22 Doors

We painted 22 doors last weekend. It doesn’t seem like it would take a whole lot of time and effort to paint 22 doors at first. But we have found out that everything that we don’t think will take THAT long…will take that long…or longer. Probably a lot longer.

My old roommate Nichole came to visit us this past weekend from Tuscaloosa and helped out a ton. She got to our house on Fri. night just before a big storm system blew through. It was mostly north of us, so we didn’t really see much rain at all. We seem to have storms rolling through every couple of days lately- typical spring weather for the southeast!

During all these storms on Friday evening, Frank decided he was going to try and fix a clogged French drain in our backyard. It was a drain that was carrying water from one of the downspouts off the roof of the carport to the drainage ditch behind the fence in our backyard. We had noticed that after the last big storm, our carport had a few inches of water standing around and we were worried that it would flood enough to get into the house. While we were digging up the drain the tornado sirens started going off, and it was super windy. Frank called his friend to bring over a pressure washer to try and use that to force the blockage out of the drain tube. Ha. We are geniuses, let me tell ya. This was after we tried everything possible, so it was our last resort. Our friend makes it over with the pressure washer, and here we are in the midst of a severe weather warning with tornado sirens going off trying to clean out this drain. Our next-door neighbor, who’s basically our neighborhood mom, yelled at us saying “this is momma tellin’ you that you better get inside!”...as Frank waved around a pressure sprayer (which is pretty much a 3 foot metal pole), while standing in a big puddle of water, under a big tree, while it was lightening like crazy. Ok, ok, it sounds a lot worse than it actually was. The lightening was far away, and the “tornado warnings” in Alabama are more like Watches. It was just kind of funny at the time. Needless to say, the bad part of the storm ended up missing us and we didn't get much rain at all.

We found out had a broken drainage pipe that the previous owner tried to duct tape back together…yeeeahh. So the pressure sprayer didn’t work. We ended up digging up the whole pipe from the broken spot on and replacing it. At least we don’t have to worry about our house flooding anytime soon.

Other than the drainage issues, we just painted 22 doors and replaced just as many door knobs and door hardware. Yipee! Our doors look awesome now. It’s amazing what a coat or two of paint can do sometimes. This weekend we are going to concentrate on painting interior door and window trim.

This is only about half the doors we painted!

The past few days I’ve been doing a thorough cleaning of the kitchen cabinets, and finally unpacking some of the kitchen wedding gifts that we haven’t even taken out of the box yet. Frank has been studying hard for his pilot instructor course he’s going through right now at work. I think he as about 3 or 4 rides left before he is done with it. He’s hoping he’ll be done by the end of this month, but it could be sometime in May. We’ve also been watching a TON of hockey now that the playoffs are here. Might as well be the middle of football season in our household! The next few weeks/months we have a lot of stuff going on- weddings, parties, trips. Should be a fun & busy couple of months ahead of us.

Sometimes I forget how green it is here! I really noticed it when I first moved here, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it. While I was driving to work this morning it hit me again, though- it’s super green and there are trees everywhere! That’s one thing that I do not miss about Texas, lack of trees…and green-ness. I do miss my family, though!

My drive to work- it's all trees and green!

 This is my Friday since I'm off work on Good Friday. Hope everyone has a wonderful Easter weekend. This will be the first holiday that Frank and I are celebrating by ourselves instead of traveling to see family.