We are amazing.

Toooot tooty tooooooooot!!!  That’s us tooting our own horn.  I mean, after all, someone has to!  And here is why:  in the past few weeks since we have last blogged (well all right, it has been quite a while) we have done the following:

finished plastering
finished sanding
painted
installed supports for the beams
painted some more
installed a bunch of cabinets
installed a counter
installed a sink
vented the dryer
put almost all the beadboard up
picked rocks constantly
tricked strangers into picking rocks (he he!)
sowed lots of grass seed
moved a mountain of compost
created a “berm/dyke”
finally beaten the IVY!!! (more on this coming up)
cut one tooth and working on several more.

Here are photos to prove it: This is the newly painted (green) family room with the beam supports in place.  woowoo, right?

This is the newly installed sink, counter and a cabinet in the laundry room.  Again, woowoo, although the effect is somewhat diminished by all the junk sitting on the counter.  Hey, we’re working on it, what can I say?

These are some more cabinets and some more counter in the laundry room.  It also shows the beadboard above and below the cabinets.  Obviously, the wall to the right is not done yet on the top.

I am going to spare you a photo of the dryer vent.  Of course, this is all what David has been working on all while holding down the regular 7-3 job that he does at church.  Big things going on there, we think, but I’ll let him talk about that later.

I am also going to spare you a photo of me picking rocks.  It’s quite tedious, but there are a lot of rocks to pick and so I do.  I also put an ad in Craigslist to see if there were any crazy people out there who want free rocks.  It turns out about a dozen people theoretically want rocks and 3 people were crazy enough to actually come pick them.  One woman came twice!  I’m going to re-post the ad and see if we get anyone else!  My problem with the rocks is even if I pick them, where do I put them?  So yeah, if anyone reading this wants free rocks, come get them!

I am also not going to post a photo of the berm/dyke because it would mean taking a photo of the entire perimeter of the back yard which, well I have better things to do than to try to photoshop that into meaningful, manageable size.  You’ll have to imagine a huge heap of compost that used to be about 4×8 and sitting in the middle of the top of the yard.  Now imagine that pile being shoveled up and distributed all around the edge of the back yard.  I am doing this to try to define the yard, to try to prevent soil erosion, to try to prevent water drainage into the neighbours’ yards.  This will take several years to get it to function in all those ways, but currently it’s a start.

THEN I TAMED THE IVY!!!  I know, can you believe it?  I have raked and mowed and thatched and raked and yanked and sworn (but only ever so mildly) and now this is what it looks like:

I know, it doesn’t look like much does it?  But ah dirt, blessed, sweet dirt!!  How I love thee when thou art free of ivy!  That whole hill-ish thing behind the house was covered in ivy, if you will recall.  I actually have more thatching to do because one of the actual thatching springs broke (quelle surprise) in process, but it sure does look different.  As soon as I get that done, then I will be able to sow more grass seed!! We have superdeduper dense shade grass seed and it has been coming up like crazy everywhere else, so we shall see.  Here is Jan helping.  You can’t see the tooth, but I assure you it’s dead bottom centre.  He is trying to wear my gloves.  I tried to get him raking, but of course he put it down just as I pulled out the camera.

.

Here are photos of my next two projects.  sigh.  They are daunting already.  The first is a stump, not of Jesse, but of some stupid juniper-y type bush that someone planted stupidly in the middle of the stupid hill and the stupid ivy.  Can you tell what I think about this?  I’ve already cut off the “pretty parts” but I’ll be darned if I can get that thing out of the ground.  I tell ya, I nearly had an aneurysm trying.  I guess I don’t have enough body weight to cut the roots which is a good thing??  Anyway, it’s coming out and you know me. It’s coming out.  It might as well stop fighting.

.  This next photo shows the huge-mungous pile of junk that we still have to get rid of.  Most of this is still from that tree limb that fell.  The rest is from various other things.  We borrowed a chipper, but this stuff is so big, we would have been chipping until doomsday.  So there it has been for ages now.  I guess the only thing now is to load it onto the trailer and haul it away to some dumpster or something.  That will also take quite a while, but not as long as burning it (illegal, according to the asmatic neighbour), chopping and doing ?? with it, or chipping it.

So yep, that’s about it from the old homestead.  We’ve been a wee bit busy, but I think it will be worth it.  Summer school starts next week so I will slow waay down on the house.  Also, Jan seems to be becoming a normal child and has been pretty much crying without much stopping for 3 days.  This means I haven’t done as much as I would like on other things.  Instead I have been playing with Noah’s Ark and throwing the ball for hours.  But those are good things to do too. I’m guessing this is a teeth thing and will be over eventually.

Stay tuned for what will undoubtedly be the revenge of the ivy, for more teeth, for exciting happenings at church and for further construction.