What’s been happening at our house …

 

Final baseball tally: They had a record of 25-9. We are already looking forward to next year!

Another bobcat sighting – this time, we have tracks. The bottom print is one of our dogs, the top is the bobcat. The kids and I went for a jog to the hunting cabin on an overcast day and on the return trip, we spotted it running ahead of us in the road. Hadden and I both saw it this time.

 

Birds, birds, and more birds. There are 7 in this picture, but this morning, there were 8 on the feeder at one time. They are eating us out of all of the sugar in the house :)

Projects:

John recently built stairs down from the deck. This was the truck with the supplies! Only in Alabama :)

I finished staining the deck – at least the top face of everything. I still need to finish the outside edges and will need scaffolding to reach it. I was on the hummingbird superhighway while working on the deck.

While John and the kids were away at church camp at Shocco Springs, I had some indoor projects to tackle. One of the reasons John finished the stairs down from the deck was so that I could work on the entryway and still get in/out of the house.

Before – plain door  and bare concrete floor.

These turned into nightmare projects for me. The first thing I did was attempt to stain the door – this picture doesn’t look that bad, but believe me, it looks awful. I really don’t like using gel stain and that is what the person at HD gave me to do the fiberglass door. I obviously am not good at it, because some spots started to dry too quickly and the finish looks uneven. I bought some stuff to take off the old and I will try again later. I also found some tips online on how to handle gel stain, so hopefully it will turn out better.

And … the floor. Oh, the floor! I actually lost sleep over this one. I was going for the nice look of mottled colored concrete that you sometimes see in restaurants. Not sure exactly what happened, but it didn’t turn out at all. Above is the intermediate – lovely, huh? Looks like smeared, dirty concrete – nothing close to what I was going for.

So, back to the paint store for a different approach. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put the new one over the old one, so I had to sand off this layer before putting on the new one. John and the kids got home somewhere in the process of sanding. :(

Here it is after the first coat of solid stain color – much better, in my opinion. I have one more coat of clear to put on and the floor will be finished. And, then, back to the doors. We have decided it would be best to take it off the hinges, so we will have to plan that carefully with the heat and weather.

So – what have you been up to?