled for a few months until she was able to get the pavers and dirt ordered. It took Avery about 10 trips with a little blue wagon to move all of the pavers to the backyard. They were really heavy! The pavers were a huge undertaking and it took a few weeks to get them all laid. It turned out that all of the sides were different heights and the rectangular area was not square. Leveling each side was a nightmare!

It took us about 40 trips to the front yard with Morgan’s grandpa’s old wheel barrow to transport all of the raised bed mix. But finally the planter beds were ready in time for spring planting.

September

Screen Door

• 

Avery installed a screen door so that we wouldn’t get so many flies in the house. It was pretty easy, just needed to cut it to fit and then use the shims to hang the door level.

Nursery

• 

• 

• 

• 

Avery gave Morgan a few options for what to paint on the baby’s wall. He chose mountain theme. We wanted something kind of outdoorsy and not too girly.

Avery got three shades of blue-green paint in the same vertical, but in hindsight, she could have just gotten one can of the darkest paint and mixed it with the light in various concentrations. She ended up making a few custom colors to put more layers into the background. The mountains were free handed. The sun also got scrapped.

• 

• 

• 

Avery copied the design for the shelves from the closet in the master bedroom – just keeping the house consistent. She bought two hardwood boards and Home Depot and cut them down to size on the table saw. It turned out the wall wasn’t even close to plumb, so she filled in all the gaps with caulk. After it dried, she went over the whole thing with two coats of flat paint and gave the closet a new coat.

• 

• 

• 

Irrigation

Our big day was rapidly approaching. Avery wrapped up her projects at work and went on maternity leave Sept 9. Finally, lots of time to finish house projects and nesting! First up on the list: front and back yard irrigation.

The home owners before the previous owners had put in a sprinkler system on the front and back lawns. The previous owners changed the front to be lots of plants with mulch and never figured out how the irrigation worked. It was time to change that!

Avery used the metal detector and found 3 sprinkler heads buried in the front yard. After capping them off, she turned on the water and discovered 2 sinkholes of water appearing. She dug them up and found broken risers. The following process was repeated roughly 6 times:

• Turn on the water
• Discover a: a) watery sink hole b) shooting fountain
• Dig up the hole and find: a) broken sprinkler head b) broken riser with no head c) busted pipe
• Go to home depot and buy the parts needed to fix the issue
• Realize the parts are: a) the wrong size b) male instead of female
• Go back to home depot and buy the correct parts
• Install new parts
• Think the system is complete
• Recover from physical exertion for 2 days

October

Nook cushions

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

October 9th was BlueB’s due date, and we were ready for her arrival. She didn’t make her appearance, so Avery took the day to complete one last project.

We wanted some cushions to put on top of the Ikea shelves for us to sit on when we read to BlueB. They were going for $200 if we wanted them to be the right size! Ridiculous!

After upgrading from our queen bed to the king bed, our foam topper didn’t fit the bed anymore. Morgan said he didn’t want it on his side. So Avery decided to cut the topper to be half the size of the king bed and take the scraps to make the cushions. Luckily, the math worked out and there was enough area available.

[Update June 25, 2023] Brooke doesn’t like sitting and being read to. She does like using the reading nook to cruise on though.