Smokin'

 

This is How My Garden Grows

It's been 12 years since I've planted a produce garden!  We got a couple raised planters this spring.  One is fully complete and I'm enjoying watching everything grow.  These plants (zucchini and snow pea) were supposed to go in the second planter, but they were starting to grow so fast that I decided to plant them in bed number 1 instead.  Yes, I ate that first snow pea.  

Manageability

Now that the renovation is complete, it's staggering to me how far we've come. 

Potentiality

Someday soon, this pile of bricks will be a finished fireplace.

Distributionally

It may not be the most exciting blog pic, but I'm so happy to finally have a fully-functioning furnace, A/C, and proper ductwork throughout the house.  They finished today!

And there's a kitty.  Kitties make any image look better.

Dusty

Tools of the trade.  Drywalling continues.

Revivify

House renovation is coming along.

Graphically

We spent time at Menards today with the contractor to work on the details of our new kitchen.

Progressively

It's been a long, hard road, but the house renovation finally started today.  I am so relieved that this is moving forward! 

I thought I'd do a triptych to show the progress in one of the rooms, in this case, the kitchen.  Image one is shortly before we moved in, back in 2018.  Image two is from this past weekend when we were prepping for the construction crew.  Image three is from this evening after the close of demo day one.

Bloody

I was trying to do some touch-up painting this evening and managed to get more paint on me, the paper towel, and the ground than on the designated object.  Looks like a bloody massacre! 

Nitty-gritty

When you have to remove half the stuff under the hood to fix the problem.

Handy

My husband, hard at work on a new deck.

Nasty

Today turned into a project day involving a hulking behemoth and a reciprocating saw.

This ginormous antique double chest freezer died about 10 years ago, or so.  However, it appears it was never defrosted properly at the time.  Once we finally managed to pry open the hermetically sealed freezer doors, we discovered 2 inches of the stankiest standing water in the bottom of the freezer.  I dumped 2 gallons of bleach in it and closed the lid again.  The combined smell of potent bleach and musty water was more than I could handle.

Now, a couple months later, the bleach smell has dissipated and my husband had the pleasure of sawing it into pieces for removal.  The only thing the bleach seemed to do was peel up the paint in the standing water.

Here's an action shot of my husband during the deconstruction.

Fence Post #4

Last Saturday we finally got the rest of the fence up. Hooray! All that is left is to cut off the excess from the 4x4s, cap them, and make a gate in one part. That will all probably get done next spring. It's a huge improvement on the back yard already, just the way it is!


Someday, we plan to add a retaining wall on the side of the yard and extend the fence further. But that's another project for another day...or year...or decade.

Fence Post #3

We finally have the toughest side done! Yippie! This side of the fence was all at the top of a hill.

That's not to say we haven't had problems along the way. June 21st we were going to get a lot of this side done. However, after finishing a section of fence and taking a Gatorade break, I happened to look up at the last remaining mature tree in our back yard...















Maybe it isn't apparent enough in the above picture, so let me show you from another angle...
















WHOA! Our tree was splitting in half!















Not only had a large portion already split, but a crack continued down the trunk another 30 inches past the split! The wind was blowing pretty hard that day and we watched the two halves bounce in the wind. Visions of it splitting to the ground and falling on all the wrong things, danced through our heads. My husband made a beeline to the garage to get his trusty little chain saw. We figured half of it would be easy to get down, but even with a line tied on it, it didn't fall quite where we had hoped...











It fell right on a little maple tree (which you can't even see!) And the chain saw got bound up in the split when the branch fell. Note the circular saw at the base of the tree. He had to use that to get the chain saw out of the tree. Once that limb was finally on the ground, all the branches had to be cut up and stacked in a huge pile. (This is the one advantage I could see to living in the country... We could have lit that pile on fire and be done with it.) By the time we finished all that, we were pooped!

The rest of the tree is trickier since there are so many things in the way, including power lines. We decided to hire a tree service to deal with that. But first, Xcel has to come out and clear the branches away from the power lines. I won't hold my breath waiting for them!

But this weekend, nothing stood in the way of getting that side of the fence done. On July 2nd, I hauled the mountainous pile of branches to the compost site. They fought me all the way! Afterward it looked like a wild pack of gerbils had attacked the insides of my arms. Mean, mean branches! My husband took July 3rd off to work some more on the fence. The 4th we were on hiatus because of a very enjoyable BBQ. And on the 5th, we finally made it around the corner. (Maybe "around the bend" would be more appropriate! We'll be glad when this project is finished.)

It's all down hill from here...thank goodness!

Fence Update

Since I started documenting the fence back in April, I figured it was time for an update. Especially since we have a bona fide section of fence done now!

On May 24th, my wonderful husband and a guy from church that he suckered....I mean commissioned... to help him, moved 2 tons of cement around the yard to anchor the rest of the 4x4 fence posts.

Then we bought the rest of the wood to complete the fence. This gave me great hope that THIS year would be the "year of the fence."

Yesterday was chain-saw fun on some unruly bushes and our very first section of fence hung. Whoo hoo!

Fence

I didn't have time for a photo shoot today. But I did take a documentary photo of part of our new fence. Isn't it lovely? Ok, so it doesn't look like a fence yet. But it was a lot of hard work getting it this far, so I thought I'd at least take a picture of it.

Hallelujah

I played hooky from my blog Thursday and Friday, but it was for a very good reason. (At least I think so!) I finally have a dishwasher (besides me) in the kitchen. Hooray!

Thursday I had to get ready for the install. Friday was the install. Saturday and today I've been trying to get everything organized again.

So today I thought I'd share a few documentary photos of the installation, and tomorrow I will get back down to business with my photography.

Many thanks to my wonderful husband and brother-in-law for all their hard work!