Busy weekend!

I didn't get a lot done last week, aside from sort of fiddling with the door a bit. I made up for it this weekend, though. I got a lot done that I wasn't even really planning on. Enough with the intro, let's get to the pictures and captions. Interesting note on the pictures: I now have more than 1000 pictures of the house and the various projects we've done so far. That's probably more pictures than I've ever taken in my life all put together.

Here's the bathroom wall. You can see how flat the patch looks, especially with the semi-gloss paint. The flat paint in the rest of the house kind of hides the bad texture, but this stuff just shows up like a beacon. I got that hopper gun and decided this weekend was a good time to bust it out and give it a try.

First, I wanted to flatten the area. It has a lot of layers of texture on it, and those need to get gone before I get going. This little guy is a life-saver.

Here's the wall after sanding. You can see the little metal patch piece that's on there from the door knob hole that started this whole mess originally. The more I try to fix it, the more it needs to be fixed. I'm hoping to stop the cycle of abuse and regret soon, though.

Here's the fun part. You have to mask off everything around the patch area because the hopper gun splatters like crazy. I thought this was enough. I actually thought this might be excessive. I was so wrong.

Here I am with the hopper gun. It seems really nice. All the pieces (except the hopper) are solid brass and the whole thing just feels really solid.

There's the splatter I put on there. You may notice a difference between this splatter and the splatter I was getting from the can. I certainly noticed the difference.

The depth of the texture with the hopper gun is so much nicer. It put big globs with tiny speckles between instead of just small globs everywhere. It's exactly what I need. Any of you who have experience with this may notice that I simply have too much on here, and I realized that when I tried to knock it down. I think I may also not have given it enough time to solidify.

Pay no attention to the adorable wife toes in this picture. Okay, maybe a little. Look how cute they are! All done now, I promise. The splatter got a little bit everywhere, even with the masking paper.

Yeah, pretty much everywhere.

I cleaned it, though! I need to see if I can find a way to make it work that I get to make the messes for the renovations, but the wife has to clean them up. That would be awesome. For me.

I didn't get a picture of the failed knockdown, unfortunately. There was a lot of cursing and stomping of my little feet when it didn't work, and it's best not to get any records of that. This is how it looks now, after I scraped off the failed texture. I'll have to sand it and go after it again. I'm testing on some cardboard in the garage now to see how my settings need to go.

My target.

Here's my first try. The speckles seem like they're too small and too close together, but we'll see when we knock it down.

Yeah, that's not going to work.

A little better. The best thing about the hopper gun over the can is that you really do get globs with speckles. No matter how hard I tried with the can, I never got globs and speckles. Now I just need to get the right number, size and distribution of globs, and all will be well.

The cardboard is flexible, which makes knocking the texture down a bit tougher, but this is a bit better. I think I need a few more globs, but this is pretty darned close to the right size. Almost there, now!

I finally went and got the paint for the siding, too. My mom was awesome and called KB to get the color for us, so we hit up Sherwin Williams and got a quart for touch-ups.

Pretty easy here. It looks almost invisible now, which is a far cry from the "hole with a dead pigeon in it" we were rocking when we first moved in.

I also put a coat of paint on the new trim piece, but it needs a bit more. You can also see the little heads of the screws we used to secure the brickmold, so those need to be filled.

The trim looks better, for sure. Had to go get some Bondo putty for the nail holes, though. i heard that the Bondo will stick better and last longer than regular wood putty, so I wanted to give it a try. So far, I'm liking it. It's cheap, easy to use, easy to sand, and has a nice smooth finish when all is said and done.

 The Bondo at work. I think these spots will work pretty well. A couple of them need to be sanded a bit more, but overall they're looking good.

This is the enemy. It's crabgrass in my front yard. It isn't so bad up here, but it's starting to spread and no weedkiller I've tried will take it out even a little. I can't even get it to turn brown or anything. It just soaks up deadly toxins and demands more, like Lindsay Lohan or something.

This is the back yard, where it's really bad. I haven't mowed back here for a few weeks, partially because I kept wanting to spray the grass and have it have enough surface area for the poison to really take hold. Partially because I'm lazy.

Laziness be damned! I just got out there and started pulling. The crabgrass comes out pretty easily, since it grows in tufts. I still have plenty more to take out, but I think I got the worst of it. I also mowed after this, and I'm hoping that my theory will prove out. It seems that crabgrass grows faster than regular grass. Therefore, if I mow all the grass to the same level, the crabgrass should make itself more apparent and I get go pull it out without damaging the good grass. We'll see how that works.

This is my beautiful wife planting our little eggs into larger pots in the back yard. The sprouts were really thriving, it seems, but they needed to get out into the world and get some real sunlight and all so they can grow up big and strong.

This is sort of interesting. The eggs seem to have been containing the roots more than we anticipated (this may have been because they weren't buried) so she peeled off the shells and the membrane stayed behind. It makes them easy to plant, but the roots should have no trouble punching through. Brilliant!

Here they all are in their new homes. We'll have to see how they progress out in the real world.

I also decided to trim the tree. It had a few low-hanging branches that really got in the way of mowing, so I cut them off. I used a saw instead of a machete this time, since I kind of want this tree to survive. I really think it looks nicer back there, and it's much easier to get around in the yard. This big giant tree back there is really great for shade in the evenings, and we're one of the few houses in the neighborhood with a tree this big. I'm sort of proud, even though I had nothing to do with it.

So that's about it for this weekend. I feel like we accomplished a lot, even though they were mostly small jobs and some were unsuccessful. The experience with the hopper gun is valuable every time, since it is clearly the right way to go for the wall texture, and getting the hang of it will open up a lot of possibilities. Thanks for reading!