Well it's been a busy couple of weeks, it has. A while back I finally
called a contractor to come see about replacing my retaining walls in
the front yard. They're currently old brick and are tilting and
cracking with the weight of ages. I want to see them replaced with some
nice looking field stone. Mmm, rocky. But the price he gave me was
way too high. He did, however, give me a reasonable offer on a house
painting.
My house was last painted when I was around..
eleven? Twelve? Something like that. Many eons ago, anyway. They
painted it themselves, actually, to save money. My mom was always about
saving money even when we had plenty of money saved up. She would
almost never let us run the AC in the summer. It was only with much
persuasion and begging that I was able to get a window AC in my room
when I was 16. Anyhow, it's been a long time since the house was last
painted and it's been flaking and chipping a lot in the past few years.
And some of the masonite siding and wood trim was warped or rotten with
age. Not to mention the gosh darn woodpecker holes. So I decided
I needed paint far more urgently than a new wall.
Well, it's done
now. Except for some odds and ends like the doors and steps. I wanted
to go for tannish gray walls and black trim. Little bit goth, ya
know. But the gray turned out much lighter than expected, like a very
very light beigey gray. I had an anxiety attack or two worrying about
how that would look. It turned out okay, though the contrast of the
light color and the black is starker than I had planned. Ah well. The
house certainly looks tidier! They replaced a lot of the damaged boards
and caulked my cracks... yes. So that should last a long time.
Distressingly,
they discovered some termites when removing a damaged board. They
hadn't gotten into the framework or anything, just the wet, crumbly
stuff, but still. I've never had termite problems before. So I had to
get the termite people out here to take a look. They're going to dig a
trench around my house and fill it with poison, it would appear. They
wanted me to get rid of a ton of cardboard boxes my dad had left in a
corner of the basement for some reason.. rainy day boxes, I guess. It's
been pouring rain since then, though, so I haven't been able to get to
work on that til today.
My basement is really more of a dirt
floored, deep crawl space accessable only from the outside.. it's about 6
feet at the deepest end and about a foot at the shallowest. Sadly
it's not very suitable for a dungeon. Well, it's dirty and dank and
such, so that's not so bad, but it's also full of bugs, spiders, and the
occasional Arkansas scorpion (they're small and pale, but pack quite a
punch). It's not really a place I would want to leave someone tied up
in. Not responsibly, anyway. Alas.
It's been pouring rain for
a couple days and the deepest part, which I had to cross, was flooded
with several inches of water. I had to take a few spare cinder blocks
from behind the house and put them down as stepping stones. Then
I moved a ton of dirty old boxes of all sizes out of the cramped
corner. They're piled up outside now, taking up half the patio. I'm
not sure what I'll do with them, as I'm not sure the garbage men take
heaps of loose boxes. Well, at least it's done now. One of these
days I need to totally clean out all the ancient detritus from my
basement, but I guess I could wait til I have a slave. Slave labor, you
know.