SYNRGYdesign

The nice part about having moved in already is that we no longer have to “go to the new house” to work on it.  We can just wake up in the morning on the weekends and get to work.  The bad part about having moved in already is that we can not unpack yet because nothing is really finished enough to put things away.  That is not entirely true.  The bedrooms are pretty much done.  The family room and living rooms are done except for some minor painting that still needs to be done.  The kitchen on the other hand is not done.  We are still working on the cabinets and the countertops so we can not put anything away yet over there.  Living in a construction zone seems to be twice the work because there is the maintenance of the house itself now that we are living in it and the construction that is going on as well.  We can no longer just leave the tools around and lock up.  As difficult as it may be sometimes it is worth it to be here already and watch the kids really enjoy living here.  

Unfortunately the weeds are getting out of hand.   As much as we would like to try to concentrate on the inside of the house we are forced to also try to maintain the outside of the house as well.  The weeds grew in the back yard like crazy a few months ago when we had what little rain we get here in southern California.  Below is a picture of how tall it got with the kids trying to make a maze through it.  Luckily once we cut it down those weeds have not grown back but the weeds in the front are not only growing but they are of the spiky variety which make it very unpleasant to walk around in.After a few hours of trying to dig up some of the weeds and very little progress lately I quickly discovered that it will take more then just a day to “maintain” the front yard.  The gardener that came by and said he could do it all in one day is looking better and better by the minute…if only we had the money for it.

We are finally getting around to sealing the kitchen countertops.  We are very past due on this but other things such as moving in has taken priority.  We had originally covered the countertops with some cardboard to help protect them while we worked.  After taking them off over the week end we saw that the countertops turned out pretty good.  We applied one application of the penetrating sealer and that seemed to go pretty smoothly.  Then we made some paste hoping to match the existing color of the countertops.  Luckily we went with basic charcoal for our color so we were not that worried about trying to mix something that we could not match.  We tried out a few test spots and found that using a straight concrete mix made the batch a little more green then when we used the ready mix bags.  A few trial and errors later we seemed to get a batch that matched pretty good but we will have to wait and see as it does dry differently.  Crossing our fingers that everything goes well. 

Well we have been living in the construction zone for a little over a month now.  It has not been easy but things are slowly getting done.  Our remodeling efforts have not been as fast and furious as it was before the move mainly because we are trying to find a balance between fixing everything up and having some down time.  Doing only the remodel all the time was really starting to wear thin and the kids need to have some breaks from it. We basically have all the bedrooms done and the kids bathroom is now done except for painting.  All the tiles are in but we still have to grout.  We spent the weekend trying to get the concrete countertops sealed and we finally finished staining the hallway.  They are small steps but are big differences.