And Jeff's mom also came over to our place Thursday morning to clean out the old dead sedum in the bed behind the house. What a nice surprise that was to come home to.
This weekend, we installed the first pedestal sink. Everything looked great. Until the drain started leaking. Tried again. Same thing. Calling the plumber to do it for us. This isn't worth taking the chance over again. It's also the last thing we'll need until the kitchen, so why not?
So instead we turned our attention to other things. Jeff started the cleaning process on the big bedroom upstairs so that we can get the ceiling smoothed and everything painted. He removed the baseboards, too -- no small feat.
While he did that, I mowed the lawn for the first time since we've lived here. This is a big, big double lot, and I was frankly afraid that I'd be in for a four-hour ordeal.
Shockingly, it went by quickly -- around 90 minutes' worth of work. That's doable, and makes me feel like I have no need for a riding lawn mower right now. Maybe in a few years, but we'd rather spend our money on essentials.
The result. Note the pit/pond in the foreground. This will be important later.
Jeff's mom gave us a great housewarming gift: She's paying to have the horrible mess in our yard cleaned up professionally. This means tons of leaves and acorns to be swept away and -- most importantly -- the giant mess of brush and fallen tree limbs hauled off.
I got a couple of bids, and also had them give us a price to regrade around the house with topsoil (an absolute essential, as we get a tiny bit of water in the basement in two spots, where the grading slopes way into the house). The contractor I chose will even seed and straw everything when he's done, for far less than the other guys. And he isn't asking for any money up front. Sounds good to me.
But before that could happen, I had to remove the decking for the first five or six feet so that they can get the dirt in. Much easier said than done, as the screws were the kind with the square-hole heads, requiring a finicky screw bit to get them out. And many were countersunk and stripped. A huge, huge pain, but I finally got it done with only minor damage to three boards. That's reasonable.
A little friend was disturbed that I jostled his hiding place. Hello, Mr. Five-Lined Skink. This photo doesn't do justice to his iridescent tail.
While I removed the boards, Jeff started filling in the pond. I've always been sure that the majority of the fill could come from where the earth had been built up around the hole. It's pretty obvious that most of that lip is heavy clay -- the stuff that should be deep in the ground.
When I finished with the last board, I joined in with the garden fork and started filling. By 7:00, we had no more pit, but only a gently-sloping low spot instead. Too tired to go on any further, we called it a night. I'd feared this would be a several-week job, but we did much better than I expected.
We also decided to dig out two weird pieces of concrete. The big rectangular thing was implanted in the sedum bed for some bizarre reason. It's about four feet long and about a foot wide. Weird. The cylinder was in the middle of the back yard with a cut-off metal post embedded inside. I'm guessing that was a long-abandoned tetherball pole, as it didn't have a mate anywhere else.
The evidence. Don't know how we're going to get rid of this junk.
The landscaping guys should be here in the next two or three days. Then we'll replace the deck boards and get back to finishing up the bathroom. And we've also got our eyes on a nice set of patio furniture to enjoy eating outdoors before it gets too hot.
We're exhausted. Time to rest.
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