Thursday, May 13

Today I am grateful for:

A lovely warm day. There was some clouds, but it didn't rain (though that would have been okay too).

A good phone conversation with my eldest sister (she's the one who still has horses).

I spent most of the day continuing to clean out the hedge. I think I'll be happy to be done with it for this year, as it seems like I've spent all of my spare time working on it. It ends up feeling like I haven't had a day when I do this, because it's just the same thing again and again, and then it's dark.

I'm feeling really frustrated about the yard. There's a lot of uneven ground from all the work we've done, and big vehicles driving over the lawn. I'm also frustrated that my husband, every time I turn around, in spite of me saying at least a thousand times "don't drive on the grass", wants to drive over the grass. He treats the whole yard as if it's just a functional area, and not something meant to look nice. We still have stuff stacked on the West side of the house. Some things do still kind of have to be there, but a lot of it doesn't.

We shingled the roof of the addition last summer, and the unused shingles are still sitting in front of the house almost a year later. Why? Because there's no real reason to put them away, right? There's still some pieces of the old front stairs sitting in front of the house, and when I asked him about them, he said "well, we might use them" (we're not going to use them). So, what, they should just sit on the dirt in front of the house? There's a pile of garbage wood from tearing down a little overhang over the front door that he's going to re-use (but he won't move because he needs to "go through it and pull nails", meaning it will sit there until I pull nails and move it for him). There's rocks, broken concrete, and a pile of lumber, a couple of sets of stairs that we are likely not going to re-use, and just SHIT everywhere. Under that is bare dirt that is rapidly filling in with weeds, but I can't landscape it properly and either put gravel on it or grass, because there's shit piled on it. I know that landscaping isn't THAT prioritized, because we're still working on the house. Why can't we landscape AND work on the house? Or at least start addressing the piles of shit that are still there, in spite of me constantly fighting to pick things up and take them to the dump.

Everywhere around the house is more bare dirt. The steps into the house from the front and the back are makeshift from scrap lumber and ugly as hell. They are "just for now" (two years so far, but better than climbing in and out with a ladder which is what we did for a few weeks). There's the broken picnic table that could be fixed in an afternoon, but has sat there like a carcass for two years, at our back door.

There's dirt mounded up higher than a flower bed by the back door, that he says can't be lowered because the higher dirt is the right level, the flower bed (which was somehow fine before) is too low. So, really I should just give up and move the flower bed and get that area leveled.

Yes, he's supposed to be home to work on things in about a week. I don't know if it will be picking up old piles of shit or doing something about all the bare dirt and broken pavement, because the priority will be NEW work, like putting in windows and working on the addition. Which is all great, but a lot of things have been done to the point of being functional, not nicely finished. Like our little tiny porch, which has a jagged hole in the wall with some shelves to store boots, and an unfinished hole with the exterior door stuffed in. We aren't going to finish the jagged hole around the door because it works fine. It might not even be the door we'll keep, so for two years, maybe a couple more, it'll "work". Hard to say when we'll do something about the jagged hole in the wall with shelves for storage. After all, it works fine.

While I am glad that things work fine, it would be nice if we could get so far that they also look good. That they look finished, with no crumbling plaster, and no peeling paint, and things like that. Things that I can paint finally because we won't be cutting more holes in the walls.

It would be nice to walk out to my car in the rain, and not have to slog through clay mud. I could walk on a nice walk way. I could maybe mow the lawn without thumping over old deep ruts left by heavy machinery. Maybe I could have nice flower beds somewhere. Maybe all the building materials will be used up or put away or taken to the dump.

It's so tiring to have to look at all of these things, and for the most part my hands are tied. These things are beyond my ability to fix them, or they require the rest of the house to be more finished.

I do what I can. I keep pushing my husband about whether or not we're going to use something, and to haul it away if not, or to put it away.

I'm doing what I can to keep the yard looking nice, like the work I'm doing to clean out the hedges. I am often the one cleaning the yard, pruning everything, keeping areas clear so I can keep them mowed.

I feel like I can work as hard as I want, and we'll just have to keep moving on with projects, only getting them to a stage of being functional, but not finished or attractive.