Monthly Archives: August 2019

Late Summer

It seems we were just in June looking forward to a long Summer and here it is, almost Autumn already.  The days are getting shorter and the nights are a little cooler.  I must say Autumn in just about my most favorite seasons. I don’t like the real hot weather as it seems to sap any energy out of me that I have, so the cooler days are so looked forward to.  I love the clothes we wear in the Fall also. Corduroy pants, woolen sweaters, heavy socks and boots.  I have an intarsia sweater with apples on it I can’t wait to wear.  I ordered it from one of  my favorite online companies, Coldwater Creek.

Speaking of Coldwater Creek, there was a glitch or something in their computers and they put over $1700  of bills on my account.  I didn’t know about it at the time, but a lady from the company called me and told me so I checked my credit card and yep, they had charged me about ten times for that intarsia sweater, but they had already taken it off.  So I thought nothing about it until today David heard a knock on the door and there was a lady there holding a vase of flowers in her hand. The flowers were for me. David said my boyfriend should be more discrete about sending me flowers. I had no clue who they were from. Here are the flowers.

They are so pretty. And here who they were from.

Talk about good customer relations!   I was so surprised.  I don’t order from them that often, but maybe it was because I was nice to them on the phone.   Anyway, thank you, Coldwater Creek for the pretty flowers. I don’t work for them nor do I advertise for them, but I think this was pretty nice for a company to do after an err they made.

Wanting to see our older grandchildren before school started and knowing they would all be busy, busy, busy with school, sports and friends, David and I wanted to take them out for breakfast.  We missed our granddaughter as she had already gone back to college. We had a nice visit and will be seeing them on Grandparents Day before too long at their school.

Everyone is taller than David and I now. We are shrinking in height and they are all tall.  Was just yesterday I was rocking these two boys, holding them on my lap.  We ate at a pancake house that we all love and the food was so good.  It was really busy and they were serving a lot of pancakes.

On the way home we traveled through downtown Indianapolis in Fountain Square to see if we could see some of the homes remodeled by our favorite gals on our favorite fixer upper show on HGTV, Good Bones.  It’s nice to see Hoosier girls starring in a tv show and we watch it every week,  Here is one of the houses. I remember watching this particular show.

They are known for their brightly colored houses. No taupe for these girls.  They buy rows of broken down houses and fix them up.  They are bringing back neighborhoods in Indianapolis that have fallen on hard times.  So if you get a chance to watch their show, you will enjoy it. They are so funny at times, but they are sure hard workers and not at all afraid to get dirty.

Driving around we saw this interesting door. It had a lion’s head above it. You can see part of it in the picture.

Then on a beautiful late Summer’s day we attended one of our grandson’s soccer games.  He is in a traveling team and several of his games will be played in our town as we have a really nice soccer field. Our boys played on this field years ago.  At that time there was no public restrooms, but they have built some nice ones by the field.  I sure could have use those years ago!

He is getting so tall.  A pre-teen.

I love to watch soccer games.  They all want to play football and I just could never get interested in that game.  Our younger son got a badly broken arm in a football incident and I just have never liked it since.  Now that one of the players on the Colts team has retired because of all his injuries, I am more likely to think it is not a safe game to play. And I think the uniforms for soccer and lacrosse are much cuter!  But that’s just me.

I said I would show you all our swings we have set up. We use them all.

Let’s go down our porch steps to the one on our cabin porch.

This is the little cabin we just finished restaining  this Summer.

 

David took the old swing from this porch and put up this new one. This is where Molly likes to sit with me, but she’s almost too big to fit on the swing any longer.

Then the swing from the cabin was put on the old swing set in our backyard.  I stained it and I can sit here and watch the chickens.

This is the swing on our front porch.  We sit here to watch all the hummingbirds fight each other for the hummingbird food.  We can also watch the world go by. You can do that when you are retired.

There is the swing on our new screened in porch.  We sit here a lot watching the birds at the bird feeder.  The birds actually planted the sunflower that is here….

Not bad for a bird.

And last, but certainly not least, there is the swing on my shop porch.

I sit here almost every day watching the traffic go by and say a prayer of thanks I am no longer in the rat race of life so many people are in, rushing here, there, and everywhere. I use to be one of those rats, but I am glad those days are behind me.  I enjoy retirement immensely. I remember the days when I was a girl when my mother, my aunt, my sister, the dogs and I would sit on the porch after supper and sit and talk and swing.  Oh, how I wish they could all join me on my swings now.   David and I have created the Porch Sitters’ Society of which we are the CEO’s and welcome anyone who would  like to to come sit with us.

