Monday, September 4
Sep. 5th, 2023 03:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
A cool, overcast day which is actually good for working outside.
That my Sweetie worked more on the insulation.
I spoke with Sister E for a while. She and her husband are now officially living in their new house in town, and the new owners will take possession of the acreage in the next week or so.
It sounds like they got rid of a lot of stuff. She talked about finally just hiring two guys with a truck to empty the contents of the garage and take it to the dump, after they picked out what they wanted from it. I feel a little badly about that, as it likely wasn't all truly junk, but I understand reaching a point where you don't need it, and it's work to see if anyone else wants it, and a thrift store might not take it either.
I worked on the mulch area. Again.
I am just so tired of working on the house and the yard like this. Before we moved this house onto the property, I had lots to do to maintain things, but now I have to maintain the same amount of things AND try to get ahead on big projects.
I know we had to bring the house here to replace the falling down around our ears trailer, but it has been four years of work without an end in sight. Sure it's BETTER, as my ever sickeningly at times optimistic husband points out, but there really does not seem to be an end in sight.
At some point, I have to work up the courage to fix the cracks in the plaster walls that lace around EVERY ROOM in this house from moving it here. Then I have to sand it, prime it, and paint it. EVERY ROOM. I will have to move everything out of each room, and move it back in. That in itself looms like doom.
We used to have more time to hike, go kayaking, or whatever, but now it just seems like every day if we're not working on something fairly big for at least part of our day, we're falling behind.
I really don't "enjoy the process" of constant work on the house. If you had told twelve year old me that I would spend almost all of my adult life working on a house (we spent seven years renovating our first house, then on and off constant work on the old trailer to keep it livable, now this house. Twenty years doing this), I would have been somewhat discouraged about my future.
It's nice to HAVE a house, and I always expect to have SOME routine work, but this just feels endless.
It's hard to enjoy it when all it feels like is being surrounded by work that needs to be done.
So, that's all I did today. I worked on pulling grass and weeds from the next area I want to mulch, pulling some huge rocks out of the dirt there, digging out some piles of dirt (It's just an uneven area that has had clay piled there and partly removed, then a big pile of top soil piled there and partly removed, and it's all hummocky and the grass grew in and made it solid).
I also dug a trench to lay in more of the wooden ties for edging.
Then I laid down some cardboard to make the first layer of mulch, and covered it with the last of the cube of wood mulch.
Yes, it's an enormous project, it has taken me most of the summer in bursts, and we still have a lot to do. I really want it finished this fall, so I don't have to just keep working on it again next year.
Then we came in and watched more "Schitt's Creek". Very funny show, if you ever get the chance.
I read about the volcanic eruption in the Tongan peninsula in 2021/22 that was the largest and most powerful eruption in a century, and was able to be recorded and studied with modern equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga_Ha%CA%BBapai_eruption_and_tsunami
A cool, overcast day which is actually good for working outside.
That my Sweetie worked more on the insulation.
I spoke with Sister E for a while. She and her husband are now officially living in their new house in town, and the new owners will take possession of the acreage in the next week or so.
It sounds like they got rid of a lot of stuff. She talked about finally just hiring two guys with a truck to empty the contents of the garage and take it to the dump, after they picked out what they wanted from it. I feel a little badly about that, as it likely wasn't all truly junk, but I understand reaching a point where you don't need it, and it's work to see if anyone else wants it, and a thrift store might not take it either.
I worked on the mulch area. Again.
I am just so tired of working on the house and the yard like this. Before we moved this house onto the property, I had lots to do to maintain things, but now I have to maintain the same amount of things AND try to get ahead on big projects.
I know we had to bring the house here to replace the falling down around our ears trailer, but it has been four years of work without an end in sight. Sure it's BETTER, as my ever sickeningly at times optimistic husband points out, but there really does not seem to be an end in sight.
At some point, I have to work up the courage to fix the cracks in the plaster walls that lace around EVERY ROOM in this house from moving it here. Then I have to sand it, prime it, and paint it. EVERY ROOM. I will have to move everything out of each room, and move it back in. That in itself looms like doom.
We used to have more time to hike, go kayaking, or whatever, but now it just seems like every day if we're not working on something fairly big for at least part of our day, we're falling behind.
I really don't "enjoy the process" of constant work on the house. If you had told twelve year old me that I would spend almost all of my adult life working on a house (we spent seven years renovating our first house, then on and off constant work on the old trailer to keep it livable, now this house. Twenty years doing this), I would have been somewhat discouraged about my future.
It's nice to HAVE a house, and I always expect to have SOME routine work, but this just feels endless.
It's hard to enjoy it when all it feels like is being surrounded by work that needs to be done.
So, that's all I did today. I worked on pulling grass and weeds from the next area I want to mulch, pulling some huge rocks out of the dirt there, digging out some piles of dirt (It's just an uneven area that has had clay piled there and partly removed, then a big pile of top soil piled there and partly removed, and it's all hummocky and the grass grew in and made it solid).
I also dug a trench to lay in more of the wooden ties for edging.
Then I laid down some cardboard to make the first layer of mulch, and covered it with the last of the cube of wood mulch.
Yes, it's an enormous project, it has taken me most of the summer in bursts, and we still have a lot to do. I really want it finished this fall, so I don't have to just keep working on it again next year.
Then we came in and watched more "Schitt's Creek". Very funny show, if you ever get the chance.
I read about the volcanic eruption in the Tongan peninsula in 2021/22 that was the largest and most powerful eruption in a century, and was able to be recorded and studied with modern equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga_Ha%CA%BBapai_eruption_and_tsunami
