Construction Everywhere, Almost!

Road repair on the 30-year-old streets in our neighborhood is in full swing. It looked like a military construction battalion had descended on Jalisco Terrace one week ago Monday as huge rigs with big scoops and lots of beeping, blocked off sections of the street while workers in hardhats took over our once quiet neighborhood. They wasted no time in breaking through the asphalt to access water main connections 12 feet beneath the surface to replace them as part of the preventative maintenance aspect of their work. Each home will be assessed at around $3000 for the work which seems like a fair amount to me.

We received a notice on our front door this afternoon advising us that they'll be replacing the curb at the threshold of our driveway on Monday and that we won't be able to pull our cars in or out across it for 6 days afterward while the cement cures. It actually seems a fitting time considering the inside of our home has been torn up for the past 6 weeks—why not the outside as well?

Our main floor remodel has progressed quite a lot since I last spoke of it here. The drywall work is done as is the refinishing of our floors and the replacing of trim and doors. And the cabinets are mostly in! It's a lot to keep up with and gives me a new appreciation for the job of a general contractor. Keith, Karen, Jeff, Steve, and Joe have all been extremely helpful in making sure that details both large and small are addressed. I messed up in not seeing to it that obsolete wall receptacles were eliminated during the drywall phase. I wish I could go back and revisit that portion of the project but it's a little late. They're mostly hidden by furniture anyway. Perhaps we'll take it on in another year. Or not.

We're so happy with the cabinets that Keith and his crew have assembled for us. The new layout gives our home such an entirely new look and feel. I'll add several photos to the end of this blog entry to show the progress.

I put an Asian Beetle trap out in our backyard on a shepherd's hook a few nights ago to try and get a handle on the destructive little munchers and minimize the damage they're doing to our River Birch trees in back. The traps seem to work really well. I gave an extra trap to Karen and Bob next door as they've had much more of a problem with them than we have. That probably speaks to the wider variety of vegetation they have. The beetles were swarming me as I placed the trap which emits a pheromone of sorts and attracts the beetles. (See the video below.)

Our friend Job has season tickets to the Minnesota United FC soccer games and gave us two tickets he couldn't use. Neither Tammy nor I had ever been to a soccer game so we thought it'd be fun to check it out. And it was! We were total newbies though, not even knowing which team on the field was the home team but that didn't take long to figure out. The game ended in a 0 - 0 tie but we still enjoyed ourselves—plus, Tammy had just returned home with the pups from a month in Babbitt living with Cindy while construction continued at home so it was a nice date night for us.

Tomorrow promises to be another busy day around here with Jeff arriving early to continue doing prep work before painting the baseboards, trim, and doors. We've decided to book a room at an Airbnb near Lake Nokomis in South Minneapolis for 2 to 3 days to allow for our home to air out from Jeff's work. We look forward to doing lots of walks around the lake with the pups in addition to trying out some different restaurants. It will be nice to have a finished space to call home and a place to sit that's not also my bed for a change.

Some recent photos and a video from my world...
















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