It is Saturday. The 4 year-old graduated PreK this morning. That wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. They wore little caps and gowns. Each child received a special award highlighting a particular talent they’ve shown this year and, of course, a diploma.  I did not cry. I did not cry, much. Considering the focus of the home search was to find a house in the appropriate school district before the kid hit kindergarten, it looks like we are squeaking in just under the wire.

Thursday and Friday were light days in home errands and progress. Not blog-worthy. Thursday was a quick lunchtime run to Home Depot to locate a replacement mailbox. I’ve never purchased a mailbox before, there are a shocking amount of bad choices to be made in that aisle. I wanted a simple black mailbox and a nice clean font for the numbers. I found one of those things.

Friday’s lunch run was to drop some tools, the mailbox, and its new post off at the house for our weekend project.  Patching was wrapping up and prep was underway for ceilings and walls to be primed. The wall that was removed was paneled on one side, they finished it off by replacing the paneling on the remaining wall posts and it looks great.

Here it is from the other side.

The fireplace you see taped up in the background is a little project I started before the real work began. The brick on the fireplace will be painted when the house interior is painted. We will need a chimney sweep out at some point over the summer to deal with this thing and we might find out that we need to replace the glass door insert. Until that happens, I need it not to look like this…

So I invested in a can of high-heat black matte spray paint, meant for outdoor grills.

   

You’ll notice in the last photo there’s some test painting on the brick. The color on the right won, it is Sherwin Williams Dorian Gray.

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Today, the house is being taped off for the priming and painting. Anything not being painted is sealed off with miles of blue painter’s tape and lightweight plastic drop cloths. This is the sign that the sprayers are about to be unleashed and it is exciting stuff.

Don’t worry, those cabinets will get attention soon enough.

Outside of the house, we made a little progress of our own with the new mailbox. The mailbox at the house was definitely showing its age and was customized, which meant it was already on the list to be replaced. The boy took it out with his natural bulldozer-like talents when we stopped by Wednesday night, so this became an immediate priority for the weekend.

Replacing a mailbox with near 90 degree temps and an active 4 year-old running laps in the yard is an adventure. It’s also surprisingly time consuming.

   

I did capture this, the only time he was not moving during this process.

 

Success.

 

These are the numbers I was hoping to find but did not have any luck in the hardware store. Once again, Google provides. I eventually found them on Amazon and they should arrive at some point next week.

 

 

The other project for the day was drilling drain holes into the retaining wall near the garage. With the boy’s help, of course.

Tomorrow will be the obligatory haul through IKEA. We need replacement hardware for the bunkbed that will be assembled in the boy’s room, and there’s alway something else to be found at IKEA.