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.

We finished the deck, a whole day ahead of schedule. Every day last week I came home and added 3 or 4 new planks to the deck, so by the time I started Saturday morning I only had half of the 20-foot side to finish up.

On Saturday afternoon Ron and Sue came up, and Ron helped me cut all the planks I needed for the 12-foot side. Dana and I put about half of them on before we gave up Saturday evening. 

On Sunday morning Dana and I finished planking the deck, and then while Dana went to visit her grandmother Katie and I put a facia board around the edges to finish it off. Dana and the kids moved the patio furniture onto the deck, and I hauled the barbecue back around, and Sunday night we ate dinner on the new deck.

I have a tendency to stand in the sliding door and look out at the deck and think: "I did that." 

We had a storm last night. Lots of rain. And wind. Enough that two of the trees we planted yesterday came crashing down overnight, the two furthest from the house. Dana and I got up early to replant them, this time a little deeper than the time before.

While I was at work, two of them blew down again, this time the tree furthest from the house and the one closest to the house. I re-planted them again. Then I put stakes and rope to hold them up.

So far so good. 

We accidentally planted some more trees today.

Not accidentally, per se. It wasn't an accident to plant them, but buying them and putting them in was a spur of the moment sort of thing.

Early on Sunday morning I started digging out the trenches where we are putting the pier blocks for the deck. Dana came out, saw me digging, and said "We need to rent a tool." We rented a little Kubota excavator for the day, 8 hours of engine time in a 24 hour period. Since we only had an hour or so of digging for the patio, we looked around and said, "What else can we use a digger for?"

We came up with three things. Digging in a water line from the hose bib in the middle of the front to the chip shed, digging in an electrical line to the front gate, and digging the holes for the trees. Two of the projects meant leaving ditches across part of the place for a while; putting in the trees seemed like a one-time use of the digger. So that's what we did.

I waited for the excavator to be delivered. Dana headed down to Woods Creek Nursery to buy flowering plum trees. You remember a couple of weeks ago when we planted a flowering plum we bought the smaller trees? This time they didn't have smaller trees, we ended up with three enormous (20-feet tall) flowering plums to plant along the driveway.

Digging the holes with an excavator was easy. I loaded the dirt into the back of the truck and Joey and I unloaded it into the stock pile that I'm building over next to the compost bins. Last time when I planted a tree I used the tractor to mix dirt and compost, and then to haul the mixture to the planting hole. This time I moved one load, and then the front left tire on the tractor blew out. We ended up moving compost the old fashioned way -- shoveling it into the truck and then shoveling it back out.

Putting the trees in the holes was harder than we expected, but in the end we had the three trees planted along the driveway. It looks kinda elegant, the tree-lined driveway up to our house. It's a look that I really like, it's gonna be nice each spring when the trees flower.

We've been describing laying the flagstones for the patio as "building a jigsaw puzzle, only there's no picture on the front of the box, all the pieces are the same color, and none of them actually fit together." It turned out to be exactly like that.

Dana and I hit the, well, not bricks. Rocks I guess. Rocks early and started laying the flagstones for the patio. With only one short break in the morning when my Mom and brother stopped by and a slightly longer one at lunch time, we laid the whole patio by 4:00 p.m.

It looks surprisingly good.

We've decided now that we have the patio we're pretty much committed to building the entire deck. The patio by itself looks pretty silly.