My mom and I have been working on the never ending flower bed situation. I have yet to plant my 30,000+ seeds. I had to dig up a lot of rose bushes and other random bushes. I also got rid of the daffodils and day lilies. I wanted a clean slate and day lilies get out of hand and are too tall for the front of a flower bed. So we've been weeding and weeding and weeding then adding dirt. It is such a large area, that we decided to grass the section in front of the garage and just have a flower bed in front of the porch. Since we still have a million things to do, I've decided not to add flowers this year. One more thing to maintain when we have other projects to do. Same with our vegetable garden, next year. Josh also ripped up the giant ugly tree stump in the middle of our front yard on Easter. Looks like it was never even there.
Josh has been working on turning our dock into a deck. Last summer the floor of the deck was built, but no stairs or rails. We used cables instead of balusters for railings. It's easier to look through to the yard and is a little more modern. We put a flat board on top to sit drinks and lean against and it's surprising how handy that small feature is. So, Josh has been working on the cables, stairs, rails and staining. And we have a 6-seater patio set. We've only ever had a small set with 2 chairs, so I'm definitely excited about this. We spend a lot of time outside in the summer, so the deck is becoming one of my favorite parts of the house. He only has a few more cables to add, once the parts he needs are back in stock. He just needs to build hand rails for the stairs and stain the stairs.
He also built a pretty awesome duck coop. We have 4 Indian Runner ducks that are about 2 months old now. I'm so happy to get them out of the garage. They have a lot more room to move and now can hunt for bugs and worms. They do love to splash the water onto the ground and play in the mud. They used to be so clean! Still trying to get them used to leaving their pen, but they are still too afraid to venture out. We put the ducks next to the house for their protection and our entertainment. The area we picked was very overgrown and filled with random junk we gutted from the house, so just seeing it cleared out was satisfying in itself.
Another little project was burying a water line. That was not fun digging through hard clay. I tried to help, but Josh took pity on me and finished in record time.
We wanted to start working outside because this is really the first chance we've had since we bought the house 18 months ago. The laundry room is functional, but not finished and the downstairs bathroom will be the last thing completed. It's still cement everything. Our basement still gets a lot of water so we need to find a new way to fix that and it's also really annoying because it's a decent size (size of living room, dining and kitchen combined), so that's where I was planning on storing everything, but unless I move everything to a plastic tub, that's not going to happen.
Yesterday, we started working on the family room and now have all the drywall up. It's a major accomplishment just to get things cleared out of the way and have the room empty.
And today Josh has been ripping out some of our inconveniently placed bushes. So happy to get rid of the giant eye-sore at the end of our driveway.
Whew, I'll try to update more often then once every 5 months :)
