One Year of Working Remote / Fence Gearing Up / Office Taking Shape
March 13th marked one entire year of working remotely at my job. It's been a whole year since I've seen my coworkers in person. A whole year since I had to make that work commute. It's been a whole year of this strange pandemic world we're living in. Going back and reading my journal entry from back then when there was so many unknowns and so much uncertainty is surreal. It feels like a million years ago. My management has said that we'll be returning to the office in July but we'll see how that goes. Life is slowly getting back to normal but I can tell it'll still be perhaps another year before things are truly normal again. And even then, it'll probably be a new kind of normal.
The next big project for us here in the new house is to replace the chain-link fence around the property with a more private wooden fence. We've been researching and thinking about this for months now and we're going to attempt to get this going before summer arrives. We had several fencing companies out here to give us estimates and one was close to $20,000 which is way more than double what it typically should be. I guess everyone is blaming the ice storm we had a month ago for causing fencing companies to be stretched thin and wood supplies to be running down. Apparently wood is three times its usual price at this moment. It's wild.
Obviously we don't want to spend $20,000 on this but we do have a long fence (260 feet) which borders five other neighboring properties. It's madness. Also, I want to be lazy and have someone else do the hard work of pulling metal poles and 40-year-old concrete out of the ground. We haven't been able to get on a schedule yet to have one of these companies come out, so we've had time to think about all possibilities.
As luck would have it, we began speaking with one of my best friends, Bryan, about options. He mentioned that if the metal poles are okay, we could simply remove the chain link itself and attach wood to the poles. Others have suggested this too but I didn't think I wanted to deal with it. Bryan offered to come out and help us do the whole fence this way and that got the wheels turning in my head. In the days after that talk, we pretty much decided to save all our money and do it this way. We'll be buying the wood ourselves somewhere and we'll be preparing to get this rockin' during April. Probably on the weekends. It'll be a lot of work, but I guess that's what we're signing up for. This whole house is a lot of work and that's just the way it'll be.
But there are parts of the house that are truly taking shape and starting to feel like home. The smallest of the three bedrooms has become my home office and man cave. It's the space I've been allotted to fly my freak flag! I've been allowed to purchase furniture and decorate as I please. Artwork and fun paper collages that I haven't displayed in the better part of a decade is now up on the walls filling the space. The desk in there is where I telecommute to work, too, so when I'm on a video call I sometimes get comments from coworkers asking about the artwork and goings-on behind me. It's starting to feel truly cozy! One aspect of it is a low and long TV stand that I'm putting a small TV on and then hooking up a bunch of retro game consoles. Along with the decor, it's feeling like a fun room and it's coming together in a way that the other rooms aren't. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's coming to a sort of completion faster than the other rooms. But there's no rush. We have years...
The next big project for us here in the new house is to replace the chain-link fence around the property with a more private wooden fence. We've been researching and thinking about this for months now and we're going to attempt to get this going before summer arrives. We had several fencing companies out here to give us estimates and one was close to $20,000 which is way more than double what it typically should be. I guess everyone is blaming the ice storm we had a month ago for causing fencing companies to be stretched thin and wood supplies to be running down. Apparently wood is three times its usual price at this moment. It's wild.
Obviously we don't want to spend $20,000 on this but we do have a long fence (260 feet) which borders five other neighboring properties. It's madness. Also, I want to be lazy and have someone else do the hard work of pulling metal poles and 40-year-old concrete out of the ground. We haven't been able to get on a schedule yet to have one of these companies come out, so we've had time to think about all possibilities.
As luck would have it, we began speaking with one of my best friends, Bryan, about options. He mentioned that if the metal poles are okay, we could simply remove the chain link itself and attach wood to the poles. Others have suggested this too but I didn't think I wanted to deal with it. Bryan offered to come out and help us do the whole fence this way and that got the wheels turning in my head. In the days after that talk, we pretty much decided to save all our money and do it this way. We'll be buying the wood ourselves somewhere and we'll be preparing to get this rockin' during April. Probably on the weekends. It'll be a lot of work, but I guess that's what we're signing up for. This whole house is a lot of work and that's just the way it'll be.
But there are parts of the house that are truly taking shape and starting to feel like home. The smallest of the three bedrooms has become my home office and man cave. It's the space I've been allotted to fly my freak flag! I've been allowed to purchase furniture and decorate as I please. Artwork and fun paper collages that I haven't displayed in the better part of a decade is now up on the walls filling the space. The desk in there is where I telecommute to work, too, so when I'm on a video call I sometimes get comments from coworkers asking about the artwork and goings-on behind me. It's starting to feel truly cozy! One aspect of it is a low and long TV stand that I'm putting a small TV on and then hooking up a bunch of retro game consoles. Along with the decor, it's feeling like a fun room and it's coming together in a way that the other rooms aren't. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's coming to a sort of completion faster than the other rooms. But there's no rush. We have years...