Hey look, I do stuff!
Yesterday I saw a crow steal an egg from a robin's nest outside my bedroom window and then a mocking bird and a sparrow chased it down instantly. It was the best day ever.
Two days before that, I saw an enormous, vivid double rainbow.
I'm starting to think there's a glitch in the matrix and I've been deposited in a program where everything is television and movie references and internet memes come to life.
Anyway, for a little over a month now, we've been working on our back yard, specifically having torn apart our back steps before they collapsed and hurt someone and tiling over the cracked exposed aggregate patio on which said steps rested.
Patio before
Patio after setting all the tiles, but before grouting. The tile is a porcelain made to look like sandstone. I like it a lot and it was wicked easy to work with after the mess of slate we used for the guest bathroom.
Here's a corner after it was grouted but before it was cleaned:
I didn't get around to taking a pic of it all grouted and finished. And we've sort of trashed it with deck construction mess. Which brings me to deck construction.
I don't really have a before shot, but here's a couple after:
Oh look, there's the grouted patio.
Anyway, we have that last board of decking to rip and put in, which is probably a lot more difficult than it sounds. That's not a straight line against the house. Because we're amateur carpenters. But it's freakin' solid! And just needs that last board, railings and stairs and it'll be done.
Then we'll start working on the pergola that we're going to grow jessamine on for shade. So we'll have our own angry jessamine just like Cleolinda! Actually, we already have some on the gaslamp in the front yard. And it's very angry right now because I intend to transplant it once we get the pergola done and so I haven't trimmed it all spring. It's getting unruly.
And after the pergola, Jonah's getting a new treehouse/playset/swingset/playground/thingy. And then I'm going to hibernate for about six months. Or move inside and start finishing up a bunch of the projects we started in the house last summer when it was too hot to work outside. Like putting our baseboards and quarter round back up and rehanging everything on the walls we had painted.
Protip: Don't purchase a house with a bunch of 45 degree angles. Just don't. It'll fuck your shit all up. I've screwed the pooch on mitering baseboards and the ledger board for the deck now because of the same damn angle. I just automatically try to split 90. Probably because I have teh dumb.
Oh, right and between the weekend we started the patio and the weekend it was finally finished being grouted there was a weekend where we planted small squares of zoysia sod throughout the yard for it to hopefully spread in our full sun areas. That was also the weekend of Alicia's funeral. I think I tweeted something about how all this hard work was therapy for me. I shortly thereafter changed the tagline of my writer's blog to "Because writing is cheaper than therapy and healthier than drugs." Seriously, the writing and the hard manual labor in the hot sun has been so good for me. Both things give me time to process, time to think and be completely introverted.
I have a well earned farmer's tan right where a women's cut Teefury shirt hits my upper biceps, which sort of cracks me up. Both of my thumbs and my right index finger are completely bruised from being smashed by hammers repeatedly, there's a cracked blister on the inside of my right thumb, I have unexplained bruises all over my body, and I feel ridiculously alive.
Two days before that, I saw an enormous, vivid double rainbow.
I'm starting to think there's a glitch in the matrix and I've been deposited in a program where everything is television and movie references and internet memes come to life.
Anyway, for a little over a month now, we've been working on our back yard, specifically having torn apart our back steps before they collapsed and hurt someone and tiling over the cracked exposed aggregate patio on which said steps rested.
Patio before
Patio after setting all the tiles, but before grouting. The tile is a porcelain made to look like sandstone. I like it a lot and it was wicked easy to work with after the mess of slate we used for the guest bathroom.
Here's a corner after it was grouted but before it was cleaned:
I didn't get around to taking a pic of it all grouted and finished. And we've sort of trashed it with deck construction mess. Which brings me to deck construction.
I don't really have a before shot, but here's a couple after:
Oh look, there's the grouted patio.
Anyway, we have that last board of decking to rip and put in, which is probably a lot more difficult than it sounds. That's not a straight line against the house. Because we're amateur carpenters. But it's freakin' solid! And just needs that last board, railings and stairs and it'll be done.
Then we'll start working on the pergola that we're going to grow jessamine on for shade. So we'll have our own angry jessamine just like Cleolinda! Actually, we already have some on the gaslamp in the front yard. And it's very angry right now because I intend to transplant it once we get the pergola done and so I haven't trimmed it all spring. It's getting unruly.
And after the pergola, Jonah's getting a new treehouse/playset/swingset/playground/thingy. And then I'm going to hibernate for about six months. Or move inside and start finishing up a bunch of the projects we started in the house last summer when it was too hot to work outside. Like putting our baseboards and quarter round back up and rehanging everything on the walls we had painted.
Protip: Don't purchase a house with a bunch of 45 degree angles. Just don't. It'll fuck your shit all up. I've screwed the pooch on mitering baseboards and the ledger board for the deck now because of the same damn angle. I just automatically try to split 90. Probably because I have teh dumb.
Oh, right and between the weekend we started the patio and the weekend it was finally finished being grouted there was a weekend where we planted small squares of zoysia sod throughout the yard for it to hopefully spread in our full sun areas. That was also the weekend of Alicia's funeral. I think I tweeted something about how all this hard work was therapy for me. I shortly thereafter changed the tagline of my writer's blog to "Because writing is cheaper than therapy and healthier than drugs." Seriously, the writing and the hard manual labor in the hot sun has been so good for me. Both things give me time to process, time to think and be completely introverted.
I have a well earned farmer's tan right where a women's cut Teefury shirt hits my upper biceps, which sort of cracks me up. Both of my thumbs and my right index finger are completely bruised from being smashed by hammers repeatedly, there's a cracked blister on the inside of my right thumb, I have unexplained bruises all over my body, and I feel ridiculously alive.