Mine grows rather slowly. I can accept that though. I didn’t think we’d have a garden at all this year, but at the last minute and with the help of friends and DH it came together. Now I’m already thinking of starting more peas and salad greens later on for a second harvest of them.

I purchased the plants you see here – 4 tomatoes (I think they are Sweet 100′s) and mixed salad greens. Carrots and green onions were planted in the ground a few days ago.

Eventually we plan to extend the garden all along this stretch between the retaining wall and fence. I do think I’ll swap the mesh fence for electric fence, the idea being that you can turn the electric off and reach through to harvest things. It’s funny how I thought this stretch would be plenty of room, but I’m already thinking we’ll have to expand somewhere else on the property.

See my little green house? Thanks for this Terese! I’ve added 3 more containers of start since this photo. The leeks are coming up nicely and one of the peas, but there’s not much sign of anything else yet. My latest starts, planted yesterday, are sage, zucchini and more peas.

Not a lot to say about these – we need to order the metal roofing and start putting up trim. The siding will be fake board and batt. At some point will get back to finishing the fencing. In the meantime, Miss Blondie is perfectly happy at her boarding stable.

Warning: picture heavy post ahead! As an extra bonus, something you don’t see on my blog very often: dogs.

We are having a very mild Winter here in Washington. It’s still been very rainy so we take advantage of every sunny day we get. This weekend (and days on each side of the weekend) we’ve had gloriously sunny weather with a high in the 50′s and lows around freezing.

Saturday started with evening up the truss ends and building the lookouts (all of these things create the eves on the outer walls of your building), attaching fascia board, and finally sheeting half of the roof. At the end of the day the crew moved around to the opposite side of the building and got the fascia on, as well as the lookouts. With the prep done, it only took half a day Sunday to sheet the back side. After that it was quick work to roll out the tar paper.

All this work was done with an all volunteer crew of family, friends, and neighbors. I don’t help much with the building aspect, but later on R will help with projects at all of their houses (as he has also done in the past). My main job for the weekend was fetching food/drink, and keeping an eye on the dogs. Shown above is Logan who is 3 years old and Ziva who is 5 months. Logan is *really* gentle, but he’s big so it took an hour before Ziva was comfortable playing with him.

At the time of our last update the concrete was done and the lumber package had been delivered. Very quickly after lumber arriving the walls were up and the trusses were stacked. The building has taken shape!

Next we will be working on sheeting the roof and getting it dry inside. When that’s done it’ll be the walls. The roof will be metal; I’m not sure when the metal sheets will be delivered. I have no idea what type of stall door hardware I want or what type of flooring in the stalls! Guess I need to get busy!

After a lull at the end of last year we’re getting back into our projects around the house. By “we” I mainly mean DH since he works on projects and I go to work for someone else during the day.

In the last two weeks we’ve done 2 concrete pours for the barn. We went from footings only as you see in the first photo (you’ll have to take my word for it – in the photo you can barely see the footings and rebar sticking out of them), to stem walls being poured and panels stripped, to pouring the floor in the barn and spreading gravel in the stalls, to nicely back filled, and finally the lumber arrived yesterday.

I’m excited! Although it’s wet outside this morning the weekend is supposed to be mostly dry. DH is preparing for truss delivery next week which means all the walls have to be up.

Here we go again – this time it’s fencing. Looking west from the master bedroom deck you see the trees have been cleared a bit further and the footings have been dug for the 24×36 foot barn. Between where the footings have been dug and where the fence posts start, there will be two mud free paddocks. To the left of the photo the barn will have it’s own driveway connecting it to the private road we live on.

Turning to the right we see all the way down to the far corner of the pasture. There will be a gate down there that goes out onto part of our property that will be left treed. Once we get around to making a trail through the trees, we will be able to directly access state land.

Now we’re looking north and you can see how the pasture comes up close to the house. We had some concrete blocks left over from the wall that will get used around the septic tanks and then we can finally plant something around them.

Finally, this is looking east and you can see the upper pasture.

Just like the wall that was built last weekend, this project is coming together quickly with the help of another neighbor. R has a tractor with a post hole digger and he spent yesterday evening and a good part of today digging holes for us. Later on this year or next year, my R will repay the favor by helping with his fencing or building projects.

. . . we built the pyramids, Math, science, history, unravelling the mysteries, that all started with the big bang! Oh wait, that’s the theme song to The Big Bang Theory and all we built was a retaining wall.

Technically there was no “we” because my only contribution to this project was 1) the idea to get rid of the slope and replace it with a wall that provides strong definition to the driveway; 2) ordering the rock. Between Richard, our neighbor M__, and two young men who live next door they knocked this thing out in 2 days!

We even had enough gravel that the horse trailer is now parked on gravel too. Whether I can back it up onto that spot remains to be seen!

Enough about gravel – A Midsummer Night’s Dream is blocking and will be unpinned tonight or tomorrow…

I haven’t done a house post in forever. When we left off with house posts the house wasn’t quite done (really, is a house *ever* done?) and some progress has been made that you haven’t seen.

This is the back deck and patio:

It’s not 100% finished. We still need to pour a step between the upper and lower levels and eventually we need some landscaping. At least it’s usable though! Now I can move the outdoor table out here, get the barbecue out of the garage, and we can go out the door of our second floor master bedroom.

Next up I believe we will be tackling this area of future horse pasture (there’s more off to the left that’s not visible in the photo). It needs to be fenced and I need to continue removing the undesirable weeds.

The last two weeks I was working on site in western Washington and staying at my house there. It was less hectic at the office which gave me the time to dig into stuff at the house. I was rummaging around in the garage every evening that I was home. With all the sorting, tossing, and giving away I made quite a dent in the garage mess.

(Gratuitous house photos included below so as to not have a photo-less post and because I miss my house.)

Given away:
- 1 large box of clothes
- 1 large box of miscellaneous goods
- 3 sets of arm curl type weights
- 1 air conditioning unit
- 1 medium box of horse stuff
- 1 small box of beauty supplies
- 1 large box of new painting supplies
- 4 windows
- 1 exterior door

Tossed (mostly recycled):
- about 10 cardboard boxes that were emptied in the sorting process
- 1 small box of mixed paper
- 4 bags of trash

Then I brought some things back to Montana that I’ve been wanting to use. The most exciting of which was my sewing machine, quilting supplies, and fabric. I also brought back some clothes and shoes, and my bicycle.

I didn’t do much knitting while I was gone, but I do have a finished object to show you in the next post.

Tonight we expect to move over to our new rental house. We’d be over there already if we could be, but it was just this morning I got the high speed Internet connected (required for work) and most of the furniture was delivered. Here’s the house.

So, so much nicer than this crappy apartment where we can’t get away from our neighbors. It’s much bigger than what we need, but there’s not a lot to choose from and moving into a house that’s normally rented to college students was NOT an option. Every day I think I can’t take even ONE more day in this apartment so it will be a relief to get this move done.

We looked all over town and finally found furniture at the last place we looked. In all honesty, even if we had gone here first we wouldn’t have known what we wanted anyway.

After the lengthy furniture buying process we still managed to go to Costco and purchase all our linens. They’re washed and ready to go! There are still some basics we need, but we should be able to cover it with a trip to Target and Costco (again).