Yesterday was the one year anniversary of Anne and I getting our house. Since then we've been very very busy and we're nowhere close to done. But all in all it's been a good experience and I'm happy with our choice.

Here's the current to-do list:

• put up cement board and tile kitchen backsplash
• replace kitchen light fixture
• finish installing foot board on kitchen cabinets
• replace switches and add light switch in kitchen
• get or make LED under-cabinet lighting
• paint kitchen
• paint woodwork in our bedroom
• replace light in entryway
• install ceiling fan in living room (pray there is electrical in the ceiling cap)
• get or build new vanity for bathroom
• install new sink in bathroom
• install new in-wall faucet in bathroom
• replace light fixture in bathroom
• finish making light fixture for dining room and install it
• paint back and bedroom hallways
• replace lights in back and bedroom hallways

Whew! That's a lot of crap! Though that should pretty much take care of the first floor renovations and we can take a nap afterwards and start saving up lots and lots for creating the second floor space.

This weekend we finally finished the patio. I am glad to have that done and I don't ever want to make another patio myself again. However, considering the money we saved doing this ourselves, I may have to...

We went from this...

...to this.

Once we got the foundation in it wasn't so bad...

...and went rather quickly.

And, we're done!

The fireplace.

More Photos

Last weekend Anne and broke ground on our patio. As you may remember we got a bunch of pavers from my parents when they replaced their front walk. So we figured out how large of a patio we could make with them and determined where we wanted it and what we wanted to do. And finally we started digging.

The beginnings of our mud hole.

We're going with a basic rectangular shaped patio because we don't want to be cutting any of the paver bricks. It's just easier that way. We are adding a little bump out on one corner for the cast iron fireplace that you can see in the left of the above photo.

We made some pretty good progress until the torrential downpour ended our work. This past weekend we finished digging and I removed a couple of old concrete post anchors from the old section of our fence.

Sledge hammering is fun! Hack sawing is not.

This past weekend we began re-filling our hole with crushed limestone, which i don't have any photos of yet. At $2.50/bag it seems cheap until you realize how many bags of the crap you're actually going to need, yikes!

Our foreman keeps us on task throughout the process.