Day 15: Drab colors galore

I took care of two ugly problems that have been bugging me for a while today. Sometimes even drab colors, when fresh, can make a world of difference.

41. ✅ Re-caulk the bathroom sink.

When you own your home, you notice things. Specifically you notice when the previous owners were into DIY. But more than that, you notice when the previous owners either took shortcuts or didn't know what they were doing. At some point in history a previous occupant of my house installed a sink. When they did so they used plumber's putty to mount the sink on the vanity, which is perfectly fine. However, they used way too much, and they never sealed around the edge of the sink with appropriate bathroom caulk. So over time as that putty got wet over and over again, it began to ooze out. It looked disgusting, and I knew it wasn't doing the counter top any favors. Ugh, plumbing. Well, first things first, I gave the counter top and sink basin a good cleaning. Using some Q-tips I made sure to clean out any gooey residue or water from in between the sink and the counter top. Once I was sure it was clean, I hit it with a hair dryer just to make sure it was also dry--moisture trapped in enclosed spaces is a ticking time bomb. Then using sanded bathroom caulk that I had on hand from a bathroom tile repair last fall, I filled the gap as best as I could. I was a little rusty so the bead was less than perfect, but I was able to clean it up and make it presentable.

55. ✅ Patch the chipped corner in the kitchen.

Children are animals who tend to break things. My children are no exception. It's easy to tell which areas of my home are the most trafficked, because the walls are littered with chips, scrapes, smudges, chocolate milk splatters, crayon art, and other imperfections. There's a corner between the kitchen and living room that is the worst of them all. It's been hit so many times that a good deal of drywall mud had been chipped away, some by accident, some by a 3yo who likes to pick at small blemishes to make them huge blemishes. These are pretty easy to fix--it just requires a lot of waiting for things to dry.

In case you're wondering about the colors of the caulk and paint I used for these two projects, they are called Oyster Grey and Gobi Desert respectively. And they are every bit as exciting as they sound.

Day 91: Cleanliness

73. ✅ Clear out the flower bed in the front yard Two words: scorched earth. Garden hoe: loosen the dirt. (Broke that hoe.) Shovel: remove the dirt. Sieve: Filter out all the crap in the dirt. What was left was a smooth patch of barren soil. I'm sure there are undesirables lurking beneath the surface, so I'll let it lie for a few days before I do anything else with it. 51. ✅ Deal with the shred pile This took days. I've been accumulating junk mail, old bills, and literally anything with my name, a family member's name, or our address on it for several months resulting in a two-foot tall stack of papers. It couldn't be done all at once, because (A) the shredder kept overheating, and (B) I kept running out of places to store the shreds. (They take up considerably more room than the unshredded sheets of paper.) 75 ✅ Clean off the workbench Getting rid of the shred pile was the main roadblock in completing this task, but it's done. And now there's a bike up ...

Lazy Productivity

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