Joe and Jamie's Blog

With all the excitement of storms, Christmas, and fooling around with this blog I almost forgot to mention the car accident. Nothing major, so don’t fret.

Jamie was rear ended (again) in the Acura. Maybe that small car just has a sign on the back bumper that says hit me or something. I don’t have a post of the first time this happened, it was before this blog started. The first time Jamie was sitting at a light and someone on their cell phone didn’t notice traffic was stopped and ran right into her. This time it was unfortunate for both Jamie and the other car. Some idiot in the center lane of a three lane road crossed over the left lane into a parking lot without signaling, cutting off Jamie to the point where she had to slam on the brakes and come to a full stop and barely avoided him/her. Sadly the lady behind Jamie didn’t have as great of breaks/reaction time and hit Jamie. To me it was no one but that idiots fault, but he/she kept on driving and wasn’t found. Now the car is in the shop awaiting to be fixed again.

As you can see the damage isn’t that bad, but what sucks is that it bent the exhaust forward, so that has to be replaced as well. All you see in the picture is the muffler tip being bent, but it really jammed the whole exhaust pipe forward. Oh well, guess we’re getting our money’s worth out of the insurance.

Bumper and exchaust damage

More bumper damage

Jamie’s sister Casey and her husband Andrew just recently moved into their new house. The guy before them left it very dirty so we all pitched in to clean up. All week long Jamie and I kept going back to help unpack and paint. The house looks so good now that it is painted and clean. Casey and Andrew are very happy.

Here are some of the shots of what it looks like now. I’m killing myself for always forgetting the before pictures.

This is the kitchen. It’s hard to tell but it’s not white but a very, very light green.

Here’s the living room, it really looks great with the yellow and fresh white on the trim and windows.

Casey and Jamie enjoying a drink after all their hard work.

Their dog Webber and I just hanging around…

Today we almost finished the project. Just a few odds and ends left.’

We have to just patch the drywall where the shelf used to be and buy the new dresser so we can bust up the old one.

For those of you who missed the first post on this, either click here to read it, or simply look at the previous post.

Here is the new wall/banister that we built in replace of the old shelf. Now I can’t push Jamie down the stairs over the edge, only the traditional way.

We used 2×4’s for the frame and just screwed and glued it together with liquid nails. Glue has become far greater than nails and screws lately, so it was the best bet along the drywall side since there wasn’t a stud where we where mounting it. The shelf that used to be there was a foot deep so we did have a stud to screw that into on the drywall side. It was pretty cheap to buy and was put together quicker than the trick to and back from Home Depot. Surprisingly they were open normal hours for a holiday.

Look how nicely the dresser’s fit in there. You can see to the left of it the hole in the drywall we have to repair. I’m saving that excitement for next weekend. Mounted the trusty fire extinguisher on the post. Every house should have one on each floor. You never know what may happen. Circuits can short, candles can burn, etc, etc.

You can see that we moved all of Jamie’s pig stuff to the shelf at the top of the stairs. She loves pigs so naturally we are up to our necks in pig stuff. Then there is my DVD collection, somewhere around 350, that shelf is only about 1/3 of them.

Look how nicely everything fit outside the room. There is plenty of walking space, every dresser drawer can open all the way without hitting anything now, and remember, all this was crammed inside the room!

I bought 2 foot long brackets that came with a hook on the end of them. From there I just cut a pole to size and screwed it to the bracket to keep it from sliding. Now I have a very sturdy clothing rack that not only looks nice, but won’t fall over on me every week. Its even longer than that cheap piece of crap too. It doesn’t block the outcoves at all. That small dresser is the one that is leaving shortly, just have to wait to get to a store to get the new one that will be in the room.

Look at all the space gained inside the room. That TV stand was used to hold the photo printer outside the room. It is temporary until my 50″ plasma gets fixed and I buy a nice new TV stand. This old one does the job for now. We can now access the laundry very easily. No more scraping it along the side of the dresser to get it out. The dresser we had there was so old and horrible. I was able to bust the thing up outside with no tools or effort. The top broke off while I was carrying it downstairs. We’re both glad to see it go. I have more space by my desk now that the DVD shelf and little glass stand are gone. Have more room to put useless crap, but hey, it’s room that I didn’t have before.

Now to you guys it may not seem like a lot more room was gained,  but if you were here you would be shocked like we were when we stepped back. Don’t mind Jamie, she’s just studying for a biology test. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. We work the same but at the end of the day I sit back and relax while she studies all night long about bones, muscles, systems, blah, blah, blah. Glad I learn a lot on the job so school is very easy. It’s much better to get paid to learn things.

So once again I sit back and relax and enjoy some Molson Tripple X.