Category: Home Improvement

The sofa and chair came back from the upholsterers. Truly faboo. Not only was the job well-done, but the fabric we selected looks smashing — a colorful modern print on the sofa, a rich blue on the chair.

Major props and recommendations to Lev’s Upholstery, here in Denver. They done good. And thanks to Jim for the help in purchase and shipment.

Now to quickly shroud them up so that kids, cats, and food don’t turn it all into a murky, torn-up mess in the next week or so …

I’m not sure why it is that our household has all the power tools that the Testerfolk borrow, and theirs has all the carpet cleaning tools that we borrow, but I’m glad of the latter, at least. Thanks to J&D’s Bissel carpet cleaner, we now have cleaner carpet — a distinct shade of brown, as opposed to greyish tan.

Just in time for (and, of course, driven by) the return of our couch and chair from the upholsterer.

(Note to self: We need two bottles of carpet cleaning liquid to do the main traffic areas, not one. Though even just running it on “Rinse with Hot Water” picked up a hell of a lot of dirt.)

Doyce gets The Dreaded Knock On the Door in the Middle of the Night — or, more properly, The Dreaded Letter from the Homeowner’s Association in the Middle of the Summer. Jerks.

(Be patient with the page load — Doyce went picture-crazy yesterday.)

I keep waiting for one to arrive at our doorstep, too. And with equal lack of justification. When the Testerfolk have the most bedraggled house on the street, or the block, then the HOA can bitch. When water is plentiful and their lawn is an oasis of brown in a sea of green, then they can complain. And when they drop their “you must have X% of your yard as lawn, and no buffalo grass allowed,” then they can have the moral justification to suggest xeriscaping for any imagined slights on the local property values.

Until then, they can stifle.

And it will only set you back $3000 or so — not counting installation.

As one commenter asked, “How do you fill up water balloons?”

(via BoingBoing)

Finally got the upholsterers out to pick up (and, of course, reupholster) the sofa and chair in the family room. The former is a sofa bed we bought a year or two ago, whose cushion fabric immediately split. The latter is a legacy of the in-laws’ living room, one or two redecorations ago, and has needed reupholstering for, well, over a decade (there are two mates to it upstairs in the bedroom, but they don’t get quite so much public view).

We actually bought the fabric in California back at, um, Christmas, but I didn’t get the reupholsterers called until last week. Still, eight month turn-around on a project like that isn’t bad for us.

The furniture is due back at the beginning of August. Meantime, we’ll need to pull a couple of chairs downstairs to camp out on. After we vacuum the couple-years-of-dust-and-debris that was under the couch (Kitten is in Daddy-Look! Hog Heaven). After we replace the filter on the vacuum cleaner …

Last year, I was unhappy with the various sprinkler folks I’d called. So I called some different ones this year, to figure out why our zone along the sidewalk wasn’t doing anything.

After cancelling the initial appointment, and then changing the date of the second one they set, a rep from Company A came out and confirmed that, yup, that zone isn’t working. He replaced the solonoid on the valve, which is the most common problem. Nope, no dice. And no water.

He could tell, by his arcane instruments, that the valve control was getting only low voltage (5V, instead of 15V), which indicates a nick in the line somewhere (as opposed to a break). Unlike every other sprinkler company we’ve ever had out, however, he did not have a line tracer, that would have let him figure out where that was. We had to schedule another visit from them.

Well, we did, which ended up two weeks later (the Strike Count is already at 2.95 here, folks). The guy (same one? different one? stay tuned) showed up this morning, and …

… well, I expect that a sprinkler repair guy knows how to work sprinkler controls. We have only-few-years-old-from-Home-Depot sprinkler control in the garage. And it’s a Rainbird, so we’re not talking about obscure, off-the-wall brands here.

By the fact that Margie called me, confused about how to operate it (I’m the Sprinkler Guy at our house), I gather that this yahoo did not know how to work the control.

By the fact that they were trying Zone 1, and were getting confused because nothing was happening, and the sprinkler repair guy (you know, the guy who’s supposed to know about sprinkler systems) didn’t notice that there was no wire leading into the control for Zone 1, I gather that this yahoo is a particularly dim bulb.

If the sprinklers are not working absotively perfectly, and their price is not absotively fabulous, Company A will not be getting any repeat business.

Rrg. Sorry, Love. Should have called someone else.

