Ranch House Update

Suna couldn’t wait to show me this racoon print in the mud. They do love water, and we do live in the country. “This strange creature has engulfed Daddy’s foot. Must. Get. It. Off.”

The cabinet doors really dress up the kitchen—that and cleaning it. Now all we need is glass for the center doors. Raul continues to make progress rocking the house. While everyone else was working, I moved dirt around. We have a lot of dirt.

This house isn’t indicative of my wealth. This house is my wealth.

—Danny Thomas [and me]

We continue making slow progress on the ranch house. Ruben continues his contractory behaviors of not showing up when he says he’s going to, but he does eventually show up.

I’m beginning to think that paying as we go on this house was a mistake. It makes mid-steam changes too easy. It also makes tracking time and expenditures to the original budget difficult, if not nearly impossible.

I know what Danny Thomas felt like when he talked on The Tonight Show about a fancy house he had built. He said, “This house isn’t indicative of my wealth. This house is my wealth.” The ranch house is quickly consuming resources to the point where that’s a true statement.

The cabinet doors are now all in. Ruben has been tying up loose ends and touch ups. Raul continues working on the rock. We’ve cleaned up a lot of the construction debris. We put all of the excess drywall where I will haul in a few loads of road base to make the driveway circular—it’s gypsum, after all. And finally, I’ve been moving dirt around to level the yard and ease the slope off the back porch.

 

Good Company

One of the four agaves Mike and Martha brought us from their garden. Finally, a plant I can’t kill Photo by: Suna

We had company at the ranch yesterday! Our friends Martha and Mike from Austin came to visit. A meal and some adult beverages were consumed. [Yes, I know it’s passive voice. Actions are described while actors are concealed.]

Mostly we sat around and talked about things. They walked the property. Mike made us a couple of boomerangs!

Then Mike and I planted the agaves they brought. We planted on at each corner of the gate.

 

A Tile Rug?

This retaining wall should help us keep the HVAC units level over time. It will also make a nice raised bed garden.

Jaime may wish he hadn’t suggested a tile rug in the entry way.

Jaime continues to work on tiling the ground floor at the ranch house. I’m impressed. The Versailles pattern Suna picked out is difficult at best. But he has also managed to continue it seamlessly around all of the obstacles I mentioned before.

Suna and Jaime came up with an interesting idea to make the pattern even more difficult. Jaime will use some large format tile to make a tile “rug” in the middle of the entry way. We even have enough leftover tile of a from the master bath to make a decorative border. And now we’re buying some glass tile to make a second border. I’m sure it will all be beautiful when it’s done.

By the way, all of the tile in the house is Travertine, which I want to call “turpentine” for some reason.

Outside, the HVAC heat exchangers have been installed. Raul built a retaining wall around them, so we should be able to keep them level once we bring in more dirt and relevel them once.

 

Front Bed Expansion Complete

The Back of the Front

I didn’t have to add another course to the expanded front flowerbed, but it was a close call. Several stones ended up buried to the level of the grass, just above the high point of the grade. Keeping the grass out of the bed will require vigilance, but that is much less expensive than another course of stones.

Next project: tree trimming.

Landscaping, High School Band, and The Greencards

New Edging, Established Bed

Photo by: Suna

I finished putting in the edging around the front flower bed nearest the house yesterday afternoon. I stopped on the way home and bought the remaining 17 stones. Then over the course of the afternoon, I carried them from the truck and laid them on top of what I already had down.

If that doesn’t seem to be a full afternoon’s work, it wasn’t. I was working from home, so when my brain would cloud over, I would go downstairs and move a couple of stones to clear my head. It worked, too.

Beccano prepares to play.

The other big event of the day was going to the bad concert. The high school has four fully-populated bands, and we listened to them all. The top band sounds professional. The band TubaBoy moved to because he didn’t want to work so hard sounds like a college-level band. The band Beccano is in as a Freshman sounds like a very good high school band. The lowest band is for students who picked up their instruments late.

We had planned to go see The Greencards afterward. Suna had even won free tickets, so we would only have had to buy one. But the powers that be decided at the last minute to start the concert a half-hour late. By the time all of the bands were finished, we didn’t have time to get there. Sigh. Beccano really wanted to go.

The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty

New raised bed with retaining wall

We are all just flowers in God’s garden

That is why He spreads the shit around

—David Byrne

This weekend was spent doing what Robert Heinlein called “pick and shovel work to prolong life.” OK. It wasn’t so much to prolong life as to make the yard look better.

Yesterday I built a nice retaining wall and flower bed. It was the first time I had ever built this kind of wall. The hard part is getting the first row of stones level. After that it takes care of itself. It will be nice. We can sit on the wall to weed the bed, and I can reach the center of the bed from all of the edges.

The picture is the finished product, but Suna posted a couple of pictures of the work in progress, if you’re interested. Beccano even helped turn the dirt and mix in the garden soil.

Today, we bought a little more soil and the plants for the bed. I turned in the additional soil. The local soil has very little organic material—something I hope to rectify over the next few years. Then the plants went in.

Catelina Midnight Blue

Beccano’s choice

Suna wanted red petunias to carry forward the red theme. I bought a tomato (Mr. Stripey) and some sweet basil). I planted the petunias a couple of inches in from the center of each top stone. Then I made another row a few inches in from that. I planted 10-15-Y onions in between each onion. (Can you guess which song I couldn’t get out of my head? Right—except these were onions in a petunia patch.) The tomato and the basil (turns out there were two in the same pot) are in the center.

Then I went to work finishing the new gate I started yesterday when Suna and Beccano went to the home store to buy the rest of the rocks I needed to build the retaining wall. It turned out beautifully…except that I laid the skeleton down the wrong direction. So I built the prettiest gate I have ever made up-side-down and backwards. So since I was running out of daylight, I repaired the old dog-chewed gate enough to last the season.

The good news is that I used 5/8” staples. When I picked up the new gate, one of the boards popped off. So I shouldn’t have too much trouble taking it apart and rebuilding it. Sigh. It’s like erasing a whole sock of knitting, but with a lot more physical labor.