home depot!

A few weeks ago I filled out one of those forms for a giftcard drawing at Home Depot ... and I got a call yesterday saying I am one of ten finalists! I really do seem to have good luck with drawings. As a finalist we won a free water inspection - some consultant is going to come out to our house tomorrow and test our water and tell us if we have terrible stuff in it. Probably we will and once we know we'll feel obligated to fix it ... and we'll spend our whole $5oo Home Depot gift cards on that.

Office Prep

The first room we decided to complete was the home office. We both work from home a few days a week and I have been waiting a long time to have a nice, permanent place to work. The dining room table has been my "office" since we moved to Charlotte. I also was desperate to have furniture that wasn't falling apart and actually matched. So this was really my priority room.

Originally we had planned to each have our own offices (since we have 5 bedrooms), but then we agreed that since "my office" was hopefully going to turn in to Azra's bedroom in January, it would be wasteful to buy furniture for it or to spend time setting it up for me. So Miran's office became our shared office. First I painted the walls a nice silver grey color, and then we bought lots of tables and file cabinets at IKEA and we put them together.

Here are pictures of the room taped and ready to be painted and of me putting a filing cabinet together. I'll post some completed room pictures after I clean it up and finish filing. Right now it is so messy I don't want to document it!

Grass

For reasons we don't completely understand, a huge patch of grass died in our front yard. This actually began as soon as we moved in and Miran spent a lot of time this summer tilling the area and buying lime and otherwise preparing for a planting new grass. He also got fertilizer and grass seed and a little push thing to throw the seeds around. A few weeks ago our good friend Mark generously helped out with his pick-up truck and he and Miran got two loads of really nice compost which we used to cover half the area after laying the seeds. If you look closely the right side of the brown patch is darker - this is the side we have finished. We've also finished a stripe along the street.
So we did that about two weeks ago and now we have cute little grass peeking up. I sure hope it thinkens up because this isn't much of a ground cover!

The bad news is that we haven't been able to plan the second half because we haven't been able to go get more compost because on the way home from the second trip last time, Mark's truck broke down. We had to have it towed (with the full load of dirt). Mark just had it towed to our house since it needed to be unloaded. And it is still in our driveway. He has come over to work on it once or twice, but hasn't been able to get it running again yet.

First Step in a Long Process

Our immediate thought when we first saw the back of our house, even before we bought it, was that there really ought to be a sliding glass door to the back yard from the dining room and a nice deck or patio in that area. However, all the electric and TV cables as well as the natural gas lines to the house all arrive exactly in the spot we thought would make a nice doorway. (This picture is from before with the former owner's grill and table).

So as a first step, we called Duke Energy who sent a guy out this week to talk to us about having the electrical cables moved. The good news is they will do it for free. We also have the option of having the cables buried, but that will cost us. The bad is that we have to call an electrician first and have a new electrical panel installed at the new destination. So what we thought was step one was really step two! And since we are interested in burying the cables we need to have a really good plan of what we are going to build in the area to make sure the cables are not in the way. We are thinking eventually we'd like to conver that deck into a sunroom. So we decided we need to plan this project better and probably will tackle it next spring instead of this fall.

First Piece of New Furniture

As per an agreement Miran and I made probably about two years ago, the first piece of furniture we bought for the new house was a new mattress. Miran has a lot of backaches and felt our old mattress was part of the problem, so this was a priority. We set our former bed up in the guest room, so our new mattress is on the floor of our bedroom. Buying a new bed is not a furniture priority. But last week end Dad generously offered to build us a new bed (or actually maybe it was Mom who volunteered him!). He of course is the craftsman of our former, now guest, bed as well.

As you can see both bedroms rooms still need to be painted. But first we have to choose colors. We've got four paint samples up over the bed as possibilities for our room.