Hope you are enjoying the last few days of Summer.  Before you know it, Summer will come around again.  Bye

 

 

 

 

My Experiences With Contractors, Plumbers, and All Fixer Upper People

Having lived in this house almost forty-three years, we have, on occasion. hired people to do work for us.  When we first moved here, we were kind of poor with three little kids, so much of the remodeling on this old house was up to us.

When we bought the house it had blue paneling on all the walls upstairs and greenish blue carpet over most of the downstairs. Carpet that crunched when you walked on it. I said at the time that carpet would be the first to go. Well, it wasn’t. We had to get bedrooms ready for all of us, a nursery for our baby and a bedroom for our two boys.  We painted the paneling since we didn’t have the money to rip it out and fix the walls and then paint them. It actually looked pretty good. In fact, three rooms are still painted paneling and you would not know it.  We bought new carpeting for all the bedrooms, a little at a time. I sewed curtains and decorated as best I could on a limited budget.   That greenish blue carpet stayed on the floor for years until we could afford new carpeting.

As our family grew, we needed more space. The boys wanted separate bedrooms as they grew older so we looked for a contractor.  I’m not sure how we ended up with the one we hired, but he has pretty much remodeled this whole house through the years.  He was very young when we hired him, as were we,  He built a two-story addition to the back of our house that included a new bedroom for David and me, a family room and a combination bathroom and laundry room. We felt like we had so much more space.  After it was all built, we had a big rain and it was leaking in our new bedroom, so David called the contractor and in a storm with lightning and thunder, he got up on our roof and fixed the leak. I was so impressed with that even though we had not expected him to do that. We still talk about that with him. Since that time we have hired him for pretty much all our remodeling except for our kitchen and that’s a story  all by itself.  I regretted not hiring him for that job.

Since then our contractor has replaced all our windows, added two porches, one screened in and has done some other work on our house.

I have one criteria for hiring someone for a job. Are they optimistic and do they say they can get the job done.  I have hired people that I wondered why they were in that line of work. One time I hired a chimney sweep who said he was afraid of heights and I even had to hold the ladder for him when he climbed to the roof.  We do have a very high, steep roof, but I told him he was probably in the wrong line of work. Another chimney sweep I had hired came to our house and with one look told us he was too old for the job and I understood because he was about our age.  So we switched to a gas fireplace and no longer need a chimney sweep.

We have called people to our house who have brought their children who began to climb all over our wood pile and I feared for their safety. Needless to say, they weren’t hired. It’s not that I don’t like children, but they don’t belong on a job site.  We had a man to our house about painting our vaulted bedroom ceiling and I knew immediately that he would not be doing it by his attitude.  So, David and I painted it ourselves.

Now for the kitchen remodel.  We searched for a long time for someone to put in a new kitchen and we went to a kitchen “specialist” where we found cabinets we loved so we hired them.  Well, a job that should have taken a month took all Summer. I had to cook all our meals in my shop and we did not have the use of our whole downstairs all Summer as we were also getting hardwood flooring put in.  And the guy evidently didn’t pay his sub-contractors because I had them calling me asking me to convince him to pay them. I told them I paid him and it was up to him to pay them.  I have always wondered if they ever got paid.   It was one crazy Summer. He sub-contracted the drywall work and as soon as the middle aged woman and kid came to our door to hang the drywall, I knew we were in trouble.  They drywalled over a bump in the wall that looked like something was going to pop out of the wall.  I was not a happy camper when the contractor came the next day.  He found someone else who did the job right, but it was an unnecessary delay in our kitchen progress.  I really am not a demanding person, honest, I just expect people who say they can do a job, to do it.

We have been blessed to have a very good contractor for the last few years, but now I think all the work on our house is done. Except for some painting once in a while it is completed.

David stained our cabin this Summer. We have had it for sixteen years and it was needing some work. I will show you some pictures of it my next post.  I also will tell you about all the swings we have on our property. David and I are real swingers. Ha.

Have you ever had trouble with a contractor or anyone who has come to do work for you? I’d love to hear the stories. I’m sure there are many.  Here’s to good contractors who get the job done. Bye.

I never wrote one thing about a plumber, did I?  We don’t hire plumbers too often, but we have found a very good plumbing business who sends plumber to our house when they say they will and they get the job done with no excuses, so they are the ones we will always use.  And that’s all there is about plumbers.