updates...

Progress has been made (mostly in the positive direction)- for the most part we are proud of our accomplishments so far and starting to come to grips with the painstakingly slow process of remodeling.

Excuse the lack of commentary in the past week or so- long days of work followed by hours and hours of construction have not left much time for blogging.

Not all of my projects have been construction related. I planted a cactus garden and it's still kicking after 2 whole weeks in my care. I love it, a garden that thrives because I never remember to water it.

The Birch trees, however, are another story. They are dead. Well, three out of six are dead. But that is not completely our fault. They were half dead when we bought the house... we just didn't fix the sprinklers in time to save them.

We also tamed the weed garden that was our front yard. Then I spread something like 6 yards of mulch (a house warming present from our neighbor Sean who happens to be an arborist).

I finally finished my window seat. Unfortunately it isn't soft enough for Zuri to perch upon, but I am rather proud of the way it turned out.

I also finally got down to business stripping, sanding and finishing the mantel. I don't have any close ups of the finished product but these shots show some of the work that was involved.

Mark has made a ton of progress towards bringing our wiring up to code but I'll let him blog about that. He also liberated more of the porch. If you are thinking that porch progress has been slow, you're right. But we've run into all manor of trouble with getting the doors and windows in. For one thing Home Depot told us we'd have everything in 10 days. For the windows that turned out to be more like 15 and the doors haven't come in yet. Also, we have to find someone else to install them, someone familiar with working with a stone house. We should know more Monday.

We decided that rather then try to mend and extend the poorly

constructed backyard fence, we would just tear down the dilapidated thing and replace it with an 8ft tall redwood fence. (Extending it is necessary in that it only runs the edge of the current porch enclosure which is fine for now, but won't be okay once the porch is opened up), This work is literally going on as I type. By the way, does that look like $1,000 worth of lumbar to you? Redwood is expensive.