More Big Plans

This weekend we got a lot accomplished, for not spending much time at the house. Kenmore had its semi-annual recycling event, and so we took the fridge out of the front yard (hooray!) and loaded up the dishwasher (which we never used- it was rusted inside, and we were only using it to put our microwave on top of). So we got rid of our trashy appliances in one afternoon, which was glorious. Now the house, while definitely not looking nice, doesn't look QUITE as stereotypically trashy. It looks its own brand of trashy now. *grin*

The second thing we did was put a gate at the end of our driveway. It's just a couple of T-posts with a cable and a padlock, but it should do the trick. We both felt weird about actually using it and locking it, though. It just seemed to be bitter and agressive. So we put up a sign right next to it that says, "No Parking in Driveway." That, so far, has done the trick. I'm looking forward to having less garbage in our driveway, not to mention room to actually park our cars, or get out of our driveway, or not get the driveway torn up by humongous pieces of machinery.

Additionally, we spent most of the day Saturday and Sunday chasing around to various stores. We bought a great book on how to renovate a house, and bought the cheapest microwave stand we could find to replace the dishwasher in functionality. We also looked at fencing materials and windows. Soooo many windows. We're going to price out Andersen windows- we like them the best so far, and we think they're really nice. We can get low-E windows that are wood on the inside and vinyl-clad on the outside, with a variety of grid patterns. Plus they're double-hung tilt. So we'll see how many kajillions of dollars that will end up being. We're trying to figure out what size windows we need where to get a good quote.

Which brings me to my last, and to me the most exciting, point. We redid our floor plan. We're SUPER excited about it- it'll allow the house to be much more salable if we don't do any additions, and yet it will be even easier than before to actually make the additions. It's going to be nice, and has actually relieved a bit of our anxiety about undertaking this project. So hooray. I'll try to get my spouse to post the drawings later this week.