Painting continues…. slowly….
EXTERIOR PAINTING
Exterior painting on our old house continues!
Tim Wagner, our contractor, and his family apparently only can work on Saturdays. (I guess painting old houses isn’t steady-enough work to make it their full-time job.) However, when the weather’s nice and it’s a Saturday, they’re here and they’re usually here a good long time!
Our goal is to get a coat of primer on the exterior so as to seal the house up before the real winter cold gets here. (Oddly enough, the high temperature is supposed to be 80 degrees F today.)
So, the work is slowly proceeding. They actually have the final color on the south wall, but primer is on both the north wall and part of the east wall.
Tim also did a very smart thing on one cold, rainy Saturday.: Knowing that we needed to disguise the hack-job exterior wood that surrounds the kitchen (from the past moving of windows and filling-in of doorways), Tim took some brand new exterior wood siding home with him and primed and painted it. So, the following Saturday, all he had to do was cover the old wood with tar paper and put the new stuff on!
MUSIC IN THE BEDROOM
I finally got around to finishing running wires from the basement… up through the heating duct….through three closet….and then into our bedroom, so that we could have cable TV and could link into the whole-house music system up there.
I really enjoy having a single song play throughout the whole house! I’m looking forward to another Christmas doing that, now that I’ve managed to expand the system by hard-wire into several more rooms this year.
STREET WORK
The road work in front of our house is proceeding quite nicely, thanks in part to the good weather we’ve been having overall. The median in front of our house is almost done: they poured the concrete curb, have wired the electrical, and have now filled it in with dirt.
But they are just starting to do this same thing at the other end of this project, down by 16th and Overton, so I’m sure it will take a while before they put in the new streetlights.
My wife is very disappointed that we aren’t going to have a streetlight in front of our house. It looks like the lights will instead at least be one property away to both the north and south. I reminded her that she looked at the same plans and diagrams that I did and I didn’t remember hearing her ask questions about this stuff. But, oh well, they’re already doing the work.
I just pray that we’re going to have enough money to finish the paint job in the spring. One of the reasons we’re spreading out the job from fall until spring is because we do not have the money yet to pay for the whole thing! We’re relying on God to provide us with the extra $3-4000 that we’ll need to finish the project. (My wife quit her job about a month ago. She has a new one, but the work is intermittent, the pay isn’t as good, and she has to travel quite a distance to work on most days.)
I pray that God help give not only Terry and myself the money to create “a bit of glory” on this side of town…. I also pray that he provide such funding to the entire area! There are many people here who feel so, so neglected and ignored by the city and people of Independence. (I was at another meeting last night where people emotionally expressed this pain.) And it’s the decent people who speak up and express these feelings to the city. Folks who aren’t as well-off or who lack manners tend to express these feelings by vandalizing, littering, or worse.
This side of town could really use a lot more than lip service. The people here need funds for improvements and leadership from mainstream Independence, not just the struggling stake-holders who live over here.
Thanks for stopping by!
I just noticed this whole BLOG is not showing up right in Internet Explorer 7, for some reason. I will immediately look into this.
Thanks!
-= Dave =-