Day Five-seventy-three: yardwork

The arrival of summer encouraged us to tackle the last remaining outdoors projects. Of course, with temperatures and humidity so high and the full sun bearing down on us, we more than once regretted our decision. We are nothing if not persistent and somewhat stupid. Onto the projects.

The one part of the grounds that we didn't clear out last fall is along a old chain-link fence between our house and the neighbor's. With the rain, sun, and progrowth climate this was seriously overgrown. Points to you if you can even find the fence buried underneath.

So we got out our shovels, axe (for a couple stumps), pick mattock, hedge clippers, and a ton of lawn trash bags. Here's where things stood at the end of yesterday.

With the area cleared we needed to do something about the fifty year-old fence. We got four of these premade panels from our friends at Home Depot and stained them the same color as the pressure treated parts of the deck.

A few zipties later and voila! A fence is born! (Impending rain cut short our design work. We may try to level the center pieces.)

As if we needed confirmation, we discovered that we're one panel short of a full fence. What's another trip to HD?

Feeling inspired by this faux woodworking, we tackled the last construction part of the deck--installing the stairs. (Staining is still to come.) About seven months after taking off the old decking we finally have a complete, functional cypress deck.

We did one final project that we'll chalk up under "neighborhood beautification". Our neighbor on the other side of the fence/weeds/jungle has an old wooden shed for tools and such. At some point the kids had been allowed to spray paint the outside with the sorts of things that kids are wont to create. All concerned agreed that it was something of an eyesore, so we dug into our trove of surplus paint and transformed the shed into this.