Geothermal Finished!

These past two weeks, DTE has finally finished the electrical work outside. The lines are buried, and we have a brand new fancy electric meter! It's funny they didn't replace the old meter with an electric meter. So the geo is officially done and we should soon be getting charged for it.

The final, final step? Landscaping the backyard after this disaster. Stay tuned.

Fall!

Ode to my favorite season in pictures:

Dogs running around without heat exhaustion:

 

 

A day at the pumpkin patch:

Some fall decor at the Pitt:

Driveway

As you may remember from the master landscaping plan, Bob and I would really like to have our driveway paved. Not because we had a particular problem with the gravel drive, but because there was a huge dip from the driveway into the garage. The Cavalier's underside always hit the dip, and if I had more than 2 people in the Versa or a loaded car, than it would also hit the bottom. We thought that until we had the money, we were just going to have to suffer (well the cars suffer mostly). Another, less annoying problem, but still pretty annoying, was the bottom of our driveway. See our house seems to be at the bottom of a slight hill in our street. This means we get all the water, you guessed it, at the foot of the driveway. The original gravel was laid in such a way that the water just pooled up at the end. This meant a lot of muddy feet in and out of the house.

So we were talking to Tom over at Todd's Services, you may remember them from our master landscaping plan, about re-leveling the backyard, planting grass etc. for next year, when I off handedly asked if there was anything they could do about the driveway now with new gravel. Would that be a waste of money? or would it help us out in the long run (pavement)? Turned out it was a good idea and reasonably priced. We chose limestone gravel, which when it rains becomes almost cement like.

So in this first picture you can see where the dip is because it extends past the driveway and into the walkway a bit. I don't think the picture shows how bad the dip really was:

 

And the rest of the driveway:

I know the Versa is dirty. Try living on a dirt road - it's just not worth washing your car.

Introducing our new bed!

We always said that if we were to get a new bed, it would be a glorious king sized bed. It was one of those things that we talked about, but didn't really expect to get for another couple of years. We had gotten our queen size Sealy bed six years ago. At the time it was extraordinary. A plush pillow top was the selling point for us, but later on became the bane of our sleeping existence. You see we sleep in the middle of our bed and over time, that plush pillow top formed a big dip in the middle of the bed. It became so severe that every time I had to get out of bed, it felt like I was climbing out. Yet the bed was still comfy. Then, earlier this summer I began waking up with back pain. At first it was a night or two a week, but than it became every night. I couldn't sleep more than 5 hours without waking up in pain. X-rays and blood work showed nothing so I moved forward with physical therapy. I dreaded sleeping in the bed at night. So we finally bit the bullet and bought a new bed. I knew that I didn't want anything with coils, or a tempurpedic.  So we got a natural latex bed. I was also pretty set on getting a platform bed frame, which is incredibly hard to find. So after a couple of weeks of searching and not finding anything within our price range, we decided on the Ikea Malm bed frame. It's low to the ground, clean lines, and does the job. A king size bed also meant that we had to get new sheets, new comforter and new pillows.

Can you find Mr. Scamp?