Happy Day!!

Today was a glorious day at the Bailey's! I came home to find not one, but two projects started. And they weren't just any projects, they were the installation of the ductwork for our AC and the installation of the sprinklers in the yard. I'm not going to lie, it feels like Christmas :)










The contractor cut the holes in the floor to run ductwork to the first floor.










Sprinklers...now I just need grass.

Drilling

I know what you’re thinking, “Dan has convinced Wendy that they can make money by drilling for oil”. Although that's plausible, we haven't gone that crazy yet. We're actually installing a geothermal heat pump. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, a geothermal heat pump generates heat from the ground in the winter and uses the ground to remove the heat in the summer. In order for it to work, we drilled three 400 ft deep holes in our front yard which we will run glycol through. The lines in the ground connect to the house through our basement wall. Eventually we'll hook them directly to the geothermal heat pump in the basement, but we're still in process of making that happen.

The drilling rig arrived on Friday and then sat in our front yard all weekend before finishing up on Monday.  This obviously had the whole neighborhood asking questions and several random people actually pulled into our driveway to get a closer look.  The drilling process was also really noisy and there were several times when we'd look outside into the yard and there was so much dust that you couldn't see anything.  After the truck left we had a muddy torn up yard and a pile of leftover cementitious material/dust that took us a month to haul off.  I'm pretty sure if our neighbors didn't already dislike us, they do now. 

There are a couple of reasons we chose to install a geothermal heat pump:

1.  Our house currently only has air conditioning on the second floor, so adding an additional unit and ductwork was inevitable.

2.  The savings are pretty nice. If you include the tax incentives associated with installation of the geothermal heat pump we expect to recoup our costs in less than 10 years.  Since this is our "forever" house it will make sense in the long run.  The costs have also been offset by my thrifty husband finding the unit on sale at Cargo Largo.

Now that the lines have been installed, we need to have ductwork ran through the house and the unit hooked up. This will be taking place in the next month, hopefully before the heat sets in!

Tree Trimming

Yes, I know I’m really behind on updating this blog, but in my defense I haven’t had any spare time in the last couple of months because I’ve been studying like crazy for the Structural Engineering Licensing Test which is April 13^th & April 14^th. (Yay, Friday the 13^th!) In the few extra minutes of free time we’ve managed to work in several projects which I’ll share intermittently over the next few weeks.

The first project that we completed in early March was having all of our trees trimmed. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the yard hasn’t been touched in several years and by this point the trees really needed a little help. 

This type of work is something we have no desire to try on our own so we called in the experts.  I am still amazed by what professional tree trimmers are able to do.  This guy climbed up in one of trees about 50 feet in the air and trimmed limbs with a chainsaw.

We also took this opportunity to completely remove the tree in the front yard which fell over last summer here.

 To save money we agreed to haul all of the limbs to the road so that they could be picked up by the city. It took two days of hauling, bundling and cleaning, but we got it all taken care of by the end of the weekend and ready for the city to pick up.

Unfortunately for us though, we found out that our subdivision had not yet renewed our contract with the lawn removal service this year and there was no one to pick up the bundles.  Which meant we then had to haul all of the limbs to a city dumpster nearby.  This took us about 10 loads and two long evenings.  Lucky for us we won't have to do this for another 15 years. :)

Fallen Tree

Last weekend we had two major storms which took down a large number of trees and limbs throughout the area.  We escaped damage from the Thursday night storm, but weren't so lucky on Friday.  On Saturday morning when we arrived at the new house we found this in our front yard. 

It didn't hit the house, but it damaged the sidewalk and left us a mess to clean up.  The thickest part of the limb was about 24" in diameter and several of the limbs were embedded into the ground about 12".

 

With the help of Steve Kerr and his chainsaw we were able to cut it up and get the limbs to the road for city pickup.  Another great perk about living in Fairway is that the city picks up the limbs for free after big storms, something that hardly ever happens in the city of Kansas City. 

As for the rest of the tree, it will have to come down at some point since it is located right in the middle of our future circle driveway, but for now we will just leave it.