DIY   home improvement   crafts   landscaping   painting   tools  

After some sealing and painting of the trim around the doors, I needed a little break... and this is what my "spa" evening looked like.  A bucket full of epsom salt-soak for my feet, some sun-burn gel for my arms, a bowl full of grapes, iced sweet-tea, and some of my favorite TV shows.  It doesn't look like much, but sometimes the little things at home are better than anywhere else you could go.

Of course, the next day was back to work and here are a few things I did over the week...

Steering-wheel slip covers... cut from a cheap dollar tree sun screen and sewn to fit.  Because sometimes it just isn't worth pulling the big window screen out or the sun is shining in the side of the car instead of the front.

Then while waiting on caulk to dry on the door trim and a cloud finally shaded the yard for a little while, I put down weed barrier and put bark mulch around the bushes.

Reducing this huge stack of mulch, that we got on super sale while hubby was home, to 2 bags.

Strangely the neighbors honey bees think I am extremely interesting and have been inspecting every tiny detail of my outside work.  One even landed on my hand and started chewing on the base of my thumb.  No... not stinging... CHEWING.  Super strange feeling and more than a little freaky.  The only thing I can guess is that even three times of washing my hands wasn't enough to get the tasty smell of salmon off them.  I told it that he was supposed to be a honey bee, but I think he said "Honey smoked salmon... it works."

The bees also constantly inspected some great progress on the patio brick re-laying during the evenings, one morning, and anytime the sun slipped behind a cloud.  I have gotten decent at chipping bricks with a chisel and hammer, so was able to fill in around the curved side of the walkway at least reasonably.  I may still need to put in some red cement or something to lock the smallest pieces in place, but it is looking pretty good and I can finally roll a cart from the walkway to the patio without falling in the gaps.  

If you are ever doing this type of project, you should note that if you don't have a soil compactor or rent one, you need to smooth the sand for each brick about a quarter-inch too tall and then pound the brick down with a dead-blow hammer or mallet.  Otherwise the bricks will settle down to an uneven mess later as the sand compacts beneath the bricks.  Also note... pounding in each brick is a time-consuming back-breaking process, but also a great way to let out stress.

I took a kinda break this weekend by going to my sister’s and cooking pizza for her family, then helped a little the next day with painting some of her bedroom.  It is surprising how much a little work on some one else's project can be a relief from stressing about your own.  Then spent a couple hours trying to get the right paint for the house touch-up and trying to darken the 4 gallons of paint I got for the shed that are WAY too light color.

I thought I got the right touch-up for the house around the doors, but it ended up the right color but about 3 shades darker than the rest of the house... probably the exact color of the paint when it was new and not sun faded for ten years.  Not sure what to do about that.  Guess I could get some white to lighten it, but hate to do much more work on it when we are planning on re-painting the whole house next year.  I tried feathering it out to blend it with the rest of the house siding, but it is still pretty distinctly different.

 

As for the paint that needed to be darker... with a "light base" there isn’t much you can do to darken the color by very much at all.  Only about two minor shades even if you dump as much brown and black dye into the pail that can possibly fit.  Of course I didn’t realize until I was almost home… what I should have done was just get a gallon of very super-dark green in the same family of color and mix them all together in a five gallon bucket.  Probably would have been much more successful. 

I am completely in love with the color though, and it would probably look great on the shed… but I am trying to test out the color we may want to paint the house, so I really need to make it darker still.  I did do a test section of the current color… and somehow ended up painting the ONE section of shed that never gets full sun on it, so it is pretty impossible to take a good picture of the color to send to hubby.

Arrg!  I swear I just need to stop… everything... and take a nap or something.