Updates to the House

Well we’ve been in the house for a little over two months now.  We’ve already had some work done on the house, besides the floors.  We’re also planning the next couple of projects.  I’m looking forward to those projects quite a bit.

Electrical Work

During the inspection process it was noted that our panel was an extremely dangerous panel from back in the 50′s and 60′s.  If you google Federal Pacific you can find all kinds of fun stories about it.  Here is one link.  So we needed to have that replaced to make sure our house doesn’t burn down.  The rough cost to do that is $1400.  We tried to have the seller fix that problem but he felt he had given us enough already.

So it was up to us to find an electrician.  So I used Angie’s List to find one.  We decided to use Sundog Electric and we couldn’t be more happy with our decision.  They did a great job with the panel and we decided to have them put boxes in for ceiling fans and do some other misc work.  When they first came out they were getting a bush out of the way so they could work outside and all of a sudden a bunch of bees started flying around.  It turns out we had a huge bees nest in the eaves of our house.  So I had to get some bee killer and they rescheduled for another day.  When they came back they were able to install the new panel but ran out of time for the fans and other stuff.  So they came back and got everything taken care of this Wednesday.  Now I’m, slowly, putting up the fans.  I can say without a doubt that buying the cheap fans is a PITA.  They take so much more work at assemble and put up.  It is worth the extra money for the nice ones.  We also now have new outlets in different locations within the house.  The old ones were the crappy two-prong kind.

Landscaping

Patio Location

For now our primary landscaping focus will be in the backyard.  The thing we’re the most excited about is putting in a patio along the house.  We’re thinking of just using poured concrete because it is cheaper than other options.  Although I have heard some good things about stamped concrete.  So we might price that out.  We also want to have a fireplace built into one corner of the patio.  It would be wood burning (gas is weak).  We’re going to have to talk with the contractors when we’re getting quotes to figure out how best to do that.  When they put the new patio in they would also be fixing the nasty grading problem we have near the house, between the two doors.

Potential Garden Location

Crappy Old Flower Bed

Our other project is to begin putting in gardening space in the backyard.  I had grand ambitions of doing a ton if it at once but I came to my senses.  I want to do it right and have a nice looking raised bed made with timbers.  The cost and effort of doing all the space at once like that was a little overwhelming.  So I think we’re going to do one bed across the back fence for now and use it for veggies.  Somewhere between 16 and 24ft long and 4 feet wide.  As you can see in the pictures above.  There is some work to be done first.  I’ve taken out the clothes line and the pole closest to the fence.  I removed the bricks from that horrible constructed flower box or whatever it was.  I pulled a bunch of bushes and weeds from the left side of the garden in back.  Still need to remove that sidewalk.  Then of course comes the part of putting in the actual garden bed.

Eventually we want to make a bigger flower bed around the tree.  Not much grass can grow there so we will put in shade plants.  The current thing they built looks even worse than the ugly flower bed thing I already took out of the corner.  We also want to have another big garden bed along the fence on the left side of the yard.  We’re hoping that most of that bed would also be veggies.  We also want to fix up the flower bed along the back fence on the right side of the yard.  It wouldn’t move away from the fence.  We would probably just improve what is there.  We want to make sure we leave a nice section of grass.  That area off to the right  seems to have the best grass so we will leave that alone.

Ah the joys of being home owners! We are actually looking forward to doing a lot of this stuff.  It will make it feel more like home.  Just beware, we might sucker you into helping….  I will post some Google Sketchup’s that I made of the yard and the garden area sometime in the near future.

Ben