"Let it Begin! Let it Begin!"

If you have ever watched "Bolt" as much as our family has, you are very familiar with the guinea pig saying, "Let it begin! Let it begin!" This saying has become somewhat of a mantra in our house when we are about to do something crazy.

If you read my recent post, you know that my husband and I are about to embark on the wonderful fixer-uppers that come with owning your own home. This is also why my posts have been few and far between. I think it's wonderful and exciting. MD is still a bit hesitant.

We are planning on putting in drought resistant gardens in both the front and backyards and tearing out all the carpet to install wood flooring. I have meticulously planned out our budget, even over-estimated in order to plan on those things that just pop up here and there during home repair. I did research for best prices on materials and such. We even planned out what areas we were going to start on and when.

The master bathroom tile was to be professionally installed first. The grout in the current area is coming up in chunks, not cool. However, we are waiting on some special order part, then they should have it installed the week after.

After the bathroom is tiled we were going to install wood flooring in the bedrooms upstairs. I love carpet, I think it's great for kids and pets, and it also cuts down on noise and temperature issues. I also hate carpet because kids spill stuff, pets have accidents and with asthmatics in the house, it's an entirely different problem for them.

The downstairs carpet was third on the list because having wood flooring would increase the resale value in the long run. Not to mention the whole pets and kids spilling stuff thing.

Final in our list of major home improvement ideas was ripping out a majority of the front yard grass and planting a drought resistant garden...mostly rock and a few succulents. The backyard is mostly drought resistant already, however there is a large abundance of red mulch and ants all over the place.


I'm not sure where it started to go wrong, but our timeline went to hell in one quick swoop. I'm pretty sure it has to do with living in California. We decided to get termite protection, since California has wonderful weather and breeds termites rather well. I'm going to have to give Orkin a shout-out here, because they were AWESOME! Great customer service before and after we bought their plan. They explained there are two main types of termites: house and subterranean. Evidently house termites aren't all that bad compared to the subterranean ones. They like to set up shop and eat for years. Subterranean like to send in millions and a time to annihilate anything in their path.

Wonderful age where they actually LIKE helping!

You say, "this is great, what the heck does it have to do with anything?" It has to do with the 400 pounds of red mulch around our house attracting these stupid bugs. I thought I was overreacting until we started digging it up. We found termite eaten wood and lots of it. We also found that whoever laid the sprinkler system was quite possibly high or charged by the foot of pipe. We also found that since there are so many trees in our yard, several of our sprinkler lines leak.

Now the last item on our list got moved up in order to deal with the water bill and bug issues. In order to understand what needs to be worked on, I went to the library for some research on sprinkler systems and found that drip irrigation will work great. MD is hesitant about working with the actual pipes. How do I know this? Everyday now he has mentioned this wonderful company that does free estimates on sprinkler systems.

 Next we had to move up our downstairs flooring before the upstairs flooring. This is due to the fact that I decided to clean our carpets with our home carpet shampoo machine. Little did I know I would be bringing up the nastiest stuff known to man. Me being me, the carpet is now torn up and outside in the trash.

Before nastiness

After removing nastiness...& MD's butt!

After removing the carpet, we need to seal up the holes in the concrete and obviously let the flooring "settle" in to its new home for a few days. I'm hoping next weekend we will have the beginnings of a beautiful new wood floor!