It’s nothing personal, but I’d rather not look like a drug dealer

It’s been a while sine Joey and I have taken on home-related projects, mostly because we want to hang with Adeline when we’re home, not play with power tools. Because we like our baby more than power tools, and I feel good about that.

That being said, the exterior of our home resembles a crack den, and we feel the need to attend to that problem. So we’re very slowly fixing it up, starting with our porch. Here’s what it looked like after we ripped out the dead shrubs.

Take a close look at the steps, which we rebuilt about 5 years ago. There’s rust forming around every single screw we drilled in to them because we did not know that you can’t use regular screws in pressure-treated lumber. The chemicals in the wood make the screws rust.

Here’s a photo from a few years ago, when the screws were already rusting and we were installing the hand rails on the porch steps, a job that required me to contort my body to fit under the steps.

Anywho, we ripped out the rusty parts of the steps and the lattice work around the porch, which was starting to rot.

Look at all the crap under the porch.

We found an old boot, a rotting sled and I stopped looking when I discovered the skull of some kind of animal, because you know that means there’s probably a skull from a human under there too. Plus, I saw a spider.

Here’s the new lattice Joey is building and installing around the porch. It’s a huge improvement. Someday Next spring, I’ll employ my horticulture degree that I haven’t used in almost a decade and plant some shrubs and flowers around the porch.

Hopefully, that will put an end to the people ringing our doorbell looking for their next hit. Kidding. That doesn’t happen. They just ring our doorbell to leave burning dog doo-doo on our porch.

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