June 1st -- The painter sent an e-mail today asking if he could come on Wednesday instead of tomorrow. He needs a rig to finish painting the gutters and the exterior touch ups and will have that rig and an additional crew member on Wednesday. So, the interior and exterior painting will be done on Wednesday, instead of Monday. However, the new refrigerator will arrive on Tuesday as planned.
The finish carpenter arrived a bit after 8:00am this morning and was ready to roll. Me, too, but as I've always said, spring comes at the wrong time of the year for me when I am the busiest. There are just too many outside things that need to get done, so today was another day without moving things from the garage into the house. Well, except one thing from the garage...my fountain...was moved out and onto the deck.
The deck is really taking shape, especially since I was able to get my fountain hung exactly where I had envisioned it. And, after being in storage in the garage for about a year and a half, I was delighted when I filled it up, set up the pump, plugged it in and yeah...there you go.
Once the exterior painting is done, I have some solar-powered strings of light that I will run on the pergola.
The shelving standards on both the north and south walls of the greenhouse are set. I will need to buy a few more shelves and brackets, but the basics are good to go. The experiment will be to paint a bunch of one-gallon plastic milk jugs black, fill them with water, and place them on the shelves next to the brick wall of the house so that it can serve as a tombe wall to capture the heat during the day and hold that heat to warm the green house overnight.
The "everbearing" variety of raspberries (an early spring crop and a late fall crop) are really taking off with flowers. The honey bees from a local hive visit and at times the entire raspberry patch is buzzing with activity. I'm in awe of how the raspberries have survived construction, along with other things in the yard.
The finish carpenter connected the old gas cooktop in the basement for the future microbrewing center, and he did a great job.
He even added a shut off valve so that I can turn the gas line off when not in use.
The last item on the official punch list was to install a piece of flashing by the rear-entry door, which is shown below.
The finish carpenter is building a shelf unit for me to put in the master bathroom so I can store things that won't fit in the med cabinets, such as rolls of toilet paper and bottles of shampoo. He will build it off site this week and plans to return to install it on either Tuesday or Wednesday evening. He is really great at what he does and I will ask him for an estimate to install a whole house fan.
In the meantime, I put some fertilizer on the lawn last week and the heavy rains really greened up the lawn. Today I brought out the weed whacker and trimmed the lawn and then mowed it. I also dug up a part of the bed that was overgrown by grass and I used the grass that I dug out to patch a particularly bad spot where the excavator really tore up the lawn. I can't get to the bag of grass seed in the garage yet, so I figured that I had to dig up the overgrown grass anyway, so I dug it up so that I could try to "patch" the bare lawn. If it doesn't take, I will reseed it this fall. I will need to add additional soil and amend the flower bed with peat moss and then I have some perennials to plant this week.
Here is my "patched" lawn.
The front yard is really coming back and I'm thrilled by how much has survived, such as my bearded iris in bloom.
The front perennial bed looks great, especially with the drip irrigation system. I have a few more plants to add this week.
There are more bearded iris by the front porch and the day lilies look like they might start blooming next week.
The pink landscape roses used to run along the entire south side of the house, but now only a small patch remains near the front fence because of the construction of the deck and greenhouse. The remaining landscape roses are thriving and about to go into full bloom mode.Despite the small set back with the painter, it looks like the house might really be done this coming week in terms of the work with the contractor. Of course, when I will get everything back inside the house from the garage is another story.
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