How we spent our summer vacation

Lately all the home improvement businesses have spent vast sums of advertising dollars telling us that instead of traveling we should invest in our homes. Well, this summer we bought it. "It" being anything sold at Lowe's or Home Depot. Our friend Steve, who can build or fix practically everything and was between jobs, spent much of the spring and summer working on various projects for us. For a few blissful months I felt like the queen of a castle, laying out the daily tasks for the servants. Sadly, a budgetary coup has overthrown me and the projects have ground to a halt or are being imperfectly and slowly done by yours truly. But here's a sampling of what we accomplished.

Our first goal was to finish half the basement, especially Tyler's office since he works exclusively from home. After three years of living here we decided he'd earned heat, real walls, and more light than the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. We're not done yet, but there's wires in them thar walls! We also are finishing another bedroom and we started the rough plumbing and electrical work for a bathroom. Under the drywall we added a layer of soundboard in an attempt to muffle the pitter-patter of little feet.

For Mother's Day I decided to see if Steve could add another layer of beams to an arbor we already had in the backyard. The existing beams were too far apart and the vines flopped through instead of spreading out on top, and there wasn't any shade or sense of enclosure. Voila! Next year this will be the perfect place for the hammock I'm searching for.

I shouldn't admit it but this was probably my favorite project. I thought it was one of Tyler's whims, but he was right. Turning half of the basement into livable rooms meant that all the junk stored down there needed to find a new home. Tyler asked Steve to whip up a wall o' shelves in the garage. While we were on vacation he worked his magic and we arrived home to a beautiful bank of hanging shelves. I am an organization nerd, I admit. I often go out to the garage just to gaze at the neatly labeled boxes in their rows. It's not exactly Pottery Barn, but it does make me ridiculously happy.

Actually this was my favorite project. In the end of July our swamp cooler died. We had figured we'd bite the bullet and replace it with air conditioning in a year or two, but that schedule suddenly accelerated once I'd spent a day in a house that was pushing 90 degrees. Thankfully the AC guy rushed our job through, even working on Pioneer Day (an actual holiday here). Here's a shot of him up on the roof, dismantling the swamp cooler and sending it to its ignominious death. Something about having AC has made me feel very grown up. This is the first house I've ever lived in with air conditioning. Of course, once the first electric bill comes, I'll feel that other grown-up feeling: broke.

OK, this is definitely my favorite project. Here is the "before" shot. When we bought the house, we inherited a beautiful yard and a lousy sprinkler system. The whole neighborhood knows when we go on vacation because the lawn dies. After two vacations and two death-and-resurrection cycles this summer we'd had it. Thanks to my brother-in-law Dave, an irrigation guru who lives too far away to do forced family service projects, we tapped his friend, another wizard of water, to revamp our system. Actually, we begged, pleaded, sent photos of our dead grass. As of 8pm tonight, we have an almost entirely new system. The sprinklers are beautiful in motion. I could seriously watch them all day. They are fountains, arcing through space, cascading, dripping, dropping, welling up, raining down... I am truly inspired.

So there you have it: how we spent our summer vacation--every penny of it. I wish we'd bought stock in Lowe's and Home Depot--it would have funded an actual vacation next year!