Day Four-ninety-six: making lots of progres

Well we've been busy beavers and have a lot to show for our work. Ok, maybe some of it we hired out, but it still counts as work done to our house, right?

First an update on the basement bathroom. When we last left you we had all the tile down. On Thursday we filled in the empty spaces with grout, our first time trying that. It went pretty well despite some color variation as the grout dried. If that doesn't even itself out at least we know all too well how to use the colorant.

We also tackled some big outdoors projects. With the turn of the seasons we're trying to get the yard in shape, so that meant getting some stumps dug out, a little regrading in the back yard, and burying our downspouts so as don't have big puddles whenever it rains. Here is the front yard before...

and here it is after, the seeds are already turning into baby grass...

Here's the back yard before, in the first photo you can see some of the wadi that existed between the trees...

and here it is now in the background is another project in progress, yet again cleaning out the flower bed)...

The downspouts look great but created lines of dirt and seed where we have to cultivate yet more grass.

With all of this functional work done we turned to some aesthetics. Unlike other painters we didn't have a blank canvas to work with, we had this fairly dingy starting place...

Here it is in progress, painter's tape and all...

Trying to add a little pizazz to the place we have painted the side door blue and made the front door really gorgeous and distinctive.

Finally, in an effort to clean our ducts better than any service with its vacuum and air guns, we jury-rigged this contraption to scrub the innards. It sort of work but mostly turning the crank made the whole like double back on itself multiple times. We had a devil of a time untangling it. It was like fighting to land a spirited marlin.