Put some finishing touches on the greenhouse this weekend. It’s starting to look pretty good in there.

First, I built a couple of plant benches. I used grid tops from Charlie’s Greenhouse and Garden for the tops. Rather than buy the $139 benches from Charlie’s I used some 5/4 x 4 stock from Lowes. Each bench took 6 pieces – so for a little more than half of what it costs to get one bench from Charlie’s I built two benches for my greenhouse.

I should draw them up sometime. I looked for plans for cheap greenhouse benches on line and couldn’t find any. Someone else might use them.

Anyway, I also bought some wire shelves to put up above the cedar benches, and a plastic storage unit to hold chemicals and seeds and stuff. Still need to build another plant bench for the West wall and a potting bench for the South, but it looks nice and greenhousy in there.

Just for fun I also planted a flat of spinach and lettuce. Should have some plants growing in there, otherwise having it will be a little silly.

Last time I worked on the greenhouse I managed to build the door just a leetle bit too big. I’ve got a 71 1/2 inch hole, and I made the door 72 inches tall. Add the fact that the material that I used for the door was lousy, I decided to start over with new wood and do it right.

The second time. Close enough.

It’s been so nice the last couple of days that it seems a shame not to get out and enjoy the weather. So while dinner cooked I went out to the barn and put together a new door. First I measured. Then I measured again. I went down to the barn and cut. Then I hauled the newly cut board back to the greenhouse and tried if for fit. Carried it back to the barn and trimmed off half an inch. Carried it back to the greenhouse and made sure that it worked. Measured the cut board. Measured it again. Went to the barn and cut the next board. Back to the greenhouse. Fit the board.

You can see how this can take a little bit of time to get done, right?

In the end I had a door frame that fit in the hole that I have to put it in, is straight, and is fairly square. It’s not covered, but I can do that tonight or tomorrow.

And the title? Here’s an important safety tip: When you are using an air nailer with small gauge nails, you need to make sure that your fingers and thumbs are further away from the air nailer than the length of the nail. Otherwise, if the nail turns in the wood, like one did to me, you’re in danger of nailing your thumb to the wood.

Like I did.

When I stopped swearing I went in to get a dressing – told Dana that “I’d nailed my thumb.” She thought I meant hit it with a hammer, not driven a nail in.

I hope she doesn’t take my air nailer away…

Yesterday I bought 3 sheets of T1-11 siding for the South wall of the greenhouse. I didn't get a chance to put them on, what with going to the Pumpkin Hurl and all, but I figured I'd get a chance today.

Last night it rained. Hard. Like an inch an hour or so. But today dawned bright and sunny and looked like a good day to go out and get the siding on.

About 10:00 I headed out to  get started. Sure, there are some clouds that look like rain to the West, but I should have some time.

Like most projects, I had to gather the tools from various places around the farm, go back inside for a pencil. All the normal stuff that I need to do before I get started. I laid out the siding, made my measurements, plugged in the saw, remembered to turn on the light switch in the chip shed...

And then it started to rain again, Just a few drips. But somehow, I knew. I put everything away, slipped the siding into the chicken coop. And then the sky opened up and it poured. By the time I walked the 150 feet back to the house I was soaked like I was in the shower. Now I'm sitting here watching the rain come and go. Well, not exactly go. Mostly I'm watching it rain, and then rain harder.

 Weather Underground says we might get a break on Tuesday. Maybe I'll get a chance after work to cut the wood and attach the siding.

Update: It certainly did rain harder. For a short time the Monroe City Hall weather station recorded a rain rate of 4 inches an hour. After that it dropped back to 2 inches an hour for a short time. And then it quit. At 10:45 you would have been soaked stepping out the door. By 11:00 the rain had stopped. By 11:30 it was sunny again.

I headed back out to the greenhouse, moved the tools and the siding back to the barn and made my cuts there. Then I hauled the now shorter siding back to the greenhouse and nailed it up. Next I need to build the roof vents.

It's taken me months to get it done, but today a shearer finally showed up at our house to shear the sheep. The were starting to look a little ragged around the edges, the last guy who sheared them didn't do the best job ever, and their long wool was starting to look a little green at the ends what with all the rain we've been getting lately.

