2011: The Year of Projects

Well, I think it's safe to say spring is finally really here. After enduring a nearly endless winter (fourth snowiest ever) and a very chilly start to spring, the weather looks to have made the turn to niceness. We're on our fifth day of no rain, lots of sun and temps in the 60s and 70s. Ahhhh. I've spent hours in the garden the last few days, finishing up the spring cleanup and getting most of my plants in. More on that later.

We're getting (or doing) all kinds of work done this year. Part of it is the desire to put our garden plan into action, but I have to admit part of it is this little thing called a wedding we have coming up next June... We'd like to have the yard looking good when everyone is here, and certainly want a nice place to sit outside! So we have several things going on. The first outdoor project is nearly done. We had this shed installed last week.


We started with just bare yard.


Then the metal foundation went down.


Once the wood was on top of the foundation, getting to here took about 20 minutes! In case you're wondering, that's not our garage in the picture - it's our neighbor's.


All done!





Our nice (and now not so empty...) interior.



The installers did all the work in about 5 hours! We have yet to paint it, but that shouldn't take long. We'll paint to match the house, so the trim will probably need 2 coats, but we may get away with one for the siding. I'll finally have a good place to store all my gardening materials! Think of the extra room in the garage... We do have both cars in our two car garage, but it's pretty crowded in there. We've already moved the mower over, but not anything else.

That brings us to Project 2. This one's not so fun. Turns out we need our roof replaced. Grrr - it's only around 10 years old and we put on 30 year shingles. We can't totally blame the weather (causing the ice dams), either. We found out our shingles were defective. Of course the company involved covers only the depreciated cost of the shingles, not the paper underneath or the labor or anything else. So we have roofers coming soon. They're also going to insulate our storage areas upstairs, so everything has to be moved out before they come. Hence not moving gardening stuff into the shed... We don't have time to sort through all this stuff before they come (who knew we'd accumulated so much???), so the boxes are going into the shed for now. It's mostly baby stuff, so I'm sure we won't be keeping much of it.

Project 3 is in the middle of the work. More on that as I get pictures!