Wrapping up some loose ends

So it turns out that the only time projects DON'T take about three times as long as we plan is when we pay someone else to do them for us.

Yeah.

Why do we do this again?

Anyway, looking back over my last post (wow, it's been a while, eh?), we had just finished the patio. To be fair, the amount of work we put into the patio has figured heavily in my lack of wanting to post anything here. Or at least, that'll be my chosen excuse. Hell, I don't even feel like writing this right now, but here we are...

Way back when, before we had even STARTED the patio, we had our old friend Mike over to give us a quote on replacing the window in the kitchen with a patio door. (Mike's the guy who installed our floors downstairs, and rebuilt the sunroom.) See, to get out onto our nice new patio, we had to go out through the family room and through the sunroom. Which, admittedly isn't exactly FAR, but feels like light years when I've let the barbecue flare up again, and I'm burning the chicken.

Mike had assured us that fitting a new door was just a day's work for him (hah!), and so we went ahead and ordered a nice, pre-hung set of French doors. While we were waiting on those to be ready, we dug out and built the patio, and then sat around for another couple of weeks... it really took a long time for it to be ready, I gotta say.

Not Mike's fault at all, but the door place was... well, not the sharpest tools in the shed, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the door eventually arrived, and Mike came over at about 8:30 one fine Thursday morning to stick it in. Just in case I haven't ever shared a picture of that particular window, here's what it looked like the day before:

And these are the pictures the War Department sent me at 10:30 that morning:

Oh, and of course, she also texted that the door didn't fit, but she was LYING. VERY NOT FUNNY, DEAR.

By the time I got home, well, there was nothing really left to do but go and buy a lockset because we'd forgotten to tell Mike which one we wanted. At his recommendation, we got one with a lever handle because, even though it doesn't match the style of our existing door handles, it's a lot easier when you've got an armload of chicken for the barbecue in one hand, and a nice cold bottle of beer in the other. Not that, you know, I'm EVER likely to be using the door under those exact conditions every weekend or something.

Fortunately, I've done enough knobs in my time (TWSS) that I'm getting pretty good at it and I can install one without having to do it twice:

So the next part of this particular project was to replace the baseboard heater that was in front of the window. Of course, now there was a big freaking door there, so we'd have to come up with another solution. Fortunately for us, they make electric heaters that, amazingly enough, hang on the wall! So we bought one! This being us, it was not as easy as that. See, original electric wire that fed the baseboard heater came out at the bottom of the wall - near, oddly enough, the baseboard. Hence the name? I dunno. Anyway, we had to cut out a piece of drywall, and pull the wire up through the cavity and then across the wall to the panel on the back side of our new heater:

Fortunately, this being the kitchen, and not exactly a finished space, we decided to just put the drywall back, and mount the heater in front of it. We'll get around to mudding over that when we redo the kitchen in, oh, say, five years? Sure, let's go with that.

And with that, the patio - and the sunroom! - is officially finished. We bought a nice little patio table and some chairs (the umbrella has to go back to the store and be exchanged - cheap-ass p.o.s.), and I built a couple of planter boxes for herbs and flowers.

Sunroom:

Patio:

Oh, well, of course, we still need to do some backfilling and seeding around the retaining wall, and there are a couple of decorative bits to put in, and I really want to put a hosereel on the side there, and the barbecue is pretty ugly...

I'll say one thing for our patio, though: it makes the rest of the back of our house look like shit. Man, somebody really ought to do something about that stucco...