I started looking for a shearer in June of this year. Back 30-odd years ago when I raised sheep on the family farm that's about the time of year when we sheared, a memory that was reinforced by the flock just West of Duvall, they started losing their fleeces around June too. The first person I contacted didn't show up for our appointment. Didn't show up and didn't call to let us know that he wouldn't be coming. Customer service at its finest. I realize that losing the business of a flock of 5 sheep isn't going to break this guy, but I might have more someday. I won't, but he don't know that...

After that it took me a while to even find another shearer that was willing to come and shear a small flock like mine. Once I did, he only makes appointments a month out, and then he needed to reschedule a couple of times. Not a big deal, but I took time off for the first one and missed some work for the second time too.

He did do a nice job on the girls, he only nicked one sheep, which I remember as being a big deal. I'm not sure how much wool we got, but if it's a conservative 15 pounds each, we have 75 pounds of wool sitting in the garage. On Craig's List you can buy wool for $2.00 a pound, so the 75 pounds of wool will just pay for getting the sheep sheared. Next I need to figure out how to "skirt" fleeces. Sounds like the kind of thing you should know how to do if you are selling wool.

I took a four-day weekend this week to get caught up on some of the work around the place. With all the rain we’ve been getting we’re behind on the mowing and trimming – all the grass is too long and the stuff around the fences is out-of-control.

Thursday wasn’t too bad; Dana and I did a few small things around the place, and when the kids came home we started them mowing. Friday Dana and I brought out the line trimmers; between the two of us we managed trim all the grass from the front of the property to the alley. We even cut down all the long grass and weeds on the hill behind the house. In the afternoon we went down to Lowe’s and bought supplies for Saturday’s project: a bunch of fence posts and bags of concrete.

Saturday we started working on the fence around the vegetable garden.  I planted the five corner posts and cemented them in. Around 11:30 it started to feel like it was going to rain so we packed all the tools away and headed inside. Of course, we never got a drop.

In the late afternoon I decided that enough was enough and I took the tractor out into the pasture and started mowing. The sheep are eating a lot of grass, but the pasture is still ahead of them. I mowed off the alley and the top of the hill down to the access road. It’s starting to look better, but I need to get out and cut the thistles off soon before they start setting flowers and seeds.

It’s been a long, cold spring. Today is the solstice – the longest day of the year. More than 16 hours of daylight, but not a ray of sunshine to be seen.

Dana bought me a little plastic greenhouse for Valentine’s Day. It’s nothing like the ones that I thought I wanted last year – it’s just 4 feet wide and about 8 feet long. I figured out that it will hold about 18 flats of plants, but that’s plenty for me to be getting in trouble with right now.

We set the greenhouse up next to the garden shed. We tried to pin it to the ground with the stakes that came with the kit but there is a layer of rocks about 6 inches down that we can’t drive a wire stake through. We put several concrete pavers on the frame to hold it down, hopefully it will keep it from blowing away.

Anyway, we looked through the Seattle Tilth gardening calendar that I bought a couple of years ago. We figured that when the calendar said “start in a cloche” that was the same as starting in our greenhouse, so we planted some spinach and some hardy annual flowers to start with. There’s only one flat of plants in there right now, so you can see that I’m starting slowly.

It works pretty well, actually. Dana put a thermometer in it and she found that the temperature inside was around 10 degrees above the outside temperature. Today i went out and found the temperature was 87 degrees inside, and only 60 degrees or so outside. It really catches the sun and makes it heat up inside.

And it gets pretty humid. The ground is very wet underneath – the rain we’ve gotten that last couple of weeks has really saturated the ground. The greenhouse is pulling that moisture up into the air, when I went in this afternoon my glasses immediately fogged up.

I’m looking forward to getting some more plants started inside the greenhouse and seeing how it works out for us. If we like the way it works we’re going to build a more substantial greenhouse for next year, something that will be big enough to hold quite a few plants as well as a place to sit and relax on sunny winter days.

Sounds pretty good to me.

On Tuesday Dana and I went to Home Depot while the kids were at cat 4H and bought 18 boxes of Pergo laminate flooring, along with the floor padding and a few tools that we need to get the job done. Last night we started unloading the family room so that we can put new laminate flooring in instead of the existing carpet, which after only two and a half years is starting to show the wear and tear of cheap carpet in a high-traffic area of the house. We finished unloading the family room tonight after watching Burn Notice, hey, after all we need to have our priorities straight.

