As you might haven noticed, it’s been a bit quiet around the New House on the Blog. While I’d like to say we were sneaky and hid away at a secret bungalow on the beach, that’s just in my dreams.
Because you see, I’ve got a part-time job.
I usually get to work at about 7:30 in the morning, and get off at 4:30 in the afternoon. Add on 30 minutes for drive time, and I get home at 5:00PM. And while I wish my day ended then, as soon as I pull into our driveway, I’m re-energized. I run upstairs to get changed, and then it’s off to my part time job.
I know, I can here you all the way out here in Michigan.
“Give it up Brandt. We know you’re not really working a part-time job.”
Fine.
Here’s some of the big stuff that’s been going down at the Malone Compound.
This is our front door. As you can tell, we’re in the process of doing some upgrades. First, up at the top, you can see the paint looks like it needs a bit of refreshing. We’ve got a friend painting the house, and from what he’s saying (depending on weather) it could be done within the next week, which will be a huge sigh of relief. As soon as that’s done, you know we’ll have full scoopz and details of colors and what not.
Second, you might have noticed those boards on either side of the windows. Originally, there was wood on either side, but as we started looking a bit deeper into our house, we noticed that these boards desperately needed to be replaced. I’m talking, dry rot so bad that it was literally flaking off and looking like sawdust. Not what wood should be looking like.
No good. No good at all. Thankfully, my buddy has quite the reputation as a painter, so when he agreed to paint our house, we knew we were getting a great deal.
Obviously, we’re still going pretty strong on the weeding and controlling of the yard, but as a slight diversion, we decided that our little mailbox was looking a bit sad. I wish we had a before, so I’ll try to describe to give you a mental image.
You know how wood looks when it’s been untreated, and neglected for a long time? It has that whitish look to it, with blackish and extremely brown lines streaking through it? Imagine that as the post for the mailbox. Then, imagine the house numbers falling off the mailbox (they had our house numbers going down the side), and even missing a few numbers. The box itself was a big green thing that’s only purpose was to gather mail. It brought nothing to the house. Well, we decided to change that.
Enter my mother, with a can of blue spraypaint.
First, that post needed some work to it. Off came the mailbox, and on went a good solid layer of primer to the wooden post.
The backside there? That’s originally what the post looked like. And even with the layer of primer, it looked MUCH better. After that was all primed, we started working on the mailbox. Again, enter the blue spraypaint.
You can kind of see underneath the green that it originally was. It wasn’t hugely ugly, hard on the eyes green. But it was boring. Like, “Ho hum, here’s another mailbox that looks like the last one.” But we were going to change all of that.
Back to the post. We let the primer dry, grabbed some of the paint that my buddy was painting the house with, and applied a layer of that to the mailbox.
The color we applied over the primer was the same paint color we’ve got on our house. I don’t remember the exact name, so as soon as we find the exact name, I’ll edit this sentence and put it in.
You might notice that we smudged a bit on the bottom. When we mounted the mailbox, we noticed there were a few areas that needed a bit of a touching up. Luckily, that’s an easy fix, especially since it’s just a few quick swipes with a small roller to get things up and going. And the best part? We looked down the back end of our street (this view is looking towards the back), and the front end (where we’re standing), and we noticed that we now have a nice little mailbox that stands out a ton from the rest. Imagine white backround-black numbered reflective stickers on the side of the mailbox with our address, and you’ve got the full picture.
Next on the agenda? This beast.
We’ve been a’clearing away, and I’ve hacked this thing down a ton to actually try to get it out, but to quote from “The Lord of the Rings,”
“The trees are strong, my lord. Their roots grow deep”
“Rip them all down.”
While we won’t be ripping all of them down, this beast has my number, and we’ll be hooking the tow straps up to it tonight to yank it out. I’m intrigued just how far those roots go down.
New House On the Blog 