I feel like I haven’t posted in a while, but we’ve still been busy working on things around the house. We’ve been working on the bathroom bit by bit, but I think I’ll wait to post the photos until I feel like we’re done to the point where they’re worth showing. We’ve been painting the base board and medicine cabinet. I guess the medicine cabinet mirror alone took 3-4 days to prep…but more on that when it’s time to show.

Otherwise I guess we’ve done a little bit more garden work. We planted more vegetables in our “vegetable garden”: squash, another tomato, green pepper and a honeydew melon….

Squash and tomato garden bed

In the meanwhile the neighbors kudzu is doing fabulous. I keep trying to fling the growing vines back into their yard when they come onto our driveway. Then I try to go along the fence to tear the ones that are creeping through to our side. What do you do in a situation where your neighbors kudzu is out of control and you care more about it than your neighbor? We bought some weed killer that I’ve utilized a little bit on the neighbors kudzu, but there’s only so much I can reach. It’s a weird situation.

Neighbor’s kudzu

The last few days I’ve been working on prepping a flower bed against the back house wall. I discovered a pack of sunflower seeds and a pack of phlox that we hadn’t used, so since we’re probably already past the point of being able to plant seeds I figured I’d at least give it a try. Before we just dug a hole and planted plants. Now that I have the proper tool (“cultivator”?) I’ve been prepping the bed, loosening all the soil, etc. We should have been doing that stuff all along, but since we’re not only first time homeowners, but also first time gardeners we’re still picking up new stuff. On that note, it’s amazing what all I’ve found while digging up the dirt! I feel like an archaeologist with the items I find. It mainly seems to be tons and tons of rusted nails, and tons of broken glass. Definitely a “WTF, what were these people doing??” moment! In the picture you can also see that we need to repoint our bricks. The mortar is crumbling and disappearing, but through our research we’ve discovered that it’s not as easy as putting new mortar in. Due to the age of the house the mortar and bricks used to be made of softer materials than today, and if the incorrect (modern) mortar is used it can damage the brick and therefore the foundation. They offer mortar testing for something insane like $500 – so we’re kind of at a point where we’re not sure how to proceed.

Sunflower seed bed

Other than that we’ve worked on slowly removing the giant pile of roof shingles that have been sitting by our shed. We’ve been putting a stack of them in our herbie curbie every week, so I think we should have another 2 or 3 weeks before we’re rid of it all. Much better than paying $300 for a dumpster. ;-)

And as I’m typing this it is finally raining. I don’t think it’s rained since my last blog shows the picture of the “drowning” plants. I mentioned the drought and rain deficit we’re having…and it’s only gotten worse. As a matter of fact, before today our deficit was greater than the rain we’ve had for the entire year! I’m sure after this rainfall we’ll have made up for some of it. Every day the news reports about watering bans or show trees whose leaves are crumbling because they’re dry and brown as though it was fall. Since our grass consists of weeds anyway we’re not too worried about our lawn (still trying to decide which type of grass we’d eventually like to get). It’s funny how much I never cared about rain until owning this house and garden. Before I was sad when it was a rainy day – now I know what it feels like when people are hoping for rain for the garden!

Enough for today. Like I said, I’ll post some pictures soon of our progress in the bathroom. I’m sure it won’t seem like much, but it’s been taking enough damn time!