I was thinking about last summer as compared to this summer and am so glad we are finished with selling and moving out of our last house, and choosing and purchasing this house. Last summer was so busy with keeping the house constantly clean for showings, and grabbing the dog and leaving when someone wanted to see it (often on short notice). It was also busy with decluttering the house and moving items to the storage unit and getting ready to move.

This summer is also busy, but its a FUN busy - spending time with family and friends - which is a much better way to spend the summer. We are both glad we made the move, but don't plan to do it again any time soon.

Our latest house project is almost finished. We had the back patio pre-wired for speakers when it was built, and we finally chose some outdoor speakers and installed them in the ceiling of the patio. We worked on it early Sunday morning to avoid the heat of the day (even in the morning its already hot). We make a great team because each of us can do some of the tasks the other can't. I am hopeless with electric screwdrivers, and so I get the screw started with a regular screwdriver and then Kevin uses the electric one, he's also a whiz with a drill! I can strip the wires for the speakers, which is something he's not as good at.....none of the tasks are easy at the top of a ladder, but we got them done. We were able to get each of the speakers installed and they look great, one is a little crooked (my fault), but other than that they look really good. Unfortunately, we couldn't get any sound to come out of them. The wires at the receiver don't look quite like the wires that we hooked into the speakers (each speaker has a red and black wire, the wire at the receiver has 4 wires (we'd expected 2 sets of red and black wires)), so we had to hold off until I could talk to the installers.

It turns out we were just about right in our thought of what might've happened. They wired it to have a volume switch by the back door, and so we either need to add a volume control or splice the wires to complete the connections. We were so close! We even took that face plate off to see what was there, but thought the wires were for a security system.. We should be able to knock it out tonight, and then our patio will be even more relaxing when we can put on music out there, much better than our tiny boombox...