Without any business travel to speak of, my life is pretty mundane. The month of May slipped by without anything interesting enough to even write about.
I did get a business trip to Pleasanton in Northern California last week but it was work, work, work. Ten to twelve hour days, dinner, bed, and do it all over again.
Not very exciting except that now I don't have to look at the deteriorated front door any longer. The house we moved into about three years ago has a nice wood door with leaded glass. But it looked like it had never been cared for in any way. And it's fairly exposed. No significant overhang to protect it and faces mostly west so it catches a lot of weather straight on.
I didn't think to get any good "before" pictures. The top shot is, obviously, the door in progress but well along. My neighbor Paul helped me with this project. We got it down and sanded it down to bare wood. Between three and four hours with an assortment of power sanders, sanding sponges, and plain ol' hand sanding. There was some water damage along the bottom panel and the molding around the raised panels was a real mess.
We stained it, each working down one side, with a walnut stain that matched the original color fairly well and looks good with the brick. Then I put on two coats of satin polyurethane.
With drying time for everything that took most of the day on Good Friday and all of Saturday. It really could have used a third coat of polyurethane but we had company coming over on Easter Sunday and it didn't seem like a good idea to leave up the OSB board that was screwed in place in the doorway. :)
The end result isn't perfect but it is so much better than it was.
Just a quick post. Been horrible about blogging. No time, no time! Aryn and Anna came to stay for the weekend this past weekend. A friend of ours let us know that the bluebonnets behind her house were in full bloom.
So we loaded everyone up along with Alice's DSLR. Here's what I think is the best of about 20 shots.
Walking into the living room on a bright sunny morning like today, I am struck by how much I like this house. We liked our previous home but the living room in that house was like a cave. This one has lots of windows and higher ceilings to give it a terrific bright, cheery feel.
Of course, it took a lot of imagination to see what it could be with the previous owner's ... decor (lower picture). White walls, whitish carpet, and not much imagination.
I've got to say that the previous owner probably wouldn't recognize the interior of the house.
Three reasons for this post:
After a very long time sitting in the closet I finally just hung up the pictures for this wall. Mostly from my travels in 2007.
The room is in decent shape for a change. I tend to pile stuff on the footstool, a bad habit I'm trying to break. My shiny big 26-inch wide screen monitor is paired with the older 19-inch wide screen in a dual-monitor setup. That's where I spend 8 to 10 hours a day. I've taken to using RDP to the laptop so I don't have to change between the two keyboards. The solo monitor to the left is for our home computer, Alice's laptop, which happened to be gone when I shot this.
And finally, the office situation. My employer is going to compress more people into cubicles to save on office rent. Our Houston space has shrunk from occupying our own campus of four buildings to selling the campus and compressing into 3 then 2 and soon to be 1 building. For the moment there are still more employees than can fit even in cubicles. So the solution is to convert some people to office-at-home with a few cubes fitted for "hoteling" (i.e., empty with a phone and network port). Since I work about 9 days out of 10 at home anyway, I've volunteered. The main upshot for me is I'd lose my office phone. I tap into that via some magic software that causes my office extension to ring my work Blackberry and, more importantly, lets me make calls that originate at the office. We'll see how this proceeds.
(Catching up on past events, however unexciting)
Before and after pics of the laundry room floor. It is so much better. Cruddy, worn vinyl and beat-up rusty drain pan all gone. And all the squeaks removed in the process.
As the long break I had at Christmas wore on, Alice reminded me: "If you let this vacation slide by you'll never have time to do the tile and you'll have to hire someone." When she's right, she's right.
This occupied all my free time from New Year's Eve until January 6th. Not a horrible job but my knees are getting too old for this. Kneepads, of course, but the straps on those damn things irritated the back of my knees almost as much as kneeling on hard floors did the front.
I did a lot better job of working this room so that I wasn't waiting for things to dry. When I did the hall bathroom back last January, I kept sort of tiling myself into a corner. I was able to work this back to front much better. I also planned and cut the "baseboard" tiles for this one at the beginning instead of as an afterthought. So those went in as I went along and not as a separate job after the floor was done. And the layout came out exactly as I intended with whole tiles at the exact planned spot at the doorway.
Anyway, that's three rooms floored upstairs. That leaves the two guest bedrooms, the master bedroom, the master bathroom, the hall, and the stairs still to go. Thinking of wood for the master bedroom, tile for the master bath, and new carpet for all the rest. As the budget allows.
It was odd after I got this done. Put away the tiling tools and leftover tile. I had the pile of tile boxes, morter mix, etc for this project all piled in the garage for barely short of a year.
(Catching up on past events)
Snow in Pearland. Last time this happened was Christmas Eve, 2004. The picture is of the front of the house at about 11pm. By then the snow had stopped and temps were hovering just over freezing. It was all gone by morning.
Off to the right on the driveway, you can see the material for the new roof.
