Home Work: Worker bees make progress

Grandmama and Grandpa J worked like bees during their visit last week.  They zipped through my to-do list. The biggest project was replacing all the door knobs.

When we moved in there were a variety of handle types. Here are couple examples of before pics from the listing and A's phone:

Every one of the 6 keyed exterior doors required a different key.  The previous owners had spray painted dark bronze over the original gold color on most of interior door knobs.  It's a cool idea (spray painting hardware) - saves a lot of money, looks nice for  selling the house, but terrible for long term items that get a lot of use. After 2 months in the house, the spray paint had rubbed away and the gold was showing under the spray paint on almost every knob.

 We ordered new knobs for all exterior and interior doors. Now all the exterior doors can be opened with the same key. And all the interior knobs are the same. The unified look of all the interior knobs is gorgeous. I absolutely love it. Hardware is a small thing that makes a huge difference to the feel of the space.

Kudos to Grandpa J for the hard work (2 full days!) of removing all the old hardware, fixing weird things that had been done previously, including realigning the hinges on the door to the master bedroom so that it actually closes, and installing all those new knobs.

 Side note: Hubby put up these bamboo shades in the master bathroom and guest room just before Grandmama and Grandpa J arrived.

 Grandpa J also fixed the dimmer switch in the dining room- used to look like this one in the den:

Now it actually dims - and it looks nicer:

Grandmama and Grandpa J also replaced all the old incandescent (aka energy hog) light bulbs throughout the house with nice LED bulbs.  We also took the square shades off the dining room chandelier, bringing it much closer to my style. 

 Here it was in the listing picture

Here is the after. Sorry about the horrid photo quality. Apparently even A's smartphone has a better camera in it than my 5 year old digital camera! I cannot believe how fast things get out of date.

Grandpa J also took apart our central vacuum to try to see whether he could improve the suction. He cleaned out the very dirty filters and collection bucket and taught us about keeping all the wall vents closed.  Works much better now.

 We took advantage of Grandpa J's military discount to buy Hubby a serious new chainsaw.

 

They got to work on the 3 pine trees after that. Now they look like this:

 We are probably going to buy a wood chipper for the brush since the cost of renting one for the amount of time that this project is going to take would be about the same. And we will probably need one for all the falling branches/tree cutting in the future.

Not to be outdone, Grandmama used her new AccuQuilt machine to cut all my scrap fabrics and fat quarters into enough squares and triangles to make 2 Ohio Star quilts - one for each of the girls' beds! One will be dark blue background and light colored stars and the other will be light background with medium and dark fabric stars.

What a great week! I am so grateful to have such hardworking helpful family members.