August

This month has been a heck of a whirlwind. It started with me coming home to find this little sweetheart of a pup stealing the show at home. He's a doll, but has some serious issues with mouthing and nipping at us. All puppies do and I know it's just a phase, but it is a painful one. He's learning and growing and I'm glad he's part of our family. So far he's more than doubled in size and I think the ears may have even tripled in size. ;-)

We also had a weekend trip to Alabama to see the progress on the basement. That went well. It was the pups first road trip, of many more to come I am sure. This is how we found out that he doesn't actually NEED to go to the bathroom every 10 minutes, he just wants to. We only had to stop 3 times so roughly every 2 hours. We also introduced him to the ATV, UTV and tractor. He may make a farm dog yet.

Mid month was a massive rush of getting ready for the first day of school. Hundreds of dollars worth of school supplies and clothes and shoes. I'm still feeling quite poor because of it. It also meant meeting this teacher, that teacher and oh- the AP courses have their own orientation. BUSY BUSY time.

But now the kids are back to school and things are settling back into the pattern of getting the kids up at 7, dressed by 7:30 downstairs by 8 - eating breakfast, walking the dog and catching the bus. Typically during the first few weeks of back to school we also manage to get in a swim or some gymnastics after dinner and before it gets dark. That will only continue until the time change, but for now I am taking full advantage.

This weeks project was to reinstall a barricade to help hide our pool pump... When we painted the house over the summer the original lattice was pulled down and even though we intended to save it to reinstall, the painters chucked it into their trash. So when a home that went into foreclosure finally sold down the road we spied a white vinyl picket the new owners were replacing with privacy fence. We stopped by to talk to them and they let us know that one of the workers wanted to take it. Oh well. They did say though that if the fence was still there the next day we could pick it up. Well - low and behold the next day it was still in the driveway.  Since i had already gotten permission from the owner I stopped and filled up my truck with all that it would hold. Purloined with permission. :-D Oh I was happy. Did I mention it was the day before our Alabama trip? No - well that did make things a bit difficult and we worked well into the night to get the truck unloaded and the fencing stacked into the back yard.

Guess who helped dig? (Can you see the dirt on his nose?)

The kiwi plants were already beginning to topple over without the support even though I had cut them back to the ground when I had to remove the lattice.

 

GROSS. This fence was just disgusting. I  don't know what in the world they did to it, but yuck!

So I put in the posts, checked to make sure they were level, installed the bottom board....and quickly realized this is nothing at all like dealing with a wooden fence. Ho, Hum. I did manage to finagle it in, but I had to had cut a few of the pickets in order to get the top rail on. It works, and you can't see the cuts now that it's all together but the second panel went in SO much smoother once I figured out NOT to install the posts first. LOL

Eh- as these things go it went pretty well. A little time consuming until I knew better what to do. but all in all I would call it a success. 

The kiwi are much happier and I am too because now I don't have to look at this!

It's definitely been an eye sore for the last few weeks but the kiwi will take over the fence before winter and then I won't have to worry about it any more. I'm also hoping that the fresh start for the kiwi will help it to produce some flowers next year because if it doesn't at least attempt to produce fruit soon it will be replaced.

I still have a few small things to do to wrap this project up. A sprinkler head needs moved, and the brick to protect he base of the vines needs redone. But for the most part it is done. I've washed the fence once (See last pic isn't as bad? But it needs at least one more attempt. It's still fairly grungy. I can't even tell you how bad it was.

So this project got put ahead of the wall for the blueberry planter and the wall for the main garden but those are still on the radar. We've just dealt with a ton of rain recently and when we've been able to dedicate any time to it we haven't been able to due to the standing water. This I knew wouldn't take as long and was quite a bit easier to do by myself. Thank goodness because it's starting to seem like the projects are piling up faster than we can do them.

See you soon!

Barbie~

Appearances. (Walkway project)

Appearances - Woah. Now that word looks strange after I typed it. Kinda like the word itself wants to tell ya something, huh?

No? Just me? OK, I can deal. ;-)

One of the big projects we've been working on recently has us getting ready for tax season. Eh? Come again? Well. I realize that may sound rather strange, but our driveway is not wide enough for both my itty bitty car and my Honey's big bad truck at the same time. It is wide enough for the two sit there comfortably next to each other, sure. But, you'd better pray no one needs to enter or exit those vehicles!

So we have decided that this coming tax return (Oh, please oh please be there like we planned!) is going to be allotted for a driveway expansion. When we started looking into expanding the driveway we found out that our HOA (TSOAG) have their noses stuck up our butts again and refuse to let us do a circular drive that we have plenty of room for, and in turn also refuse to allow us to pour a CONCRETE driveway in order to continue the uniform look of our existing driveway.

Now, you'd think this would be the preferred method of expanding a driveway so that it would be the most pleasing to the eye and the most likely to be done by a proper contractor under the best conditions. BUT, instead they insist that it can be done by pavers, or other such nonsense. Being that we planned on putting a facade of stack stone on the front of the house around the garage this goes against every bit of eye pleasing/decorating sensibility that I have. I REALLY wanted to have concrete poured and have it stamped all the way across the driveway to be uniform. GRRRR.... Instead I'll have pavers, stone on the small retaining wall around the planters and a different stone on the wall of the house. *CRINGE* I'm hating this!

I digress. Since there will be so many types of stone involved we decided to get started early on one part of the project. The only part that we felt comfortable tackling by ourselves and before any of the tax return came in. Stack stone can get expensive and this portion was not nearly as expensive. So we dove in, head first. It took a few weeks of looking around and a whole lot of arguing over exactly what pavers we were going to use. (I like to tans and browns and hubby liked the more mixed pinks and blues) We found some instead that had the slate colors he liked with the browns that I liked and mixed them with the pinks that we already had (that I hate, they are on our pool deck)

Then, we got to work laying them on our sidewalk up to our front door.

Well, it's not perfect for either of us. I suppose it keeps both of us from gloating and we are both equally satisfied that the job is done. We used only the 4" square blocks on the walkway but the driveway expansion that will abut the walkway will use both the larger rectangular bricks and the smaller squares in the pattern. This should distinguish the walkway from the driveway and meanwhile we have a much nicer looking entrance for the next 6 months while we wait to start and finish construction on the other projects. I might attempt the stack stone, but I certainly can not handle the driveway expansion.

I've laid a lot of patios and walkways, like I did this one but something for a (real) vehicle to drive on? No way! Not to mentions the HOA (TSOAG) would certainly be sending me some love letters after that. LOL. At a hundred dollars a day fines I think I'll skip. Thanks anyway.

More projects posting soon, because I've been a very busy gal!

See you soon!

Barbie~

*TSOAG= The Sons Of A Guns*