There was a time when I thought English ivy was charming.  I mean, it is. When you see it growing up old brick homes, there is something beautiful about it.  Now that I have lived in a mid-century brick home that was half-eaten by English ivy, I no longer find it charming.  It stains the brick, it grows in windows and screens, it chokes out bushes and trees, and it’s incredibly hard to remove and control once it’s gone unchecked. A lot of ivy was removed from our home before it was put on the market.  We could see the remnants of it and have cleaned off the roots and staining as we’ve worked on the exterior of the home.  (You can read about how we removed ivy roots & stains HERE.)  And now we’re working on removing ivy from an overgrown bed on the left side of the house.

When I last shared about the custom A/C screen/surround we’re building, it looked like this… My dad came over on Thursday to help me with turning those primed and painted pieces into finished panels.  My dad and I are a good building team because we have a similar approach – done is better than perfect.  Several times, we said something like, “We’re not sending anyone to space in this thing, so it’ll do.”  Even Jeff, who usually brings more perfectionism to the table, said it doesn’t have to be perfect.  It’s just hiding an A/C unit.  No one is hanging from it or living in it. That being said, now that we’ve built two of the panels, I can see some minor flaws in my design!  Perhaps they are not so much flaws as things that could be improved upon.  My design allows for access to the A/C unit for