Painting - Before and After of Back Deck:

I need to do some touch up, but I'm so happy I didn't have to scrape off the old paint and put on the new paint. Well worth the money.

Exterior Paint

The neighboring house that got foreclosed has had a parade of contractors coming through to fix it up.

We hired one of them to repaint all our exterior trim, and repaint the front porch and back deck.

He and a buddy did the trim today. They are planning on doing the decks on Monday.

Furnace and Air Conditioner Quotes

Our furnace is original to our house, and at 23-years-old is already past its expected life of 15-20 years.

Rather than waiting for the furnace to break and have to replace it in a hurry, Brianna is arranging quotes to replace the furnace with a new model, and to add central air conditioning (which we don't currently have).

We've only had the Costco-endorsed HVAC guy out so far. The upshot is: minimum $10,000 to install a new, low-end furnace and AC unit from this company. And it shoots up pretty fast from there.

New Dryer

We bought a new clothes dryer. It runs on natural gas.

The old dryer was electric. So why does the new one run on natural gas?

One of our long-term goals as a family is to have an electric car that charges from our solar panels (enabled by net-metering). But when we sized our solar panel system, the utility only let us install a system big enough to cover our current electricity consumption.

Part of the plan to fit an electric car into our existing electricity budget was to switch from an electric to a gas dryer. Natural gas is an extremely economical heating source in the US, and with the advances in hydraulically fracturing gas-bearing shale reservoirs, the price of natural gas in the US is going to stay very low for several decades.

So switching over to a natural gas dryer has been part of the plan for a while now, and me breaking the old dryer just pushed forward the schedule a couple of years.

(We don't have any plans to update the clothes washer for a while - it's a low-efficiency model, but those have a much better track record for actually cleaning cloth diapers than the high-efficiency models do).

Sunday evening we made a family trip to our local Sears Outlet, and purchased a nice Kenmore gas dryer for 45% off list price due to some scuffing.

Because of all the snow on the ground, it wasn't until wednesday that the plumbers were able to come out and install the new gas line for us.

It's the yellow flex line. The other two lines go to our water heater and furnace.

Everything is working nicely now!

(I put the old, broken dryer on the free section of craigslist, and had multiple people offer to come pick it up Monday evening. It was surprisingly easy to get rid of it.)

Solar Panels!

The solar panels are installed!

They won't be turned on until after the final inspection sometime next week (there's still some painting and touchup to do, as well). Pretty excited to have them up there, though. And we think they look pretty good!

Click through for the story thus far:

Solar Panel Update

Solar Panel installation is in progress!

Unfortunately, the installers had a procurement system problem, and the panels we ordered aren't in the state of colorado. So we have to wait a week or two for our panels to actually arrive.

On the other hand, we got our electrical panel updated!

Instead of the  two sub panels with 100 amp service we used to have, we now have one professionally-installed panel with 150 amp service from the utility and an additional 35 amps of capacity from the solar panels. The meter was also upgraded to handle net-metering.

Lawn is Aerated

There was a crew of people walking the street today with big, gas-powered aerators. We shelled out $70 to get our lawn aerated and fertilized. Took about five minutes for the crew of four guys after we paid the lady. No picture, but glad it is done.

Sprinkler System Winterized

Brian is away, so... it is time for me to hire out jobs. :-)

Brian and I were talking about having our sprinkler system blown down. He was on NextDoor (like a Facebook for neighbors with no videos) and one of our neighbors has been in the commercial lawn care business for 17+ years and was recommended by another neighbor. He was about the same price as the unknown flyer person, so I think a reasonable fee.  

He arrived on-time with his large compressor.  Look how pretty the leaves are... it feels like fall.

He got the compressor started, turned the water off.

And assembled a drain on the line when the vacuum is broken.  The bucket is to catch the water when it drains down the line.

Attached the air hose.

Then he started to blow out each zone.

Brian told me about an app called Hyperlapse.  It is for long timelapse videos... has some cool stabilization technology built in.  

