Arizona, Mesa - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - Val Vista Villages RV Resort

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY TO DAUGHTER ROBYN.  When I don’t post every day I miss mentioning some important events.  We went to Red Lobster to celebrate J

 We finished up the last valance last Sunday right before Super Bowl.

 

 

This one was a little harder to get to than the rest.  We’ve been able to do a lot of in-depth cleaning during this process, Greg was hoping we were done with spring cleaning when we were done with this project.

 

 

Finding a spot to clean the blinds and screens on this last window was a challenge.

 

 

We ended up having about 3 yards of the solid material and a yard of the striped material left over.  I did my best to estimate what we were going to need.  I even went as far as to make graph paper on an excel spreadsheet and laid out the pieces on it.  As it happened I was able to cut more economically than the computer model showed.  Greg says he is sneaking the leftover material into the next patio sale they have here at the resort so I won’t be able to think of another project to do with it.  I know I want to recover the seats of the dining room chairs.

We were talking about how pleased we were with the results – yes, there are a few things we could probably have done better, but for a couple amateurs we think they look pretty good.  I made the comment that “maybe stripes weren’t the best choice for beginners” because we did struggle some to get them to look right.  Greg commented that “we were never going to be professionals at this so if we wanted stripes it was now or never”.

After our work week was done for this week we started in again on some other projects.  Greg replaced the caulk strip around the outside of the shower and recaulked the inside.  We had a small spot that leaked sometimes and the caulk strip wanted to pop out in that spot.  I persuaded him to take the shower doors down so I could do some descaling to them that I can’t do when they are hanging, no matter how hard I try there are some spots I just can’t reach.

After the bathroom, he moved on to learning how to replace screen in a door.  Our door had a couple of tiny holes that you would only notice if you were really looking for them, but we both kind of like to take care of the small things before they become big things.

I decided to tackle the bathroom storage closet.  Everything came out and the shelves were cleaned.  I even ended up finding about three cubic feet of unused storage area after I rearranged all of our labeled boxes J.  People tease me about my labeling and organizing, but it sure does allow for better living in a small space.  For the average person three cubic feet doesn’t sound like much, but when you live in an RV, it is like gold!

With all of that unused space I decided to move on to the closet in the bedroom – maybe something from the closet should go in the bathroom and then I would have room to add a couple of boxes to keep my quilting projects – it worked.  I think we even have enough room to accommodate an inversion table if we decide we want one.

Yesterday we stopped at a market that has just produce, it was kind of like a warehouse atmosphere.  The prices they advertise are so low we were a little skeptical about quality, but we were really pleased.  We loaded up, all of this was $21.  A 5 pound bag of potatoes was $.99, blueberries were $.99 per pint, three large heads of romaine was $1.00.  Needless to say we went a bit overboard so lots of veggies are on the menu for next week.

 

 

The temperatures are above average out here now, running in the mid to upper 70s headed for the 80s next week.  That sounds good, but it appears there can be a downside to the warmer weather – scorpions and rattle snakes.  Since we are in the city I wasn’t too concerned about these things, although I did buy a snake bite kit and printed off some info on what to do in case of scorpion or snake bite before we left Indiana.  But, when they started talking about these critters on the nightly news I became a little concerned.  I don’t like bugs of any kind in the house and a scorpion in the house would have just been cause to be a disturbance to the neighbors.  So although I know he was chuckling all the while Greg went to the hardware store for scorpion spray and a blacklight flashlight.  Do you know those little suckers glow under blacklight?  He has now treated around the RV with scorpion spray and the blacklight is in a handy spot.