More To Dos

My list keeps growing. I guess the fact that I start something, don’t finish it, start something else has something to do with the length of it.

I can’t help it. Yes, I’m still in the middle of painting the entire upstairs white, but the weather turned nice so I’m trying to do all of the stuff that needs to be done outdoors while its nice out, and saving the painting for icky days. Unfortunately the icky comes after doing a lot of work outside, so during the icky days I’ve been lounging inside recovering from all that outside work. Hey, there’s always winter, where the paint fumes will be lovely.

Today I was standing outside watching the dogs look for baby birds (thankfully they flew the nest and didn’t land in the yard to be killed immediately) and noticed that our back entryway thing is just plain nasty. If you can picture it, you walk out the back door to a concrete thing that’s below ground, then go up 4 stairs to the yard. Its always wet, there’s always bugs, it collects all manner of gunk and there’s mold growing on the wall. On top of that, the last owners had thrown some concrete up to make the walls look nice, but over the years that concrete had chipped off in massive hunks and it just looks like crap.

Fine, while the dogs were sniffing around I decided to chip a little more off the concrete, then I got a hammer and a screwdriver, pretty soon I had most of the gunk off the walls to reveal the concrete blocks behind the concrete. Ok, so where the deck people had to drill through the concrete pad, there’s a bit of shifting of concrete block, so that will need to be patched, and there’s some cracks that need patched, and then I realized that the dogs had dug so far underneath part of one part of the concrete pad that it had broken off at the corner and was leaning. Sigh.

Off to Lowes I go. I love Lowes, they have such cool things there. I grabbed some patch stuff and some water proof patch stuff, and then I thought I might need some wood putty, (turns out I did, part of the door frame at the bottom pretty much rotted out, so I have to fix that) and they had some disposable shop rags like paper towel rolls, so I got those and they had more damp rid, which is working wonderfully in that back room where the sump pump is. Yep, most women go buy shoes, I buy home repair crap and dance gleefully through the aisles.

I spent this afternoon chipping at the concrete and sanding down the concrete blocks, going inside to cool off, going back out. I was going to start the patching process today, but then we had a storm and since wet concrete and rain don’t mix well, decided to wait until tomorrow to do that. Of course it barely rained at all.

At one point I had a wild hair about actually putting decorative outdoor tile up on the walls of the concrete, but thought better. Just patch it and make it look nice enough to sell the stupid place in two years. That is if the housing market recovers by then.

Tomorrow I will be attempting to roll over the big slab of concrete to put more dirt under it and level it, then roll it back into place and patching it. Yeah, there’s a hernia just waiting to happen right there. Broken foot, hernia, wrenched back. I could use some quiet time in traction.