Cabinets delivered today! Yay! All but two fit in the house. I'd forgotten that there were two that wouldn't fit through the current doorways. So now they're blocking up my shop. :)

Great to have warm, sunny weather back!

Tired, off to bed.

Monday again, already? Kitchen cabinets and yard work.

Today was mildly productive.

Good side:

Vacuumed the whole (new) house to pick up all the random plaster dust in the corners from previous demolition. There's a little more to come down, two doorways to open up and one to be moved over, but it made me feel better. That's important. :)

Cut back the privet hedge along the driveway. If they survive and start to grow in spring, I'll cut back the rest come May. Lowered the top of the hedge to about 2' off the ground so the sun can get to the driveway and I won't have to shovel as much next winter. Maybe I can rig up some big sheets of mylar next winter to reflect sunlight onto the driveway so it'll melt faster. I never did dig out the place this winter, just waited for it to melt. It was good to be out in the fresh air. While loading clippings into my handy dandy pickup-trailer I kept feeling my foot hit something. Turns out that in the middle of the lawn there was a cut off fence post that the frost had brought up above the surface by an inch or two. REally odd. Got my sledge hammer and knocked it back down below the surface a bit. I stuck a stick down inside and it's pretty deep so I didn't bother trying to pull it out. Too much work, some other day when I get my fence post jack perfected. :)

Spent several hours picking up other trash and debris that's surfaced over the winter and recent rains. It's astonishing to me that after three+ years of picking up silverware, old cans and stray kid's toys that I'm still finding stuff. I collected about a five gallon bucket's worth of stuff. The place would be an archaeologist's dream in a thousand years but right now we're just getting rid of junk. :)

Then I got to looking at some rocks that I always have to avoid with the mower and thumped them with my big iron digging bar. I was hoping to just knock off some of the hight spots, but ... they moved! They weren't bedrock!! I pried up about six rocks and set them as the base of a (future) rock wall by a (future) water pond. Filled the holes with dirt and felt I'd accomplished something permanent. I'd never realized how rich and dark the soil there is. I'm going to have to plant some veggies there when the time is right, it looks really good.

The back of the truck had several boxes that needed to be transferred to the barn, and an air compressor in need of some repair. The boxes were heavier than I'd anticipated and I was more tuckered out than I'd thought I'd be. The air compressor is in need of more repair than I'd thought as well. :(

Actually, most of the day, I was killing time just piddling around and puttering. Because:

Bad news: Looks like the company that built our kitchen cabinets may be about to go under. They've been storing them for the last couple years and we've paid for them so I didn't want to lose them. Went over last Thursday to arrange delivery for this morning. 9:30, no truck. 10:30, no truck. All afternoon, no truck. I'm not impressed. Hope I can get these guys to bring them over here, I don't want to lose them. They're all custom and we paid an arm and a leg for them. :(

Guess I'll have to go by their office tomorrow morning if I don't hear anything early. I don't trust these guys on the phone.

Still need to tackle that electrical and framing work in the barn. Hoping to take another run at it tomorrow.

Well, that's it for now. Need to go soak my sore muscles. :)

Doug

Has it really been THAT long? Yeeeessssss....

Hard to believe that it's been since last summer that I posted here.

Indeed, winter DID come, and what a winter it's been!

Last summer it got so late and we were so far from breaking ground on the addition we decided to wait out the winter in our rental house. Considering we got about three feet of snow here, it was a good decision. Two people in a aluminum sausage in the snow would not be a good idea. Even NASA doesn't leave people alone in such a small space for that long. :)

Since I last posted the storage room is 99% done (still a little weather stripping to do around the doors, but it got us through the winter). It's about half full of junk from the house that needs protected storage, with more on the way.

We've given notice on our rental house and will be moving to the new place in about four weeks. So right now my focus is on getting things moved out of the old house and making sure there's enough storage room in the barn.

I learned last fall that the trees along the roadside are not maples but are some variety of elm. I'd love it if they were slippery bark (love that tea!) but haven't been able to fine tune it enough to figure it out yet.

The winter brought down parts of two of those trees, so now what's left can be brought down by the normal means we used last year. They're both pretty big, so that'll be a chore for a "group work day" sometime this spring. I still have several that are up between the wires and will take some climbing to take them down. These all may wait until next fall and the house is livable. If they survived the high winds and snow this winter, they'll survive the summer. :)

Gavin McLoad has been emptied of his metal junk, so he's free to be put to use for other purposes. Hope I can get him roadworthy this spring so he can haul building supplies. He has a nice new (used) tire for the flat one that I couldn't get off before. (Thanks Rick for the help with that!) He really only needs some work on the lights to get him inspected and licensed. I think. Unless Murphy shows up. :)

Current push is to finish up the office space in the barn loft so I've got a work room for plans and computers once we move into the trailer. Monday I plan to finish up the weather stripping and the electrical work on the storage room (lights in the north loft). Tuesday I want to lay part of the new subfloor and start framing some of the interior walls in the office area.

Still have to figure out some way to get Inet access to the property. Have been considering wireless or CATV links, not sure what to go with. Apparently DSL is not an option in our area. :( If you have preferences, experience or suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em.

Once that room is usable, Sal's office is the next point of attack, so we can store things in the house there. One hopes we'll be onsite soon after that and the pace can pick up.

The pool seems to have come through the winter pretty well, to my amazement. At one point this winter there was ice on it so thick I could walk on it. VERY odd. There's A LOT of water on top of the cover right now from all that snow and ice, but it's all clear and clean, not green and mean, so we may be able to just let it strain through the cover and stay put when we pull the cover off.

Saw two cardinals today as we took a walk around the place. Nice bright colors amidst the little hints of green here and there. Snow drops are up on the south side of the house, adding a bright white promise of warmer days ahead. On the front of the house it looks like some of the bulbs are JUST starting to awaken.

That's all for tonight! Hope your corner of the world is looking brighter too.