Increased Security

Because of the break in over Christmas Break, we have had a flurry of purchases at the Bois Bungalow. We had to replace both our front and back door due to the kick in and we chose to upgrade and purchase beautiful fiberglass Craftsman style doors along with Emtek Arts and Crafts hardware.

For the hardware, we chose a single cylinder tubular set with the Arts and Crafts lever. (I tried to post links, but they do not seem to be working...)

As for the door, we ordered the Fiber-Classic Mahogany Therma Tru door. The link for the door is also not working :(

We have also purchased an additional two cameras for our property. One will be on the front porch facing the door and the second will be in the backyard. Hopefully this will deter any future break ins.

We have also chosen to purchase wood for our arbor out front that will frame the walkway up to our front door. It will be great to finish the fence. It has been far too long!

We also purchased a locking mailbox because our mail was tampered with while we were out of town as well... We plan on somehow building it into the arbor so the mailman does not have to come into our yard to deliver our mail. The locking mechanism will hopefully keep mail thieves out and we will be able to leave without having to worry about our mail piling over.

Another purchase we made is an electrical gate opener for our back privacy fence so we can park out back without having to get out and open the gate. This will make it much nicer to park back there in bad weather.

We also had to replace my computer that was stolen and a hard drive/back up system. The tech savvy husband was in charge of these purchases.

This weekend and next week we hope to finish staining the doors, install them, install the hardware, build the arbor, finish the gate and put the mailbox up. Pretty ambitious... I'll let you know how much we get done! I will be posting pictures soon... Hopefully!

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Rain Barrels and Chains

The most recent addition to our home: rain barrels and copper rain chains. A couple months ago, we had new seamless gutters installed to replace the plastic do-it-yourself gutters the previous owner had installed. We asked the installers to adapt them to fit rain chains, and installed our copper rain chains a couple weeks later. Before: You can see the many seams that the old gutters had. They all leaked! After: This is the front of the house, but you can see... NO seams! :) The next step was to find a rain barrel to catch the water at the bottom of the rain chains. We shopped online and found out that it would be a lot cheaper to make our own custom rain barrel than to buy one. We called around to wineries and found out that they were only charging $30/full wine barrel!! We bought three wine barrels and cut one in half to use at the base of both of the barrels. This helped get them high enough so that our watering can would fit under the spigot. Here are the rain chains befo

Old House Pictures

I had the chance several months ago to meet up with the second owner's children. Their parents purchased the home in 1928, and lived in it until the late 60's. They were great and were able to find several pictures of the house when they lived in it. These pictures are my motivation to bring this house back to what it used to be. This is a picture of the parlor. It is to the right immediately when you walk in the front door. This picture is in the dining room during Thanksgiving. You can see a lot of the woodwork that we have spent hours stripping paint from. The windows behind the man at the end of the table have not been stripped yet. This is a photo of the backyard during winter. The fence that is in this picture was (mostly) still standing when we purchased the house. We put up a new fence this winter for more privacy and security. This is a picture of the owner's daughter reading on the screened in front porch. They used to sleep out there in the summer. The

Burglary

For Christmas and New Years, we spent 11 days out of town visiting both of our families. We have never been away from the house for more than a week, so this was a long trip for us. We headed up to Seattle on Christmas day to visit my grandparents and then to British Columbia to visit Thomas' family. We had a security system installed less than a year ago and have a security camera along the back of our house to keep an eye on our fence (tagging is a huge problem in our area). On December 29th, we got notification on our iPhones that our alarm was going off and the back door, kitchen door sensors had been triggered along with the living room motion detector. We assumed that it was my parents checking on the house (they have set the alarm off before...) So we disarmed it remotely. I texted my family, and eventually realized they were not the ones that set off the alarm. We immediately re-armed it and got a phone call from our alarm company and sent the police to check the premises

The Bois Bungalow

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