that brown house

It has been a really busy weekend. We started out by getting a quote for bathroom fixtures from, by total coincidence, our across-the-street (from the apartment) neighbor.

I have been making the fixture search harder than it really needs to be because I really dislike the all-in-one shower controls that adjust temperature and pressure with the same lever. Apparently it is now illegal in most states to sell showers with separate hot and cold knobs because of the scalding risk, and most of the remaining fixtures that have separate temperature and pressure knobs use fancy thermostatic valves that keep the temperature exact but cost a bundle. A few makers (Delta, Moen, American Standard) do make valves with separate temperature and pressure controls but without the thermostat, but they are pretty rare and you have to go out of your way to find them.

With that out of the way we went over to the house to patch some more plaster in the kitchen. We ended up using almost the entire roll of patching tape and the entire bucket of joint compound, which surprised me because it seemed like we had lots of it. I am new to this and my patches came out kind of lumpy, but it turns out that that’s OK, because when you go back the next day to sand down the edges, you end up sanding almost the whole thing off anyway, so it gets smoothed down to the point where it doesn’t really matter if you left some extra blobs when you put it on. The downside is that you end up taking so much off the wall that the floor gets all covered in plaster dust. I tried to sweep it up, but it still ended up getting tracked all over everywhere:

Anyway, I am getting ahead of the story because after patching, we went out to buy plants for the garden and yard. We have a couple of varieties of tomatoes, some bell peppers, some snap peas, and some flowers. (Steph will have to tell you what kind of flowers.) We marked off a section of the back yard and cleared the wild clovers out of it (and also a bunch of rocks and random hunks of wood that were buried there). Steph dug some holes for the plants while I put together some netting for the snap peas to grow on, but it got too dark before we could actually plant anything.

Sunday morning I started out by going over to Nathan’s to borrow his lawn mower, which, fortunately, is much more durable than the one we bought before and did not show the slightest sign of falling apart in the course of cutting our 20′x 12′ or so patch of grass. Steph’s mom supervised and pointed out all the spots I had missed.

I went inside to do some sanding as described above while Steph stayed out working on the front garden. After many hours of struggle she got rid of all the weeds and replaced them with plants that are actually there on purpose:

The other exciting news of the day was getting six more previously painted-shut windows to open. The only one that continues to resist is the one in the laundry room. Here in action are the kitchen windows, the right hand one of which put up a particularly vigorous struggle. You can also judge for yourself whether the plaster patching looks any good.