Year of the Yard

It's been a busy month here at the house and I have yet to post any of the improvements.

Let's start with the new deck. We hired Shawn to build us a deck in front of the Carriage house. Here is the photo progression from start to finish.

Isn't that awesome?! It's our new favorite place.

Let's move on to the west side yard. It started out looking like this.

And now,

We are loving this new yard. I've been watering the hell out of it since it was laid in on the 13th. I am not looking forward to seeing our next water bill. After dropping $10K on this project, I'll be okay with a high water bill.

We also laid some sod in the other back yard by the new deck. We also completed the little area where I've been burning the hell out of that damn tree trunk root. We repainted the arbor that blocks the junk space between the garage and Carriage House.

So, here's how that looks.

The last thing we had to do was build a gate for that little opening there. Also, Susan has been prepping the garage for some touch up paint.

And there we have it. We're pretty happy with the whole thing. Stand by there's even more to come.

BiCenQuinQuagenary

 In the news, they refer to this year's Fourth of July as the Semi Quincentennial. That's half of 500 years. I prefer BiCenQuinnQuagenary because it's more mellifluent. At least, it is to me.

We spent the day doing little stuff around the yard, culminating in a visit to our neighbors, Tammy and Lou, who have a pool. We had a great dinner and a nice visit.

We were pretty full afterward and we weren't sure we wanted to go down and see the fireworks downtown. But fireworks won out.

We drove downtown and pulled into this parking garage right by the park. We drove to the top floor and there were already a bunch of families up there.

Susan was apprehensive about going there but the gates were open, so we didn't have to pay, and it was a pretty good place to watch the fun. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if the lights in the garage had been turned out. 

So Happy Birthday, America. I'm awfully glad I live here.

Stump Planter

What a busy day! I'm quite spent.

First of all, it's my mom's birthday. She would have been 93 today. She probably would have hated that.

It's been five years since she died and today, we finally got around to spreading her ashes. We put them in the Little Spokane River from the Bridge out at the Robinson property.

But prior to that adventure, we had a crew from A-1 Tree Service come to clean up our maple tree.

Here's before and after.

They took out a lot of dead branches and ones that were getting near the house. From looking at the pictures, it doesn't look like that much of a difference. They pulled out a lot of dead stuff

We also had the guy level off the top of the stump in the back of the house.

Now it is ready for me to create a little planter out of it.

I used my router to carve out the initial circle and now I'm going to start drilling some holes and hopefully carve out a space we can place a pot full of flowers.

In the process of doing all that, I have really worn myself out. It's great to be in shape.

Also, progress was made today on the Carriage House Deck.