Tag: DIY

Lessons from a $145 Mistake

For the past month, Mr. ThreeYear and I have been working on a big DIY project in our front yard.

When we moved into our house in North Carolina in July, it was the height of summer, so it was way too hot to get started on any lawn projects.

Unfortunately, though, our front yard had some very-neglected bushes and grass that we needed to do something with.

So, in late February, we finally began “Project Make the Front Yard Look Decent.”

The first thing we did was dig up some of the neglected, scraggly bushes. I got two dug up, realized how difficult manual labor was, and promptly called some yard people to give me a quote.

I had someone come out to give me a quote, and it was a fairly reasonable charge to remove the bushes and reseed the grass, but after he gave me the initial estimate, he never returned my texts. It was the same with several other yard crews.

Apparently, the job wasn’t big enough for anyone in the landscaping industry, during a very busy time of year.

So, Mr. ThreeYear and I decided we’d do it ourselves and save the money.

To compress a weeks-long process into a sentence, it was very difficult to dig up the bushes.

They were huge, first of all. A massive row of bushes that stood chest-high on me. First, we cut off the limbs, to make it easier to get to the root balls. Then, we spent hours systematically shoveling under the roots, cutting side-growing roots with heavy-duty clippers, and pulling the root ball back and forth to loosen it up.

Continue reading “Lessons from a $145 Mistake”

Breaking “the Rules”

Last weekend both of my boys celebrated birthdays. This year, those celebrations looked a little different than this time last year. Last year, I decided to do a homemade birthday party extravaganza. Unlike Mrs. BITA’s homemade party, which seemed to be lovely and fairly easy to put together, or Mrs. Frugalwood’s family gathering, the ThreeYears’ homemade Minecraft party was a lesson in what not to do when creating a homemade birthday party.

Breaking the Rules--www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

Don’t get me wrong. The party was a straight-out hit. I had no less than four small people tell me “this is the best party ever!” with zero trace of sarcasm in their tiny voices. They were having major fun, which may have had something to do with the Brewing Station, with six bottles of sugared soda that they got to “mix” into different potions.

But the party planner almost did herself in. In my efforts to do it myself, and reproduce Pinterest, I drove myself nuts. I made a homemade Minecraft piñata, for the love of all things holy. I created the aforementioned Brewing Station, and affixed handmade labels to each of the two-liter bottles of soda in six phosphorescent artificial colors. I made recipes for the potions they could create, and had my boys weigh in on how realistic the colors were for each potion (“No, Mom, that’s a Potion of Healing, which is red, not green”). Continue reading “Breaking “the Rules””

DIY Mayhem in May

This month, the shower arm in our bathroom has broken, it has taken four different light fixture tries to replace the kitchen light above the sink, and our kitchen faucet has sprung a major leak. Not only we’re getting tips for scheduling a roofing maintenance check, but also quotes from roofers in the area to replace our roof. Because there’s a dearth of roofers in the area and the cost of labor and materials is so high, our best quote is $14,000. Yes, that is correct. The cost of a used car. One year of private school education. More than a years’ worth of groceries.

On May 14th, Mother’s Day, it snowed. It rained for fourteen days straight before that. Last week, we got two medical bills for a total of $2,000. We’ve been negotiating a new diagnosis with doctors and the school for our youngest child.

We’ve also had some awesome things happen this month. Mr. ThreeYear became an American citizen on Friday and my dad came up for a surprise visit. After the rain and snow, we got a week full of 80 degree weather and the flowers are blooming. Everything is green and alive. The school year is winding down–as of Wednesday, we’ll have just four more weeks.

American Citizen--www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
We are officially a better nation now that Mr. ThreeYear’s a citizen!

We’re healthy, have a stable and happy home life, reliable jobs, and money in the bank to cover our expenses. In the grand scheme of things, the problems that have besieged us this month are minor annoyances. Continue reading “DIY Mayhem in May”

Updating Our Pendant Lights

Hi! If you’re new here, I’m Laurie and my family and I are on a three-year journey to location independence by doubling our net worth so we can move abroad.

During our three year experiment, one of our goals is to get our house ready for sale. To that end, we asked a realtor to visit last month and give her opinion of what needs to be done to make the house ready. It turns out, a lot. But the good news is, we have time to tackle all of these projects slowly, so we’ll be able to do a lot of the work ourselves.

Mr. ThreeYear and I are not DIYers. And we’re not especially detail-oriented. But we are committed to amplifying our skill set and learning in order to get the house ready. Continue reading “Updating Our Pendant Lights”