Angel Park

We took advantage of the Thanksgiving break by going to play for a couple hours at the Angel Park.

The kids had fun on the playground equipment.

Miles was determined to climb everything.

And give his cheesy smile while doing it.

We had a picnic lunch, then went to the fields to throw mini footballs around.

After that it was one more round of playground. Olivia was the field general, as always.

It was nice to not have a little one to worry about. Everyone ran off and played on their own and had a great time. They didn't want to leave.

Renaissance Festival

We made it back to the Renaissance Festival on Saturday. It hasn't changed much since last time, but it's always fun. As always, it's fun to people watch. I found this centaur looking at a cell phone to be amusing.

We caught some of our favorite shows, like the bird show.

And of course we couldn't miss Fire Whip. Carmen got to go up on stage this time.

I got my Polish food for lunch (the girls got a turkey leg), then we went to ride an elephant.

We stopped by the gardens on the way back from there and took some pictures.

The kids have grown up a little since some of our previous visits!

Most of the rest of the day was spent jousting and looking in shops.

The kids tried their hand at jousting.

Then we saw two shows of the real thing.

The theme of the weekend was "Heroes and Villains", so they modified the knights from their usual personas. We normally always sit in the section of England's Sir Thomas, but today he was Sir Clark, Duke of Kent, AKA Superknight. He had to do battle against the Terminator, Dr. Doom, and Mephisto, who used Kryptonite to subdue him.

Luckily, Thor and Wonder Woman showed up to help.

And in the end, the villains were defeated.

It was a happy ending to a happy day.

Home Improvement Part 4 - Epilogue

We've still got a few things on our list left to finish, but the big pieces are done, and it feels like we have a new house.

Here's a time lapse video I made of the patio construction.

And another one of the wood floor installation.

And some before and after pictures.

Home Improvement Part 3 - Wood floors

Another improvement Amber has wanted to make for years is replacing the downstairs carpet with wood floors. Again, now was the perfect opportunity to do it. We had to cover the new part of the dining room with something, but of course, we could not match our tile. We found something very close (and even bought it), but decided to put wood floor throughout the new dining room instead.

This meant the existing tile had to go, so we chiseled it out together as a family.

Amber spent several thousand hours agonizing over which of the 1.2 million different flooring options to pick, eliminating "wood tile" and laminates along the way, and settled on hand-scraped acacia.

Once that decision was made, it was time to rip out the carpet and level the floor.

The installation took two days, one for the floor and one for the trim and stairs. We're very happy with the result.

Home Improvement Part 2 - Dining Room Extension

While designing our patio, we weren't sure what to do with the former "patio", the concrete pad just outside the back door, covered by the original roof. We had considered making it all just one big patio, until we remembered something I'd thought of as a hypothetical years ago.

We have always used our formal dining room as the piano room, even more so now that we have the baby grand, and we've used the "breakfast nook" by the back door as our dining room, which is just barely big enough to fit our 6-person table.

I'd always thought it would be cool to extend out the wall there to make the room bigger, and this was the perfect time. To start with, they built out a new wall around the old concrete pad.

We moved the old back window to the side, and opted for a sliding door in the new back wall for space reasons. The kids were happy to help pick one out.

We borrowed a truck to take it home, only to realize it's way too big to fit in a pickup. Thankfully, a very nice couple hauling siding in a trailer offered to drive it to our house. Not sure how we would have gotten it home otherwise.

The ordeal came when it was time to get brick for the new outer wall. We had some leftover brick from the original construction, which we had let the builders use for the base of the patio roof pillars, being assured that they could get more later. As it turns out, our brick is no longer made, so we went back and forth on whether to use contrasting brick, or stone, or something else.

In the meantime, we started ripping out hedges to open up our yard a little. Amber and I did this ourselves, and it was hard labor in the Houston summer.

We dug up roots, and concrete, and so many rocks while clearing and leveling the ground.

After what seemed like weeks of searching brickyards and looking at the stone on neighborhood houses, we decided to just go with the closest matching brick we could find. This is what our backyard looked like most of the summer.

Once they had sealed the new outer wall, they ripped out the inside wall, so we had this (and a lot of dust) on the inside while they installed new walls and ceilings.

It was exciting to see our plans becoming reality.

We got some gutters installed (not pictured), the mess eventually cleared away, and we had a slightly bigger house with a beautiful patio.

And we were enjoying it.

Home Improvement Part 1 - Patio

We've had home improvements going on since May, but they've always been in some state of incompletion. Now it's finally done enough that I feel like I can blog about it.

For years we'd talked about putting a covered patio in the backyard to replace the original deck that we rarely used, and this year we finally did it. For reference, here's the original deck.

We hadn't taken care of it, so the water seal was long gone and the boards were dirty and warping.

It took a couple days to remove the deck; it was the most secure foot-high deck ever (we were digging out concrete foundations for weeks afterwards). After that, they started framing the patio roof.

Once they had a roof to work under, they poured, stamped, and stained the concrete.

Once they had a floor to stand on, they finished up the ceiling.

And there was much rejoicing.