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Jess and I just caught up with the Tour de France on our DVR. After around 1200 miles of racing, the first three places are separated by 8 seconds, and the top 6 are separated by less than a minute. The top ten are separated by less than 5 minutes.

It's anyone's race, and the worst hills are in the next two days. Holy shit, what a great tour.

After extensive side-by-side testing, I have decided that I prefer the milk chocolate variety of Goldenberg's Peanut Chews to the dark chocolate variety.




That is all.

The post-landscaped front yard looked a little thin in places, and likely will until some of our shrubs grow to fill in a bit. So for now, we've added some of our own shrubs, as well as some annuals.



I definitely like the added color.

Finally got the landscaping done. The plants look small now, but they'll grown and fill in over time. The house already looks better, but will look even better once the plants fill in. We still need a new post lamp and an address sign for the front. Those are coming.

Before







During





After







So, that's done, and now the house has some curb appeal. We're getting some more done next summer, but this is it for now. The contractors did really good work, were very professional, and got everything done in a day. I'd definitely recommend them.

We even have some room to plant annuals. The place is shaping up!!

Jessica and I are having lots of stuff done to the house this summer, but we're also having a lot of guests. Since we didn't want the house to be under construction all year (like it pretty much was last year), especially while guests are here, we took out a line of credit so that we could get all the stuff done up front. What we never counted on was the house being under construction all year anyway, because the effing contractors won't show up when they say they will.

We hired one guy back in April to remodel both bathrooms. He finally showed up on Thursday, gutted the hallway bathroom (the one that the guests will need to use), installed a tub (the wrong one) and hasn't been back since.

We need a door (a flippin door!) installed in the basement, to separate the storage area from the media room, and that guy has now stood us up two weekends in a row (with no calls).

This is the same guy who redid the media room, which was a weeks worth of work, that he took 2 months to do because he missed so many weekends. The door is all that's left.

One part of the basement remodel was installing two heating vents off of the main supply duct. Ever since this was done, I've noticed it significantly warmer in the rest of the house, and the AC seems to be working more. Last weekend I decided to raise the light bulbs in the fixtures to cut down on glare, and notice a ton of air gushing out from around the lights. I pulled one of the vents off to find that he never connected the vent to the duct. He just cut a huge, gaping hole in the supply duct (one for each vent) and the vent just sits 2" below it. So I basically have two 6x10 holes in the main supply duct that just blow cold air into the basement ceiling where it does... NOTHING. I'm fixing that today with some sheet metal and some duct tape.

So yeah, I think this guy is fired, and if the bathroom guys don't get on the move soon, I think they're fired too.