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I busted out the mower for the first time today to cut back the weeds that are currently infesting the yard.  Once I cut everything back, I ran a metal rake over the entire front yard to pick up lotsa the creepy crawly weeds and do a poor man's dethatch.  I got my first blisters of the season, and it felt good to get out in the front yard and sweat a bit in the sun.  The front windows are open and the house is slowly warming up without the assistance of fossil fuels.  It's good to see spring getting underway in the sunny South; after this cold winter, I'm ready for a little warmth!

Thirty-two minutes may not seem like a whole lot of time, but around a month ago when my new elliptical was delivered and I first jumped on, the default program was a 32 minute bellcurve that I thought I'd never hit.  Over the past few weeks I'd been bumping up the time by 2 or 4 minutes a week, and yesterday ran it for 22 minutes.  This morning I woke up decided to go for broke and give all 32 minutes a run for their money.  ~2 miles and 622 calories later, and I had made it through all 32 minutes and felt great.  Mission accomplished!

As promised, I took a few photos of the new furniture, and complete with some modeling help from Burton, Bella and Harley.

You can start looking at them with this photo.

The only remaining tasks are to fill the corner on the left side of the fireplace, place some light, hang the few pictures still leaning against the wall and hide the cords running to the television.  That should be easy enough to knock out over the next 3 or 4 months...

The sofa, chair and console table that I ordered for my bedroom's sitting area arrived today.  It was a special order due to the non-stock colors I chose, so it took about 10 weeks from order to door, but the pieces ended up looking pretty good.  My master bedroom is almost finished now.  I just have to find a little bit of additional lighting, hang a few photos and do something with the wall behind my bed.

I'll post photos of the furniture over the weekend.

Full load of towels came out completely dry after 55 minutes.  Thanks goodness!

April seems to have ended up being the "Month to Get Things Done", which I completely blame on the nice weather and daylight savings time.  Anyhow, Friday, I stopped by Best Buy and used my 12% coupon plus about $25 in rewards points that I accumulated, and bought a new washer and dryer.  My old washer and dryer were Kenmore models, that were actually manufactured sometime in the mid 1980's.  I figured that after 20 years of dependeble service, it was time to send them to the great appliance warehouse in the sky.  Taking 90 minutes to dry 4 pairs of jeans seemed a bit excessive to me, and I'm sure contributed to my oh-so-high electric bill.  Best Buy was awesome, letting me use my 12% off something already on ad, and then scheduling me for a delivery two days later.

So this morning I prepped for the arrival of the machines, since I figured the delivery guys had better things to do than try and wrestle my old machines out from their cave.  The dryer was extracted easily enough, but the washing machine was another story.  The cold water tubing was molecularly fused to the valve, so I had to make a stop by Home Depot to pick up a pipe wrench to turn the stupid thing off.  Once it finally popped free, it spit out a nice rust colored water, which made me wonder exactly what I've been doing to my clothes over the past couple years.  The floor beneath the machines was slightly dirty, but that cleaned up pretty quick.

The delivery guys from Best Buy were running early (which is always a good thing), and they made quick work of swapping out the machines.  So now I'm sitting here writing this article while a test run of the washing machine is whirling away, and the thing is so quiet I can barely hear it.  One point that I will make is that I bought a front-loading machine to be a little more energy efficient, but the tradeoff seems to be longer loads.  The time for a maximum load looks like ~90 minutes, which for me seems to be reasonable, given that I do laundry about once every other week.  For a bigger family that does laundry constantly, this may be something to watch out for.

For pictures of the old and new machines, take a peek here.

Ever since I finished the desk and put it in the front room, I knew I wanted to get some bookshelves to serve as a backing for the desk and have a nice looking office area.  Last month, I was back in Roswell, so I stopped by Jackson's Unfinished Furniture and went looking to get some bookshelves to complement my desk.  One of the great aspects of Jackson's is that almost all of the furniture there is made to order, so you can completely customize your purchase and get exactly what you want.  I was able to get bookshelves made by the same manufacturer as my desk, which let me match the wood, as well as all of the trim.  I ordered 3 bookshelves in total--two 7.5' x 3', and one 2.5' x 4'.  The look I was shooting for as a U shape, with the tool tall shelves framing an open space that will (eventually) have a picture in it.

Earlier in the week, I got the call that the units had arrived from the manufacturer, so this morning I rented a van and headed over to Roswell to pick up the stuff.  My first reaction to seeing the 7 footers was "man, that's really tall...", but they fit into the van with room to spare.  My neighbor was nice enough to help me unload the behemoths, but once they're upright without any shelves, they're pretty to move around.  Placed into the room, I'm pretty happy with how everything looks.  The 7.5' tall shelves match the 9' ceilings pretty well, leaving some decent space at the top, but not appearing too small.  The smaller shelf unit is about the right width to give everything good proportion as well.  Next up I just need to stain everything.

Also, judging by his taking a brief nap in the bottom of one of the bookshelves, I'm guessing that Burton is okay with the new stuff too...

Holy cow, what's all that white stuff everywhere?!  It's just a result of a bunch of moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico bumping into cold air coming down from the arctic.  See all the photos of a snowy day in Marietta here.

Around a month ago, I used some coupons and watched for a sale at Best Buy, and got a great deal on a Sony KDL-40S3000 LCD TV.  One of the points that I noticed when shopping for TVs is how outrageously priced wall mounts are, and I vowed to not fork over $200+ for a mount.  So early this week, I finally decided to go shopping for a wall mount, and stumbled across all of the mounts manufactured by Peerless, and picked up a unviersal mount from Buy.com.  It's nice to see the price savings and realize that all the big box stores are ripping you off.

So the hardware showed up in the mail today, and I went about the task of putting the TV onto the wall.  I was pretty impressed at how simple the mounting kit was.  It basically consisted of a metal plate that attached to the wall, and 2 hooks that you affixed to the back of the TV, and then hung on the metal plate.  Installation was nothing more than finding studs on the wall, sinking some screws into the studs to hold up the plate, and then hanging the TV on the plate.  I also made sure to buy an adjustable angle kit, so I could tilt the TV downwards for when I put some furniture in that portion of the room.  It was a pretty easy project, that didn't take too much time.  The only thing left to do is to get cabling that's the right length for me to easily run it along the edge of the fireplace and baseboard to it's hidden from view.

You can view the photos I took of the process in this album here, starting at the bottom of the page.

As per usual every fall/early winter, I got my annual letter from the homeowner's association. This time, the complaint was the my front porch and steps needed to be cleaned and painted. Yeah, they were right, and yeah I had been thinking about doing something for a little over a year, but I always hate the impersonal "Dear Homeowner" letters...

So last weekend, I went to Home Depot and bought myself a little rotary sander to prep the surface. I sanded away, in some places to strip the paint all the way from the wood, and in other places, just to chew off the layer of mildew that accumulated. Needless to say, the sanding was the easier part, especially when compared to having to paint all sorts of spindles. The first coat went on last weekend, just enough to keep the HOA off of my back, and then yesterday I went back and put on the second coat and painted all the spindles and hard to reach places.

After it was all painted, I then took the opportunity to hand the house numbers I had bought earlier this year. So, all-in-all, it was a nice little weekend project and the house does look a little bit better in front.

You can view a bunch of photos I took of the whole process here.