Anyway, as soon as the show was over I started taking apart the A/V equipment in the entertainment center. Wow, was it dusty. There were dust bunnies on the dust bunnies hiding behind the equipment. Sneezing happened.

After moving out the couch and the entertainment center we got to work pulling the molding from around the room. Dana came up with a marking system, and the kids carried the strips out into the garage.

After that Joey and I rolled up the old carpet and hauled it out to the garage. I needed to work fast, Dana was getting awfully close to vacuuming the carpet that we were about to throw away. Joe and I managed to stave that off, however.

Next up was the carpet pad. I was surprised (although I guess I shouldn’t be) to see lines of moisture where the subfloor panels butt together. Dana said there was moisture in the carpet pad too. The new underlayment for the laminate is supposed to provide a moisture barrier, not sure what good it will do but it sounds good.

Anyway, the family room is now almost the same as it was before they put the carpet in. It’s funny – I saw this house’s bones when it was going up but I still find it intimidating to see the subfloor hanging out there.

We jumped pretty quickly past the “OK, we’re committed” part of this project. Now that the carpet is out we pretty much have to go ahead with the project. Only we’re still not 100% certain, or even 90% certain, that we can pull it off. This could still be a train wreck.

Cross your fingers.

This afternoon we pulled all the petunias from the front garden. Back in the spring Dana planted three flats of petunias (plus a few more) to fill in the gaping holes between the few perennials we had planted out there.

Dana took two heaping wheel barrow loads of petunias to the compost bin, then I came out and started helping. We switched to the tractor and filled the bucket on the tractor twice.

There is almost two feet of petunias on top of the compost heap right now. I know that they will break down over the winter and be ready to turn back into the gardens in the spring, but sheesh, that’s a lot of petunias.

We built a new garden this weekend. We didn’t mean for it to turn into a cat garden, but the cats had other ideas…

The back side of new deck (the one toward the pasture) looked unfinished – we needed something to anchor the deck and provide a place for the eye to go. We decided that what we needed was another(!) garden, one with a water feature that we can hear on the deck and with a Japanese maple tree to stop the eye from wandering out to the pasture.

I went to Lowe’s in Silver Lake on Tuesday. I found a 91-gallon pre-formed pond on sale. We went back on Wednesday to buy it. Dana went to Mulbak’s on Friday where she discovered they were having a sale. She picked up perennial plants for the new garden.

On Saturday we started by cutting the sod out of the space where we wanted the new garden to be. Joey and Dana knocked the topsoil off the sod so we could use it later. Once the sod and topsoil was off the garden I used the roto-tiller to loosen the clay underneath. We dug out 4 inches of clay, then roto-tilled again to break up the next 4 inches. I added two tractor buckets of compost, roto-tilled, put another bucket of compost on and the topsoil we took off earlier and roto-tilled again. It took half the day, but we had almost 8 inches of good soil for the plants.

After taking a break I started digging out the hole for the pond. The clay around the house is pretty nasty – hard to break through and full of rocks. Eventually I had a hole I could use, but by then it was time to stop and go shopping for trees.

Dana and I went to Home Depot in Woodinville for the trees. They’re having a sale – we ended up getting two rhododendrons for the front yard, a maple tree for the end of the driveway, a willow for the other back corner of the house, and a Japanese maple for the new garden that we’re working on. Beautiful plants, lots of digging to get them in.

Sunday we finished digging in the pond, made two trips to Lowe’s for sand to put around the pond, and finally planted our new plants. We put a drip irrigation system in to water. After filling the pond we sat back to enjoy it – and to watch all the cats run around the garden, play in the pond, and play with each other. It’s pretty successful for all of us.

Needed to work at home today – Dana is working late and Joey has a playoff baseball game he needs to be at by 4:30. Thankfully, both my manager and my company make it easy for us to work from home when we need to.

It’s pleasant working here in the den. I’ve got room on my desk for two laptops and my big monitor, the fish tank is just over on the other side of the room, there is a cat on my feet under the desk, and I can turn up my music on the stereo.

Without a commute I can start working early (today I was online by 6:30 a.m.) and quit when I get to 8 hours. No distractions, no stops by and talks, and for the most part I can stay in touch with my co-workers through e-mail and IM. Almost like I was at work with the door shut.

Here’s the view out my window – beats looking at Greg’s door across the hall like I do at the office.