Mother Nature

Living in a rural area like we do, homeowners have challenges of a different sort. We've still got the concern over bad neighbors, etc. , but also have to worry about Mother Nature.

Today it was extremely high winds that peaked with gusts of 80+ MPH. Our property has a creek running across the rear portion of it (behind the house) and the creek is lined on either side by Alder trees. One of the larger ones snapped today and fell onto our addition. No major structural damage to the house, but minor damage to three different elevations of roof and a nice hole in the big deck behind our original house. Not to mention the death of Carla's metal patio table (R.I.P.) that is now sheared into a few large pieces.

So anyhow a couple of steps backwards in the progress of the addition, a few hours of chainsaw work on the fallen trees, and a big pile of trunk and branch pieces needing to find it's way to the green waste dump in the next canyon over from ours.

On a more positive note, progress on the addition is moving right along. Stucco brown coat is complete and in about 10 days we'll do the final coat. Drywall and texture is done and we're painting the interior walls (many different colors in typical Carla style). I've begun the decorative rock work on the face of the house. I hate the artificial rocks that many people use as a veneer on their homes and walls and was all set to scour the canyon's creeks collecting rocks (actually started that process) and then I found a distributor for a company that takes natural fieldstone and slices it in half so that the stones have nice flat backs. They also do double cut pieces to be used on corners. So basically you get the ease of installation that comes with fake rock and the natural look of real rock. So happy. Downside is that it costs about triple what the fake stuff does. Anyhow it's looking really good (I'll take some pictures and post here when it's complete) and we're quite happy with it. May even end up doing more rock work than we had first planned to.

Kayla (my oldest daughter) also received an acceptance letter to a private high school that we had applied to. Very excited about this as many of her friends from her middle school have been accepted as well. The school (Orange Lutheran) is a very nice christian school with a great academic program. Much better than the public school options we would have had to choose from if she had not been accepted. It's not cheap, but I can't imagine a better thing to spend money on than our children's education and environment.

Anyhow, that's it for now. Tired from cutting up a big tree and have a nice, long, hot shower in my immediate future...