Home Improvements

Please note that this will most likely be an extremely boring post:

There is nothing like the impending visit of tons of friends and family to inspire one to get to work on needed projects. Well with everyone coming to the house after the baptism of Zane, I have gotten to many of my projects. I started last weekend with sealing up the attic, see the previous post on the squirrels. I used some of the expanding foam, which is the greatest invention ever, thanks chemists. I then put some aluminum over this to seal it up for sure. I used the last of the bottle of foam to fill the gap in the back door that was letting water into the garage. This is a temporary fix until I can get up the moxie and cash to replace whatever needs to on the door.

I painted my grill and stained the boards. This is in preparation for the epic smoking event of this coming weekend. Able and I will be smoking a 16.8 lb pork butt for the main dish meat for the baptism. To date, this will be my biggest smoking undertaking of my career and I am looking forward to it. I have stocked up on charcoal, bought a chimney and even cut up and brought home some hickory wood from my dad's.

After painting the grill and sealing the attic, I began painting some other things on the outside of the house. I started with the fences on the side, since they were looking pretty rough. I then took a break from painting on Sunday and replaced the bottoms of the columns in front. This was really necessary and I had been wanting to do this since I moved in. They were rotting and falling apart, but now are new and painted and looking great. I finished up my painting with the front door, also looking nice. There are some imperfections in the door that you can still see, but overall it is looking much better.

Tomorrow night will be cleaning up the garage and mowing the lawn. We have gotten an unbelievable amount of rain the last few days (the seal is working on the door by the way), and the grass is long and ready for a mow. The little trees have finally stopped growing after a nice dose of roundup. This was applied to each tree individually by a soaked jersey glove on my left hand. I had a rubber kitchen glove under that for safety. Very tedious since there are about five hundred, but worth it (they were driving me crazy). My worst nightmare would be going into my attic and seeing a family of squirrels made out of hundreds of tiny baby trees.