Before

The blog posts about home improvement projects continue.  Sorry to those of you who would prefer updates about our kiddos.  We are immensely enjoying time with them day in and day out, and often several times during the night.  So, for now, I'm a little more interested in writing about something besides our two beautiful children.  :) If you remember an earlier post - these Projects are what get me through the hum-drum (at least for me --- nothing meant for you other SAHMs) of this lifestyle.

(but seriously, all sarcastic-ness aside, Ben is responding well to a few small changes in expectations in our household, and Katie is turning into a pretty fun, go-with-the-flow five month old --- so I do want to write more about them - maybe I will update tomorrow, which will be the one-week point since making my "statement" to be more disciplined about a few things in my life...)

Our interior projects are almost complete.  Most of our interior home remodel came courtesy of Hurricane Ike, and I've spent a lot of time over the last five months (!) of my maternity leave organizing our many possessions.  The only area left to tackle is our kitchen - and I hope to do that in the next few weeks.

So now, with the promise of fall in the air (I get giddy every time I feel the hint of a cool breeze), we are moving our efforts outside.  And I am thrilled.  Equally excited to:
(a) update the exterior of our home.  Some of this we'd meant to do two years ago, but redirected our efforts (money) to the Hurricane Ike remodel
(b) spend time outside together as a family.  With cooler weather, and less intense sun, it's been fun to begin taking Katie outside with us, and I have hopes of us all enjoying time outside together as we tackle the exterior of our house.

So what is there to do outside?  What isn't there to do!?  First, we've hired a contractor to replace our siding on the whole house and garage and also to build a new carport.  We signed the contract last week, and carport demo begins on Tuesday!  We are so excited to finally be having this work done.  You would think that having someone else do the work would make it easier, but Mark and I really drag our feet when it comes to making decisions about contractors, as well as just coming up with a larger-scale plan that we have to communicate to someone else.  When we do the work ourselves, we can just make up our mind as we go.  With a contractor, you have to make all the decisions up front.  We actually spent a fair amount of time this morning simply trying to decide whether to replace the shutters with painted shutters, wood shutters or to omit them all together.  Again, it's often the decisions, not the actual work that slow us down.

But don't worry, in addition to hiring a contractor, we've got plenty of work planned for ourselves too (and don't forget that Mark's garage remodel is also underway):

• Rebuild a few of our fences that need repair and/or we want located in different places.  These are all very short sections of fence, so this shouldn't be too bad.
• Pave the area by our back door.  Currently this area becomes a mudslide every time it rains, which is just great when little people forget to take their shoes off upon coming inside.  We also hope to (maybe) get a dog next summer, so I really want to not have to wipe muddy paws every time doggie comes in and out.
• Improve our drainage.  We may actually hire this out to a contractor.  Not sure yet whether we are going to try and actually install some drains in low spots or just even out the yard.  Either way, our grass is a bit spotty and lumpy, so with or without drainage, we need some evening out.
• Install a sprinkler system.  We considered hiring this out, but I've heard it's pretty simple (and cheap) to do yourself, and I thought Ben might like hanging out outside with Mark while he does all that digging.
• Landscape!  Including figuring out how to make a rain garden for the area outside our front porch, where the roof run-off has killed our attempts at sod.

So hopefully future home improvement posts will include pictures of our whole family working together outside, in addition to the transformation of our home.

So, here are our before pictures!