Brooke here. In the previous post, I described the garden stairs with broad strokes of the brush. Now let’s go over some of those fine fiddly bits which are so critical in those paintings of wide-eyed fluffy kittens. These images are all of the installation of the third frame, so at the time these pictures […]
Brooke here. This post has a lot of pictures but the garden stairs have been dominating the home projects since the trees came down, so that’s okay. Want to see what our garden stairs used to look like? Nope, those are the old stairs. Want a closeup? Need to get closer? We can do that, […]
Brooke here. Sorry for the silence; we’ve had a family loss to attend to. But we’ve still been working, so let’s get away from the ivy: Remember the big pile o’ bricks left over from removing the pool patio? No? Okay, let’s do a quick recap. Our heroes fools bought a house with a […]
Brooke here: There’s one day every winter where the earth remembers what it wants to be doing. It usually takes another couple of months to shake itself awake, but there’s always that one day when the ground twitches. I love that day. Today is that day. I have to keep reminding myself that while it’s […]
Brooke here: I’ve heard it said that landscaping is two steps backward for every one step forward, but I’d bump that up to a decent-paced skip to be safe. We have almost two acres of land, and these were allowed to go all but fallow for a couple of decades. As we are dead-center on […]
Brooke here: Work progresses accordingly, but not in any way that makes it appear as though we are actually doing anything at all. I’ve been reluctant to post for fear that it seems we’re just lying about doing our due diligence as DIYers. For example, we just finished the first round of Chainsawaganza. The “before” […]
Brooke here with a brief progress report on the pool: The day after the Great Tadpole Wrangle, Brown got out the pressure washer and went nuts on the stairs. I shoveled out buckets of gunk*and the rocky debris that had fallen in during the brick haul. The plan is to work backwards towards the deep […]
Q: What are we tired of hearing from contractors? Brooke here. We’ve gotten one estimate on pool repair and another on the cost to replace the deck. Neither are what we anticipated, mainly as the contractors keep pointing out a couple of small structural problems. Like so… After seeing what was hidden under six tons […]
Brooke here: Brick removal is done. There’s just the slightest, teeny-tiny, eeeensiest smidgen of cleanup ahead of us, but the tear up is finished. Our friends Elizabeth and Jo came over to help Brown with the heavy lifting on Saturday, and Elizabeth and I knocked out the last fifty square feet or so this morning. […]
Brooke here: We’re a week into the brick removal stage of the pool repair and roughly half of the brick has been torn up and stripped away. North Carolina had several absolutely gorgeous 70-degree days over the last week – someone must have made a wish – so I spent much of it shoveling rock. […]
Flying by night 