Garden of Thought

Sure been a busy year thus far and here we are only getting going! House repairs are continuing as I have new carpet coming in this week (the last bit of the damage from last years flooding) - it's meant a lot of furniture moving on my part but it will be SO nice to have it done as it will essentially complete that level of the house. I've started looking at real estate listings in the area we are targeting to move to just to get a feel for what is out there.

I got to dance again for a friend's church for New Years services which was grand fun, and now I'm signed up to dance at an event in April as well. I was once told that if you can just start dancing onstage it won't seem so fearsome and I think I'm getting there. It's still kind of nerve-wracking but at least I'm not legitimately terrified anymore.

I've just finished up my official time at my church, all I have left is handing off the library things to a lady taking it on (so weird to give up my rubber stamp with the church library info on it), singing up front one more time and throwing my peacock-themed 'farewell' party in a couple of weeks. I'm pulling out all the stops for the party, it's a ton of work but I'm loving it, wish I could invite my online ladies to come if y'all were just closer.

Wow, where did September go? Why do I remain astonished at the rate life goes whipping by even though it's done so pretty much since I left grade school?

Been stuffing time into fixing the house trying to get as much done before the autumn October Rains arrived - this week was the start of the rainy season here, so I'm grateful I (barely) managed to finish sanding and staining the boards to fix my front deck before the temperature went down. They'll wait in the garage til I can get them put into place but at least they're done. Steps are fixed, back patio is fixed, yay!

Most of the month I was tweaking gutters, installing two rainbarrels, connecting them and getting an overflow system put into place via digging a drainage trench, lining it and filling it with pipe and rocks... lots of rocks... rocks...are...heavy... Then edging it all in cottage stone, filling in with soil and planting bulbs in there. End result looks great, wish I'd done this years ago. Hopefully this will help stave off a repeat of the water seepage we had last year.

Time to rip out tender potted plants and get the pots into the green house, put away hoses, etc. Booyah, here comes Autumn!

Wow, that dip at the corner of the house where the broken gutter washed everything out this past winter is even bigger than I thought. It didn't look like that much to fill and tamp down when I started in on it but I've now fed THIRTEEN buckets of dirt into it and I'm not sure it won't need more after I tamp some more and level it. Holy cow. It was like a funnel right into my foundation. Thank goodness I have a friend working on a deck who let me have clean fill dirt.

It looks like SO much dirt but when I put it in there and spread it around it's amazing how it all just kind of disappears and then there you are, still with a hole to fill. Now I get to figure out how to fix the gutter itself, adventures in home ownership never cease.

Still poking away at repairing my house for eventual sale, learning all kinds of stuff - with Hubby down in CA I am free to run amok with power tools unsupervised, hee hee....

Finished replacing the rotten boards on the back deck with some caveats on it being 'successful' - I can't figure out why some of them refuse to lay flat when the boards themselves are not bent and the under structure was still sound. Better luck, I hope, with the rotten boards in the front steps that are next, I have them cut, sanded and half-stained in the garage at this point. Woot!

Busy chipping away at our very hard soil trying dredge up enough dirt to fill a dip the torrential rains this last spring dug by one corner of the house. Got a chunk of new gutter so I can do my best to replace the bad gutter section responsible for that - hope I can figure that one out, as the October Rains will be here before I know it. Also learned how to play with the air compressor so I could get the car's tires back up to snuff. ;-) Learned air compressors are fun!

Hope everyone else is also getting some of those summer projects out of the way while they can.