This is one zone finishing and one complete zone cycle.   I think the original video was 4 minutes down to ~30seconds.   It is fun to play with the speed of these. 

Then he cleaned up. The process didn't take very long, 30 minutes from him pulling up to him cleaned up and leaving. 

I am very happy with how professional and quick he was. He also was very happy to talk me through all the ins and outs of sprinkler mainentence, compressors, how our sprinkler system compares to other residential and commercial ones. I liked him a lot. His name is Steve.  (Brian would you please find his # again...?)

Piano Tuning

We had the piano tuned tonight. The piano tuner was a fifty-ish woman with an impressive collection of tools. Nothing has really changed visually, but the piano sounds a LOT better now.

I guess I'll have to find a new excuse not to dredge up 20-year-old piano lessons now.

Easter Sunday & Radon Test

We had a pleasant Easter Sunday with Brianna's family down in Colorado Springs today. Lots of people and lots of really good food!

We also got the results back for a radon test run after the radon mitigation system was installed: 0.6pCi/L now, compared to 6pCi/L when we bought the house. The EPA's maximum is 4pCi/L, and anything over 2pCi/L is recommended for mitigation, so I feel that the $1200 we spent on the radon mitigation system was money well spent.

Family Work Day

Phew, it's been a long day. Started with general cleaning and picking up, including two loads of laundry. Later, a window washer came by to honor a Groupon we have been trying to redeem for four weeks now. All the top story windows have been washed on the exterior, as have a few of the largest windows on the bottom floor. We'll have to do the rest ourselves. He did point out that the seals are broken on two of the windows - we had already heard that from the original inspection report and from Brianna's brother Sven, so at least that was consistent. The windows DO look a lot better now.

The dishwasher the sellers left us has seen a lot of use, with the rust stains to prove it. We took it out of commission today in order to clean off the rust stains, remove the rust from the dish racks, and fix the holes in the vinyl-coating with some ReRack Dishwasher Rack Repair.

Here's a picture of just some of the rust and pieces I collected while fixing up the dish racks:

The dish racks themselves are still in kinda ugly shape. The ReRack isn't the same color, they are missing quite a few posts and some places were rusted clean through and had to be snipped out. However, Sears wants $150 per dish rack for replacements, and these don't fit our dishes particularly well in the first place. I'd rather just put the money towards a new Dishwasher a few months down the road.

The other big thing was Lily, Annika and Ellie coming up to paint! They did a fantastic job, and got a lot of the Master Suite moved forward another 1 to 2 coats, depending on which wall we're talking about. I'll post pictures tomorrow, when there is actual light to take pictures by.

Groupon Cleaning Lady

Brianna found a Groupon for four hours of house cleaning a few weeks ago, and it was redeemed yesterday. Brianna had the cleaning lady primarily focus on the bathrooms, although she caught other things like the handrail down to the basement (turns out the handrail was white the whole time!)

I honestly thought this tub was supposed to be an off-white/grey before it was cleaned. Brianna also (very persistently) removed the old, cruddy caulking between the tub and tile. We'll put in new caulking today.

Duct Cleaning

The Groupon we purchased for Vent and Duct Cleaning finally got redeemed on Saturday, after the contractors rescheduled on us twice. The ducts were scraped, vacuumed, and sprayed with some sort of chemical to kill off any spores or mold (hopefully). No pictures, but the registers look a heck of a lot better, and I can certainly believe the entire system is much much cleaner now.

Radon Mitigation

Forgot to post yesterday - we had a radon mitigation system installed.

***Update April 20, 2014***

We got the results from the post-installation test back: a ten-fold reduction in radon levels!

Carpet Cleaning

We got the carpets professionally cleaned and re-stretched today. It looks a heck of a lot better! The work was done by Absolute Carpet out of Fort Collins, and they did a great job for us.

Also did some more dusting. This lamp is actually pretty typical of the whole house. The first time I saw it, I thought the top was felted for some reason.

Also also, Brianna did the second-pass cleaning on the fridge. She did a great job, and it's finally clean and operating again!