This weekend

So the lull is over -- we've been doing more work on the house for the last few days. In particular, we've been working on the kitchen floor and the front yard. Without further ado...



There were a lot of old floors in the kitchen. #1 and #2 were the linoleum floors (most recent). (The black stuff on the floor is the adhesive -- I used Adhesive Remover (duh) to get it off the floor.) #3 is, in fact, a carpet threshold strip. Yes, there was carpet throughout the house, including the kitchen (eww) at some point. No carpet when we moved in, though. #4 is the new threshold for linoleum that was just screwed in over the carpet threshold -- pretty awesome. #5 is the screws, nails, and staples that I took out of the floor. Better pic coming up:



This is about 1 hours worth of removal. I ended up doing about 3 hours worth of removal all together. As such, I needed to get some wood filler to fill all those holes:



This picture was taken after I had sanded once with a 40 grit paper, and filled in some of the holes. I hope to be finished sanding and filling in a couple days. After that, I'll stain it a nice dark color, and slap on some polyurethane.

Next up -- the front yard. Lindsay has been chomping at the bit to put some landscaping in our front yard. The first goal was to remove the grass for about 5 feet in front of the house, and to remove some ugly bush/weeds we had growing. The sucker in the next picture was so heavy that the yard service wouldn't pick it up! (For the record, I couldn't either. I stole a trick from TV to get it out of the ground. I dug out all around it, sat down next to it, put my feet on the side of the house, and leg pressed it right out of the hole!) By the way, check out the spigot we uncovered!



Here's a teaser. We decided to build up a retaining wall (or three) and make a tiered front yard. It has turned out very nice -- some of the plantings are already in. Here's what it looked like after grass removal, before wall building. More when it is done!



Finally, in case you are following along, I didn't forget about the toilet. I ended up having to replace the hose from the wall to the toilet -- it was some old plastic part that had sprung a leak. I replaced it with a nice steel braided hose -- I feel like I need a Tim Taylor laugh here.