Boring Little Things

Over the last couple weeks, progress has slowly been made. The garage is still electric doorless since the door is a bit rich for our blood, at least until about new year, but there is now a side access door and Abel's part of the job is finished (except for them emptying it of their tools etc).


The french drain is working well, now with it's entire tubing buried and a let-out at the front of our property. Also, I noticed the other day that the drain pipe from the garage is properly connected to it now and so is the drain pipe on the side of the porch. The back porch is in progress now, the men poured the concrete supports about two weeks ago and built the frame about a week later.


Also, you can see a bit from the picture above, but the guys have also been scraping and sanding our house all the way around over the past two weeks. You can see it more dramatically in these two pictures:



And you can also see that our window bars are off! I love the way it looks without them, so much brighter and friendlier. But Patrick insists that we'll have to have them put them back up after the painting because our windows are old easy-shatter ones. But they'll be off again some day once we get the windows updated. Also, on the lower picture, that large dirt plot next to the house isn't there just because the men cleaned up, they cut out a couple feet of concrete so they can repair and regrade. Before the foundation was practically at the same height as the small strip of dirt that was there before.


Now, I was surprised to see the concrete gone in the first place, but not only were they preparing to repair the rotten sills and the grading issue, but I found yesterday that they had actually poured additional concrete on the lowest parts of the foundation on that side.



After that, there are a few more things, but I'll post about them in a few days when I have pictures. In the meantime, so that I have a couple of pictures that aren't so brown and dull, here is how the front garden is doing.


The plants are filling in nicely, it's been a bit more than a month and a half since I planted all these and they're not quite double in size yet but then everything has been slowing down now that it's getting colder.


And in the larger beds, the seedlings are doing even better, only the Lantana is looking a bit scrawny, I think it's waiting for high heat again to burst into growth. I also finally got some of my larger plants in the ground, the Penstemon in the front and Coleonema 'Breathe of Heaven' in the back.

Oh and just for fun - I caught my older grumpy cat being nice to one of our new kittens hehe.