Stoop

You may recall this photo from last year. I can't believe it has been a year since we bought our house! Here Liam sits on this old brick stoop which as you can clearly see had old, crumbling mortar. We had the money all saved up to professionally redo the stoop with our neighbor, but then my mother-in-law passed away and we used that money for Bill's airfare to Sydney, Australia.

In collaboration with our next door neighbor, we agreed to slap on some cement to cover the whole thing. A couple of weeks ago, we dove right in and just did it. We fastened all the loose bricks and filled in as many gaps as we could, and then poured on the cement. Needless to say, it was not as easy as we thought it would be. We are fully aware though, that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a permanent solution, but a temporary fix that we hope will hold up at least a year, until next year's tax returns.

We thought we would have a little fun with it though by placing Liam's hand print, much to his delight of course. Bill thought we should also add our thumbprints.

Slowly but surely, we are getting things done and getting this place together.

Rooftop

If it's not one thing, it's another. Because the house doesn't give us enough to think about, we need to worry about the surroundings.

We noticed that there were a few tree limbs hanging precariously over our house. Thanks to our dear friend Brother Bonilla, the most troublesome branches were removed in the summer. With the heavy snow and large accumulations lately, I shudder to think what those limbs would have done to our roof. I saw a news report a couple of days ago of some people having to climb onto their roofs to remove all the snow because of water leakage. Thank heavens, Brother Bonilla is also a roofer. He took a closer look at our roof and said we are good. Whew! The removal of the other limbs will have to be done professionally by a tree lopper at some point.

As you can see from the photos, it made for a rather entertaining afternoon watching the two of them up on the roof. Even the children helped with carrying some of the cuttings to a safer place in the backyard, until we could get around to cutting them small enough to fit into our trash bags or boxes.

Two months later, the pile was still there in November. As soon as I felt better from that horrendous flu, I had the missionaries help me. It was their service project for the week. Bill's been so busy at work and on other, shall we say, more urgent projects (like patching up our front stoop). That mess had to be taken care of once and for all, before any backyard animals got any ideas of taking up residence in there. Thank goodness it's well and truly gone. That spot is now reserved for our compost project. Thank heaven for our friends the Bonillas and the missionaries!

And while on the rooftop that warm summer day, with his trusty tool belt (that Liam and I gave him for Father's Day last year) Bill gave the antenna another look.

We decided on forgoing the cable TV expense and opted for the standard network channels via the rooftop antenna. My husband bought one drastically reduced at Rad.Sh. along with all the cabling and installation hardware. This project still needs a bit of tweaking, but so far, we are content with the results. We actually get additional channels as well as HD radio, all for free. And while I will sorely miss the HGTV, Food Network, NatGeo, and Discovery channels, we are happy for free TV. And one less bill to pay makes me want to shout hooray from the rooftop, metaphorically speaking, of course.

Life happens

That is my excuse for the lack of posts lately. Life happens. Sometimes I wish I had a "pause" button, so that I could have a little extra time to catch up with all of the madness. For starters, we have had a few issues with the house regarding home repair. No big surprise. Estimates needed to be collected for this, that, and the other. Also, every time the weather changes, we cringe at the thought of what will happen next. Then, there were, of course, some last minute summer activities that we had to squeeze in before summer ended. There's also potty training as well as the constant disciplining of my tough little guy when he gets too rough. These have all exhausted our time and energy. We also had some sad news in our family, the passing of my mother-in-law. These will all be handled as separate posts.