is this thing on?

I received this text the other day and I refuse to disappoint my reader! My one, lowly reader. JK, Alicia isn't lowly. We are still plugging along with painting our house. It feels dumb to use the word 'painting' in that sentence because it currently doesn't feel like that's ever going to happen. The weather has been crappy and our house is old. Suddenly all that 'charm' just translates to 'stupid menial tasks we don't want to do'. While we're at it, we decided to replace the door of our attached garage as well as the rain gutters. The garage door is going to go bust any second and so far, when people find out which house we bought they tend to say, "Oh, the house with the crazy gutters". We would like to move away from that infamy. We also want to remove all the weird fake stone from the chimney. We tore a piece off to see what we're dealing with underneath. So far we've found painted brick. Brian submi...

Hey-oh! Our project this summer is painting our house. There's a reason painting companies charge so much. It's pretty much the pits. Step 1: Remove all the extraneous hoopla attached to the house (i.e. unused satellite dish, weirdly placed railing on the front steps, broken and faded plastic shutters, ugly retractable shutters, etc.) Brian found about 20 wasp nests behind these shutters. Yuck. Step 2: Power-wash the detached garage. We decided to start with the detached garage because we know ourselves and we anticipate that if we start with the house, by the time we're done we won't want to do the garage. It's not the fun part, we don't us it much, and it isn't what is motivating us. Then the garage would sit, unpainted, for 3 years until we forget a little bit of how much it sucks to paint an exterior. Let me tell you a little bit about this garage. It's really old, really creepy, and chock-full of spiders. I hate it and I only go in th...