After a week of feeling a bit like a fifth wheel, I basically spent today out in the garden. As you’ll recall, the Friday before we left we hit the Denver Botanic Garden plant sale, and then on Sunday before we left, our church’s spring flower sale delivery occured.

So … lots of flowers, ground cover, plants, a few roses, this, that, and some other things. Oh, and (greater love hath no man than this) some tomato plants for Margie.

Probably about fifty, sixty plants, all told. And with the new bed by the driveway, and by the new fence, and always spaces to fill in elsewhere, it was a far-flung task.

About five and half hours worth, for all that.

And so I’m sore, but pretty happy. The new bed looks like a real flower bed (until we get the terracing done), and there’s plantings in the new side yard to make it look nice, too.

The lawnmower lady came by mid-morning and we settled on schedule and price and the lawn should go from looking overgrown and failing to close-cropped and failing.

The sprinkler zone along the sidewalk still isn’t working (gotta do something about that Monday), but I fixed a hole in the one by the front porch, and noted some other heads that needed moving and/or replacing.

Lots of work, keeping up a garden. But very rewarding, on a lot of levels.

Yes, it’s the hard-hitting information that the Internet is DEMANDING!

Started up the sprinklers.

• The new west side zone seems underpowered, and the new sprinkler head is leaking around the top of it. Needs investigation, low priority.
• Three sprinkers need to be moved, due the new fence on the east side and the new garden bed in front.

• The zone along the front bed has at least one, probably two big leaks in it. I think these existed, smaller, last fall, but now they’re quite visible.

• The zone along the front sidewalk isn’t working it all. This doesn’t bode well for the front yard.

Yup, looks like plenty of sprinkler work to keep me busy.

This was your HARD-HITTING, DREADFULLY URGENT SPRINKLER NEWS, JUST AS YOU DEMANDED IT!

Next week: Dave plants flowers!

Drain line from the house is backed up again into the basement. Joy.

Not what I needed today. Definitely not what Margie needed.

Mutter mutter mutter …

UPDATE: Rotorooter folks on-site. The overflow did drain a bit, and since it was generated out of the washing machine, it’s (perhaps — Margie didn’t say) not quite as awful as last time out.

The last time this happened predates this blog (I have a reference to the following fall here, back in 10/01).

We learned a few lessons. We bought a water alarm for the floor (which is what cued Margie into the problem). We got most of the perishables up off the floor (with the exception, it sounded like, of the box with the keyboard in it).

But we didn’t learn the lesson of regularly sending Root-B-Gone stuff down the drain, for just this reason. Sounds like something to put in the schedule.

A classic activity for visits from the Ks is big household projects. While the projects this time out were not earthshaking, they were all satisfying:

First off, Jim and I finished off the gates to the new fences. Most excellent. We now have the extended side yard fully secure for Bambina to run free in, not to mention the dogs. The last step will be disassembling the remains of the old gate on the.

Gate hanging was hampered a bit by the, ah, lack of plumbness (along multiple axes) between gate posts. We managed to work around that one, and these things should be solid as a rock.

I do need to figure out the best way to thread the latch pulls through the fence, and I have a couple of pickets on the west side that need to go up next to the old fence, and so forth, but, basically, the project is done. Updated pictures to follow RSN.

The second thing we did was install a new porch light we’d had still in the box from buying it at Restoration Hardware four or five years ago. As part of that, the old porch light was moved to flank its mate on the other side of the garage door. Piece of cake, and it looks great.

Lastly, we put in a doorbell.

When we redid the kitchen four years back or so, part of it involved ripping out the intercom/radio system that was installed in the house when built. Only after that was done did we discover that the doorbell was wired up through it.

Since then, we’ve been using a wireless doorbell of dubious quality and reliability. It got so that Margie put up a “Please Knock” sign at Halloween, and we’d left it up since.

Now we have …

… a really nice doorbell button on the porch (albeit at a different spot that the old one).

… a “hidden” doorbell chime on the ground floor that should be nicely audible throughout the house.

… a doorbell chime in the stairwell down to the basement, which mean (huzzah!) we can hear when the pizza delivery guy arrives during games.

The only problem is that the two chimes are not quite in tune, especially on their second notes. Not much we can do about that, I’m afraid.

All in all, a much more productive weekend of that sort than I’d expected (but certainly one reason why the bloggage was a wee bit light).

For those who have been dying to see what I’m talking about regarding our fence construction, I have pictures.

The album’s not complete, of course, since the fence isn’t.