Home updates

Or, in some cases, repairs.

Finally, we have gotten somewhat caught up with our major outdoor projects. Of course, as with any home, there is always something more to do, but we now have breathing space.

Our most pressing repair, although it wasn't completely obvious, was a repair to the to the facing board behind the gutter on the back of our house:

We could tell it had some water damage (it had a metal cover, but part of the wood by the downspout was exposed and we could see the water damage), but after I took off the first two foot end board, I could tell the next, twelve foot section had some damage too. That twelve foot section came off in two, three foot pieces of wood:

Needless to say, this showed the quality of work that has been so evident with the rest of the house... Now we have Kilz treated cedar wood up there. That ain't rotting for a hundred years or so...

Then there is the project that took three or so weekends. Last year my wife and I (mostly my wife) started a raised bed vegetable garden. We got months of tomatoes, peppers, and green beans out of those plants. To keep the ravenous squirrels away, we used two tactics: One, that probably did the most, was bribing the squirrels by putting the tomatoes that got insects, etc. under their tree (they were lazy) so that they wouldn't go across the yard to get fresh tomatoes. The other was a quickly assembled chicken wire fence wrapped around some metal posts:

This worked alright, but was unsightly and always got in the way of the weed whacker. This year, not only did we expand the vegetable garden, but we went all out and made a real fence:

If the wood had been straighter, it would have been a quicker build, but now it is up and seems to be holding up to the insane weather we have been having the past several weeks.

I am still working on my MO Democratic Convention posts. If anyone knows a good way to post plain audio (mp3) files right into a blogger blog post, let me know.