Some progress obvious - some not so much

Jeff's mom's housewarming gift to us was to have somebody clean up the yard, which was a terrible mess from many years of no raking or cleaning up the many branches left by an ice storm. The house is next to a wooded lot, so you can imagine what it was like after all that neglect.

While we're at it, we decided also to have the same guys haul in the considerable fill dirt we needed around the foundation to replace the grading that had started sloping in after many years of, again, no maintenance.

So I took part of Tuesday afternoon off to be there while the crew worked. I came home to this in our front yard.



Exciting. By the time all was said and done, they'd brought in ten cubic yards of fill dirt, 60 pounds of grass seed, an unknown number of bales of hay -- and they completely filled their entire dump truck with the limbs, leaves and other debris. Look at that stuff sticking out of the top. They had to put the tarp over it to keep everything from blowing out. They were really surprised it was so much themselves. They missed raking up one area of acorns on one side of the oak tree, but we can take care of those ourselves.



This was some of the most valuable work that's happened to the house, and was all thanks to Jeff's mom!



You couldn't even see this corner of the fence because of the overgrown honeysuckle and piles of leaves three feet deep. In fact, we didn't even realize the stacked firewood was behind fencing. It was just that bad.



Everything slopes the way it's supposed to now.



Even under the deck. So I had to screw all those boards back into place. Not rewarding exactly, but it's nice to have it done now.

We had massive winds Thursday night. Lucky for us, our straw all seemed to weather the storm just fine, and we only had two small tree limbs down in front. Our neighbors right around the corner weren't so lucky. They lost an enormous tree. Notice Half a House in the background.



This phase of the outside work being finished, it was time to start smoothing and sanding the joints in the de-popcorned bedroom, hallway and stairwell, while Jeff worked at pulling up some of the remaining tack strips from the carpets the previous owner never completely got rid of like he said he was going to.

The sanding doesn't look like much, but all that dust certainly turns me into a sight.



But that's only temporary. The smoothing will be done in another few months, and we'll never have to remove that nasty texture again. And regardless of how much work this all is, we realize it's worth it every time we walk to the front of the house to see this as the sun goes down.



We are very lucky to be here.