Improvising

Cutting a Soffit Grove in the Fascia Board

What do you do when you need to replace a section of 1x4 fascia board and neither Lowes or Home Depot carry the pre-grooved fascia board nor the dado blade needed to cut the groove (into which the soffit board fits)?

You channel your Norm Abram from This Old House and recall that you can use a metal yard stick as a guide and make multiple passes with your skill saw to cut the required groove. Set the skill saw to the necessary depth and then slowly move the guide about a blades width for each pass.

Kind of a pain, and takes some time ...but it gets the job done.

Phase 1 Plan

Layout for the New Addition (Master Bedroom and Bathroom)

We met with our designer (Renee) on the layout for the first phase of our remodel. The first phase will be the new addition off the back of the house.

Renee had prepared two different options for us. One option had the bedroom area of the addition at the back of the addition, and the second option had the master bedroom at the first part of the addition (just beyond the existing wall).

After reviewing the two options, we decided that we liked having the master bedroom part as the first thing that you enter from the existing house, and the bathroom part at the back of the addition. We made a couple of other small changes as we discussed the layout with Renee (like making the new porch longer and at the same height as the existing porch).

Now that we have a plan for the first phase, the next step will be to get some cost estimates from the contractors. At the moment, we have two contractors from which we want to get some cost estimates. Based on what we get from them, we may decide to get one more, or go ahead and select a contractor and get the ball rolling.

A Chipper Off The 'Ol Block

SunJoe Chipper

One of the cleanup tasks on our fixer upper has been trimming the many trees and bushes on our lot. The foliage has not been trimmed in some time. All of this trimming has resulted in several stacks of cut branches and brush.

You can bag up the trimmings and drag the larger branches to the front and let the city haul it away for you. However, Denton does assess a charge for "excess" yard trimmings that are put out for pickup. Also, you are giving up all that potential compost and mulch.

Since most of the branches are pretty small in diameter (albeit, there are a lot of them), I decided to purchase an electric wood chipper to grind them up to use as mulch and compost. I purchasing a 14 amp SunJoe electric chipper from Amazon.  The chipper arrived last Monday (several days later than Amazon's initial "guaranteed deliver date", but that's another story). I picked up the chipper from our house in Carrollton, assembled it, and started in on the brush piles.

So far so good.

I've made it through several of the piles (although there are several more to go) and it seems to be making nice piles of mulch. The mulch should come in handy when I finally get to work on building and planting our flowerbeds and landscaping.

All Paths Lead Home

Flagstone Walkway

While we've been waiting for our designer (Renee) to complete the drawings for our new master bedroom and bathroom, I've been trimming bushes and trees, scraping and priming peeling paint, and digging out the excess dirt in the front flower bed and moving it to the low spots in the back yard.

However, I did take a bit of break and went and bought some flagstone to build a walkway on the west side of the house. It is mostly just dirt on that side and it really needed something to get from the front of the house to the back.

When I complete the scraping and priming on the eve above this path, I'll add a flower bed between the path and the wall with some Columbine and other shade loving plants, since this side of the house is in shade much of the day.