Saturday Progress

Last Saturday was so productive! We started off by taking advantage of the break in the rain to get up on the roof to resecure it and tar around all the nail holes in hope of stopping the leaking in our "shop" (It's also our future master bedroom, but for now it's a shop!).

(Unfortunately, while it did help, it didn't solve the issue of the leaking...good thing we are planning on reroofing everything this summer!)

Then while Travis climbed on the roof again to give the chimney a sweep I got some flower beds started off the front porch. I forgot to take before pictures, but here is what it looks like now.

Ok, so it's not very impressive yet, but just give it a couple months. Those ugly strips of green are rolls of wild flower seeds and my hope is that eventually they will be bursting with color and cheeriness!

Next Travis got out his monstrous chain saw (I'm intimidated to use the thing, it's huge!) and trimmed down the wildly overgrown bush in our yard.

Again I forgot to take a before picture but if you can imagine everything in this slash pile below attached to the tree in a wild, chaotic, random way, you'll get a pretty good idea of how it looked.

But since all work and no play supposedly makes you dull we took a break in the weekend and went morrell hunting. Here are our spoils...

I love McCall!

Tiling the Entry

The next project we tackled was tiling our entry way with some of the awesome slate tile we got in Boise (and completely weighed down the poor little car trying to haul it all back to McCall!). It's just a small area, but we really like the way it looks!

Travis started out by laying the HardiBacker and then screwed down some trim around the edge of it to mimic the height of our future bamboo floor. Then began the tedious process of laying the tile.

We love the natural slate tile, but because it's so "natural" it was very time consuming trying to match up the heights of all the tiles, arrange them the best we could so there weren't any drastic drops from one to the other and then use the mortar to even out the best we could!In "just" three hours we ended up with this!

Now we have a lovely, tiled entry way and it was worth all the time and patience it took to get it there (I think). I'm not sure we'll be quite so picky about the process when it comes time to lay the whole bathroom floor!

Free Dump Day

In our last post we talked about the spring bloom (aka "trash) that was starting to pop up in our yard. Well, now we are pleased to say that thanks to free dump day at the local landfill and the help of some great friends we now have a semi trash free yard! It's amazing how much difference it makes to no longer have a toilet in your yard!

What used to look like this...

Now looks like this!

Now we just have to figure out how to get all the broken pieces of glass picked up...