Yeah, I know, get outta town, right? But no, Sarah and I did quite a bit of yardwork over the weekend, and it looks pretty good. This is really the first weekend in a couple of months that we've gotten to do any, on account of it raining pretty much every weekend for the past month, and being unbearably hot out the month or so before that.
The first thing
I did was mow the lawn for probably the first time in the last 4 months. Then I broke the lawn mower, and then I fixed it. That was bizarre: Matt and Becca were over visiting as I was just finishing up, and as everyone stood and watched, suddenly the lawnmower began making weird clanging sounds, and then the engine started shaking, and then (and this is the point where I let go of the mower and shut if off) the engine actually
started to spin around. We flipped it over afterwards and checked it out, and all the bolts holding the engine to the frame were gone. My guess is that most of them were missing when we acquired the mower (it came with the house) and that the final bolt fell off I was finishing up on Saturday. A trip to Home Depot to buy new bolts and 15 minutes of reassembly, and the mower was back to normal.
While at Home Depot, I finally picked up a lock to install on the door to the storage room downstairs. Options were limited because of the way the door is constructed, with a 3/4" frame around the door, and a similarly-sized frame around the opening. Eventually I settled on a latch used to lock windows, and installed it vertically. Works great, and we figure that by the time Alex has figuered out how to unlatch it, he'll be old enough to know not to. (Cross your fingers.)
Meanwhile, Sarah rearranged the fountain and the gardens. She took all the medium-to-large sized rocks we had laying around in various gardens, and put them in the fountain. The result is that the fountain looks much cleaner (any crap that falls into the water sinks below the rocks) and the fountainhead is finally stable (thanks to the rocks and a strategically-placed upside-down bucket with a hole cut in its bottom.) She also figured out how to clean the fountainheads more effectively, so it just looks that much nicer.
Sarah had me move the birdbath that was in the middle of our yard to one of the gardens, though we have yet to move the slab that was underneath it. She also used our brand-new pushbroom (from the Home Depot trip) to clean off the patio, which had accumlated a lot of crap from the birch tree above it during the last month's worth of thunderstorms. It's amazing how much better that simple sweeping makes things look.
Back in the early summer, I took down the two big red privacy screens that flanked the patio. We had just propped them up against the side of the house for the time being, but this weekend I finally set to taking them apart. I did one one Saturday and another on Sunday, pulling all the boards apart and hammering the nails out. We now have a couple piles of lumber we're not sure what to do with, but it's an improvement. I also finally took down the clothesline and its pole; most of the pole actually pulled up from the concrete, and the little that remained I was able to hammer back down into the ground. (Beats digging up the concrete block.)
Finally, Sunday night, Elizabeth (who helped me out during Saturday's Home Depot trip) assisted me in collecting all the downed branches from various piles in our yard and garage, and we broke them up and threw them in the fire pit.
Still some work to do, like digging up the three remaining privacy screen posts, and possibly taking down the half-dead tree in the middle of the yard, but this is definitely the best our yard has looked since we've lived here, and it's really starting to feel like "ours" now.
