Home Improvements

When we bought our FW house in November there were several projects that we wanted to do. Our house was built in 1938 and has a lot of original features. It's been updated and we don't have a lot to do inside, but it's the outside that needs some help. The power lines from the utility pole to our house were smoking when we moved in and one had electrical tape wrapped around it! Not safe! Turns out they were the original lines to the house when it first had power. It's strange that Oncor wasn't called by the previous owners, because they had just replaced the entire fuse box. We called Oncor & they replaced the lines to to the pole and raised them up. There were two phone lines coming to our house, so we had AT&T remove one of them. There was also a cable line coming to our house, that we weren't using, so we took it down. One neighbor had a phone line & cable line running through our backyard that I could reach up & touch. They weren't using the cable line, so they cut it and had the phone line moved. Our other neighbor had phone & cable lines resting on the roof of our garage. AT&T was great! They came out right away, gave our neighbors a new line, moved it to their property and raised it up. Charter on the otherhand, was horrible! It took 4 calls to even get them to show up. The third time I talk to the manager and he didn't even try to make a new appointment or apologize. All he said was if I was unhappy to call the BBB. I was shocked that the manager would rather have a customer call the BBB and complain rather than fix the problem. I waited a couple weeks and called again. This time, they were very helpful and a tech came out the next day. The tech was very rude and eventually moved the cable line to their property. This was more of a headache and time consuming than costly. Now, we have very few cables running through our backyard. It's looking better.

Our first big project was to have a driveway poured and get the garage set up so we could use it. We had a partial driveway up to the front porch but once it stopped, there were deep tire tracks/gravel leading up to the garage and our small cars would have bottomed out. A family friend, Ben, owns a concrete company (mostly does commercial - this was a big favor) so that's who we decided to use. Since he was doing the driveway we decided to go ahead and fix the grading/drainage issues we were having in the backyard by changing our sidewalk. The water would pool up to our ankles on the old one, which was close to the house and potentially cause foundation issues. I had no idea there were so many choices when pouring concrete! The finish, the shape/curve, the height, position of the sidewalk and more (but now I've forgotten :) ). Once we changed the sidewalk, we had to change the position of the gate. At this point, Ryan & I were so done making decisions...it is just concrete after all! Ben did a great job with the grading/drainage of the sidewalk and now water doesn't pool at all. We had to have our air conditioner condenser moved and raised since we will add dirt and grass where the old sidewalk was. We also had a strip of concrete added where we keep the trash cans.
Once the concrete work was completed, we started on our garage door. James came as a referral from one of my clients and did a great job. The old garage doors were similiar to sliding barn doors and were rotted so bad that a cinder block was held in front of them to keep them in place. There was a load bearing beam that was off center which would not allow both cars in the garage. Our garage guy added a header, removed the beam, replaced all the rotten boards to reframe the new door and installed the new garage door & opener. When we went to test the garage door opener, it didn't work! Turns out, there is not enough electricity running to our garage. I'm starting to gain a better understanding of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie!
Our next project will be to add more electricity to the garage and add dirt/grass to finish the backyard.

Before:

After:

We also restored the hardware to the doors. This is before, during & after.