Painting at the wall and ceiling

I previously mentioned a useful "edging tool" for painting where the walls and ceiling meet (see here). It has a flaw though... it leaves a slight gap at the very top of the wall. And when I say slight, I really do mean slight... as in, most people wouldn't be inspecting the walls for every possible flaw like the owner of the home would be and they wouldn't even notice. But I'm the owner of the home, so I noticed and for your benefit I'm blogging about it. Here's my tip:

Get a good angled 1-inch brush and paint to the top of the wall. It's better to get paint slightly on the ceiling than leaving the slight gap. A fairly steady hand will do a fine job. This tip should save you the trouble of "painting the wall, painting the ceiling, painting the wall" since you now know what looks better. And if you feel more comfortable using painters tape... then before you paint the top of the wall, put tape on the ceiling almost to (but not quite to) where the wall and ceiling meet because you don't want tape covering part of the wall.

Stretch before gardening

I pulled my back gardening a couple of weekends ago. I'm in my 20s so that really shouldn't happen, but it's taught me the lesson to stretch my back regularly... especially before doing yard work. In my defense, I had been working on my core at the gym, which probably tightened my back too much in the previous weeks. You'd think the bags of mulch I hauled would have caused me to hurt my back, but instead it was pulling on a tree root.
Luckily my regular gardening helper and a couple of other friends were able to help me plant the shade garden and the rest of the plants that my mom got me. Due to the tree roots, I was unable to plant the hydrangea bushes where I wanted to, so they're currently growing in pots. Not ideal, but I'll find a good spot for them eventually.

Once things start to bloom, I'll post more pictures. I just wanted to pass along my advice before it was too late for you :)

Water line fixed

I'm happy that my house is no longer purging water through a 60 year old service line. Turns out that in the 50s the standard allowed for there to be multiple pieces of pipe that were soldered together. The standard now is to have only one piece of copper line. Good news is the new pipe should last over 60 years! Even though there was some corrosion on the old water line, it didn't have holes or anything. Here are some before and after pictures.

My wallet hurts a little from this expense, but luckily I made sure to save up before buying the house. And I keep telling myself that it makes the house more valuable. Really, it pays for itself in just a couple of years because the leak was pretty bad. I'm hoping my water bills will be at least a third of what they are now. For a couple of days this was the view out of my front yard.

I watched them do a little of the work. They duct taped the new line to the old line and used chains and the backhoe to pull the old line out and the new line through without digging up much of my yard. Yes, duct tape proves to be very useful again!

Plants Galore!

As my previous posts would indicate, I'm pretty excited about the tulips that I didn't have to plant. Well they've bloomed and are beautiful:

Most of them are dark pink, but there are some red ones along the driveway.
But why call this post "Plants Galore!" and not "Tulips Galore!"? Because last Friday, I received PLANTS GALORE! that my mom ordered for me online.

I've planted all of the plants that I intend to put in the front yard for now, but still need to plant the "shade" plants and hydrangea bushes in my backyard. I've got a gardening helper who will help me with my backyard this weekend. It'll take be a while before the plants show themselves since most of them are bulbs, but eventually they'll be beautiful! At least I'm assuming they will be... in reality I don't know what most of them will look like. It's a pretty safe assumption though since my mom picked them out. Thanks Mom!