One of the things that I noticed was that the roof was growing a lot of weeds, so I cleared those off and completed covering it with indoor/outdoor carpet. I also put sheet plastic under the carpet to help keep the dirt dry, which is supposed to make it a better insulator. We also had to use a lot of big rocks to hold it down since the wind through this little valley can get serious at times.
Another thing we did was finish pouring the sidewalk around the house, and added a patio. I will show that later, but we were able to add a little parking pad for my trailer with the left over concrete.
When we first bought the property, I put in 2 garden boxes and filled them with asparagus, and then neglected them for 4 years. This year I moved the original 2 boxes, added another one, and replanted the aparagus.
The first box now has 4 blueberry bushes and snow peas, with a Fig Tree in the planter that will get moved later.
The second one has the transplanted asparagus. I let it go to seed for a while to re-establish the roots, but I am ready to start harvesting again. We can harvest just about once a week, and since there are 13 plants, that turns into a decent side dish.
This third one is our summer box. It has multiple varieties of tomatoes, peppers, okra, and squash.
Other things we have been doing over the last few weeks are re-painting the shutters and doors to a softer grey. We didn't like the blue-grey we had.
We added a fence around the utilities to cover them up.
And one of the most dramatic changes has been putting red mulch in our tree ring and adding a couple of "small" rocks (I had to have a skid steer for this). Momma put a bunch of little knick-knacks in the ring. You can also see that we added more gravel around the house, and the patio and pergola are also visible in this picture.
Speaking of the pergola, here are some in process shots, and some close-ups of the fancy details. Notice the yellow scaffold. It was invaluable in this project.
This picture shows part of the new sidewalk (lighter color) in front of the left module. It just happens to show 3 of the new kittens that are hanging out at our place. Last year a stray cat took up residence under a tarp we had over a bunch of stuff stored outside and dropped a load of 5 kittens. After a few weeks, she left them on their own and we took them to the Humane Society. We cleaned out the storage mess and put in a new shed (see next picture). Well, she is back living under the shed and this time dropped 7 kittens. I plan on making sure she is fixed this time before she runs off again.
And lest we forget why we built this house in this place, see the view up the valley from our driveway. I look at this view every morning on my way to work.
