Games and Chores

This past weekend we hosted another game night on Saturday.  We had a great turnout and ate lots of delicious food!  On Sunday we did a few chores including digging a trench and running a water line to the garden, continuing to organize the shop, and hanging a photo collage in the kitchen.  We will be spending next weekend in Florida at the Aresco's relaxing and don't plan on working on any house projects!

First Raised Bed

Yesterday I was finally able to install the first of many of my raised garden beds.  I partially buried the aluminum rails and then filled the area with three heaping wheel barrow loads of compost.  Hopefully that will help the plants a little!  Now we need to figure out what materials we will be using for the other 19 beds...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here's an updated photo of the winter garden.  The eggplant were mostly killed off from the freeze last week but the broccoli, spinach, green peppers, lettuce, and garlic are all looking good.

 

Today's Chores

This weekend we got a late start on projects around our house because we spent most of Saturday running errands and going to a swing dance in Statesboro.  Today, however, we were able to accomplish a few things.

 

We started in the front yard by cutting down branches.  Here is a before photo:

 

We had to pull out the extra large ladder for this job!

 

After.  Much brighter and a lot less like a jungle!

 

One of our errands on Saturday took us to a nursery where all of the plants were 40% off.  We bought 12 azalea bushes to replace the ugly bushes that we removed from the front of the house.  I still need to dig out the rest of the stumps and do some drainage work before we can plant the azaleas, but we couldn't pass up the sale!

 

Matthew also cut up more firewood today.  During some of our clearing work last year we cut logs into 6' sections and piled them up in the woods.  Since it has been a little chilly here we have been using a lot of firewood and decided to finish cutting up the logs.

 

We spent the afternoon in the barn rearranging Matthew's shop and my tack/feed room.  It will be a while before we put up the boards on the walls of the tack room so we decided to go ahead and move the rest of the stuff in.  Everything fit just like it was supposed to!  Also, by moving the horses' feed bins to the barn we made room to store some firewood on our porch for easy access.

Weekend Work

This past weekend we worked on a few small projects around our house in between dancing and working on one of the rental houses.

 

On Saturday we picked up two more rabbits to add to our collection.  Rabbit production has been very slow lately so we bought another doe and buck to help speed things up.

 

The doe has black ears and a black nose.

 

The buck is all white.

 

We also added a 12 foot gate in the horses' pen in preparation for my parents' visit over Christmas.  We will be splitting the pen in half during their visit to make room for their horses and they will be using this gate.

On Sunday we burned some of the stumps left from the horses' pen.

King's Mountain

Last weekend Matthew took Friday off and we headed up to King's Mountain State Park in Blacksburg, SC for another NATRC competitive trail ride.  I took Rabi for the ride and we competed in the two day event this time.  We rode almost 16 miles on Saturday and the same on Sunday with many obstacles along the way.  It was raining when we arrived but stopped within a couple of hours and turned into a beautiful weekend.  We were even able to visit the King's Mountain National Park museum on Saturday afternoon between events.

 

Here Rabi and I are waiting to vet in on Friday night, he is still a little wet from the rain.

 

 

Vetting in with the horsemanship judge.  Rabi did really well on this ride!

 

All of the riders gathered at 7:30 am Saturday ready to head out.  I think there were 42 riders to start but a few dropped out along the way.

 

Rabi and I at one of the pulse and respiration checks the first day.  He passed with flying colors!

 

And here's a view of the trails on the second day - much drier than the first!  I ended up placing 5th in my division and Rabi placed 4th in his.  All and all a great weekend even if we didn't get home until about 10:00 pm (which felt like 11 due to the time change) on Sunday night.  Next time I will try to remember take pictures of camp and Matthew!

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Halloween

Better late then never, here are some photos from the Halloween dance we went to two weekends ago!  This year we decided to make our own costumes, courtesy of Great Dane, and dress up like characters from Breaking Bad.  If you've never seen the show then you might just think we were a haz-mat crew!

Project Weekend

Jane and Richard came to visit this past weekend so as usual we got out the home improvements to-do list and started crossing things off!

 

Before our company arrived, Matthew prepared the laundry room for installing the door.  He cut out the wall board, removed the insulation, and moved the wiring out of the way.

 

The next morning Matthew and Richard figured out where the opening would be on the outside of the house and cut away the siding using the dremel.

 

 

Now there is a hole in the house!

 

Placing the new door into the hole - it fit just like it was supposed to!
























We finally have an entry way with a bench and shoe rack!  Now all I need to add is a rug and coat rack.

 

While the guys were busy with the door, Jane and I put in another flower bed around the house.  The area around the car port, air conditioner, house, and a tree is difficult to mow and maintain, so I decided it would look better if we made it into a bed.  Here is the before photo:

 

We dug up all of the grass, edged the area with black plastic edging, put down landscape fabric, and then I covered the bed in mulch.

 

The final product!

 

The flower bed didn't take too long so Jane and I were also able to work a little bit on the "front" of the house.  This side faces the woods so we really don't spend much time around it and have not done any improving yet.  Here is a before photo of the jungle.

 

Before removing the leaves and other debris, Jane got out the chainsaw and made short work of those ugly bushes!

 

I dug out chain link fence posts (we used the actual fencing for the garden) and used our garden tractor and trailer to haul away all of the posts.

 

The pile of extra fencing parts out by the road (someone will pick them up for scrap).  I had already dug up more than half of the posts before this weekend but it was nice to get them all out!

 

Here's what the front looked like when we called it quits for the day.  We will still have to power wash the house, trim the trees back, level out the flower beds, remove the stumps, and plant new plants but I think we'll leave that for another weekend!



















Jane and Richard also made a furniture delivery during their visit - a new entertainment center for our living room!  Now that we have a flat screen TV our old furniture was too big.  This three piece set is perfect for holding our DVDs and all of our gaming systems.  Thank you!!!  Now I need to find some sort of decorations to put on top...

 

And finally, I found this little guy in the leaves around the house, I think it is the smallest snake I've ever seen!