While vacuuming on Thursday, I discovered the cord on my 6 year old Oreck is damaged and is on the verge of being unsafe. I called Oreck and getting it replaced would cost $65, but I would probably be without a vacuum for weeks. Not okay with the beags. After some research and finding out I could use Amex points to buy a super fancy vac, I ( Read more... )

The deck, which we had held off on finally putting back on the addition after we had issues with the work done in the back yard, is now done! We had a general idea of how it should look, but didn't have an exact plan. My cousin, a carpenter, built it and I think he did a pretty awesome job ( Read more... )

Since we were forced to move everything out of the little addition when we got a little water back there a few weeks ago, we decided it was time to change out the flooring. There used to be some ceramic tile right by the door and in the rest of the room I had put Flor tiles down as wall-to-wall so we could easily clean up after the dogs. The Flor ( Read more... )

so may ended on a very low note -- we found out that one of our beagles, watts, has two kinds of cancer. we discovered a mass inside his cheek, which biopsied as oral malignant melanoma. then we took him to uw madison for further evaluation and they discovered he also has lymphoma in the same area. we did lots of tests to confirm that he ( Read more... )

The big stuff is done!


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It was a pretty, but slightly cool day, so it was perfect for Beaglefest, the beagle rescue's annual fundraiser/adoption event/beagle play day. Watts is never crazy about Beaglefest, so I only have one picture of him and he looks like he wants to leave. For Lola, it's the best day of the year:


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so the project should be done today, but it's also supposed to pour -- a lot -- so we'll see. here's where we are at (day 6 and then yesterday, day 9). i got home later yesterday, so those pics were at sunset and a bit dark and shot badly by yours truly:


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Here we are on days 2 to 4. I missed pictures yesterday since it rained at the end of the day. There was not much that was very interesting to look at though. They had started to lay down the paths, but had the pattern going horizontally rather than vertically, so basically a chunk of day 3 got undone and redone today.


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The yard project started yesterday. It is unfortunate that we had to undo a lot of work we did with planting and whatnot, but we are saving as much as we can. There isn't a photo of the planting along the side of the garage, but a lot of things got moved there over the weekend.

Here's our progress after day 1:

Front
Monday to yesterday

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Fixing a mystery plumbing issue at our house is a project that we had been planning on taking care of "at some point" but had been putting off due to the enormous undertaking it would be. Once we somewhat diagnosed the problem with some trusted plumbers, we learned that, due to some previous owner's interesting and never was this ever code ( Read more... )