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Snakes for breakfast

Early this morning, while working out on the deck, I heard a bird screeching and looked up to see a hawk in the trees. After a few minutes, the hawk swooped down and landed at the base of a large tree. When the hawk didn't immediately fly away, I thought I wonder if he hit the tree - and where in CT is raptor rescue ?

All of a sudden the hawk flew off with a snake or lizard in his talons and breakfast was served.

Decorating Don'ts #1

If you're ever tempted to paint your electrical outlets, resist the temptation. When you have to take the wall plate off, it can also peel the paint off the wall.

One week to go

One week to go before we move in. The grass is starting to come in, albeit somewhat spotty.

The house is really starting to look like ours. We have started putting things back together by putting down area rugs and moving smaller pieces of furniture over.

We meet with a landscaper tomorrow to get an overall plan for the yard.

Packing is in high gear. We've been eating on paper plates for three weeks and I fear I'll be left alternating between two pairs of skivvies in a couple days.

Definitely Deer

Our old place was out in the country. Way out. We used to have daily sightings of all sorts of wild life; birds, squirrels and associated furry critters, deer, turkeys, and even a stray cow.

Now that we moved to a more populated area, we wondered if we'd see the same variety of wild life. Until today, we've seen a couple chipmunks, squirrels, and some birds. As evening faded to night, we watched a doe chomping at some weeds in the back yard tonight. She took her time chomping and watching, watching and chomping. We watched her for about 5 minutes until she finally had enough of our yard and moved on. (Note to self: no hostas in the landscaping).

Ewwww

One of the downsides of finishing your hardwood floors is there is a lot of dust. Everywhere.

Tonight, we decided to clean the baseboard heating registers. All sorts of things were found in the registers; marbles, crayons, lollipop sticks, light brite pegs, string, Barbie (or some other doll) shoes and more. Worst of all was the kitchen; Cheerios, pretzels, and yes, a petrified chicken nugget.

Floors are done

The hardwood floors are finally done. The process took 5 days from start to finish and as you can see from the pictures above, they look beautiful. We can walk on them now, but will be about 3-4 more days until we can really start using them with normal wear. We were afraid to wear our shoes on the new floors so we walked around the house in our socks all day Saturday.

There is sawdust everywhere in the house. There's not as much dust as I thought there would be, but still, everything has some dust on it. Time to break out the swiffer and start dusting.

The floors were done by Mountain Flooring in Wilton. They did a tremendous job and did everything in a professional manner. They came highly recommended and lived up to their reputation.

Restoring Hardwood Floors

Spent about 40 man-hours ripping up carpet and removing those darn staples and carpet tack strips. Having pulled up about 1600 square feet of carpet, I can tell you I won't do it again.

Here you can see the floor in the Dining/Living room with the old finish. This floor was definitely the worst condition of all.

The flooring company came in today and sanded all the hardwood floors down to the wood and it looks quite different. Three more days until the floors are done after they put on a light stain and three coats of oil based polyurethane.