Yard Progress

We have put in a lot of time cleaning up our mess of a backyard and you can finally see some progress being made, even though we have a lot more work to go. You can find some of before and progress pictures her: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2224747&id=18304404&l=cde4d136ce.

I'm ready to have the yard finished, so I have been trying to spend as much time as possible cleaning. Brice isn't quite as motivated, but he did spend some time out there with me this afternoon. I think my motivation is to just get everything done so that we can get to a point where all the major projects are done and we can relax.

We finished taking out the half wall on the patio, it really opened it up and made it seem bigger.

Some of the "damage" from today. I went to town on some over grown shrubs. I still need to tackle the sage. We get trash picked up once a week, and everything has to fit inside a can that we roll out to the street, so we will slowly be getting rid of the bags. We typically only have one bag of household trash, so we can usually throw out 3 or 4 bags from the yard. This area had some large flowering perennials, that I trimmed back to the grown. There are new ones sprouting up. I dug out a few of these in another section and they have a pretty nasty root system. I'm not really sure what they are, but they have really pretty yellow flowers in September, but I think they can be pretty invasive, so I want to be sure they don't get out of control

I really should invest in a wheelbarrow. These are rocks that were randomly thrown around the yard. I still have a lot more to move. I have a 5 gallons bucket that I've been using to move the rocks. We plan to use some of these once we get every cleaned up and stat putting it back together again. I set up my stereo that I got for Christmas back in high school in our shed and pull the speakers when I'm working in the yard. It makes it a lot better having music to listen to. Here's a view were you can definitely see progress. We (I) removed a flower bed, some shrubs, and random rocks. I still have more rocks to move, before I can finish removing the shrub, but I ran into fire ants and decided I'd move on to another area. The willow still needs more trimming. We are still planning on adding a small area of grass in the yard, but have to finish the cleaning first.

Soccer

I've been playing on an indoor and outdoor soccer team. My indoor team won the winter league and we are undefeated so far in the spring season. For indoor I usually play at least half the game as goalie. My outdoor team is 3-1. I scored two goals in our game today, bringing my season total to 4. I've been playing forward mostly for this team. I haven't been having problems with my knees either.

Kitchen

We had granite counter tops installed in out kitchen last weekend. Our kitchen is small, but between the new counters and appliance, it looks tons better. Hopefully it will make it easier to sell this place, when we decide that it is time to move. We originally looked at some formica from home depot, because the price was appealing. We decided we'd look at a few granite places just to see how much it was going to cost. After haggling with the shop just a few miles from our house, I was able to get them down quite a bit on the price, so we decided that we should go for. The pictures make the counters look lighter than what they actually are in person. There are some dark red flecks that look really good with our cabinets. There is a mixture of the dark read, cream, brown, dark gray, and some iridescent flecks.

Just after installation, the color is called giallo santo

We went with a granite composite sink that is a dark grey, rather than the typical stainless. One reason was that we couldn't find a large single basin sink in stock with 16 or 18 gauge stainless. We found some on with 20 gauge, but wanted to get something that we were sure would hold up since the undermount sink is pretty permanent. This sink we got has a think wall and is supposed to be stain and scratch resistant. I love having the big single sink! Also, Thanks to Finnis and Penni for letting us have their old faucet, I looks great!

Here's a shot of the new appliances with the counters

Here's another view. You can see my orchids too. I was very happy they survived the move and are happily blooming.

Smokin'

We had been talking about getting a smoker for a while, and we finally got one. I did some research about them, because I knew that we wanted something that was easy and didn't require a lot of babysitting to maintain the temperature. So I decided that electric was going to be the write one for us. I ordered it from home depot, since they didn't have this particular one in the store. It just so happened it arrived on Valentine's day, so I called it Brice's present, even though it was something I wanted too :-). It is super easy to use. Set the temperature and add some wood chips and that's about it. It has a built in meat probe that will read out to a remote too. We have used it every weekend since we got it. We've cooked for a few people and everyone loves the pulled pork. We are still working on perfecting the chicken and just need to use a milder wood when we do ribs.