I mention this now because of late, we’ve seen a rise in how many “house guests” we’ve had. To offset some of the scariness, we’ve taken to referring to these guys by a name: “Mr. Scampers.”
Today, Julie and Bob stopped over to help us with the house. Outside, Julie and Liz were at work on the parkway. Inside, Bob was taking measurements and making plans while I was in the basement, continuing to work on removing bricks from the chimney.
I slowly discovered that hitting the chisel on an angle made things easier. As did brushing out all the debris before each set of blows. I also got to learn how to chisel away exposed mortar much faster… and to also use the chisel as a lever, to further loosen (and in some cases pry out) bricks.
It’s hard to see – but just inside each of the cut lines, there’s a small chisel mark. I added these per Bob’s instructions, on bricks that overlapped the cut line. As I understand it, these cuts help introduce a point of weakness prior to the cut line, to lessen the chance of the bricks breaking at a point past the cut line. Not a guarantee, but something to help minimize the chance of that happening.
I got to watch Bob start us off, in removing the intial bricks. And I’ve got some good instructions on how to best proceed with the removal. This looks to be another joint project that Liz and I will undertake, which hopefully we can get done in the coming week.
The time during (and leading up to) our vacation overseas was really lovely, and a lovely escape. But now that we’re back and resettled again, I think both Liz and I are hoping to get back on a more consistent schedule in terms of house work.
I never really knew what the term for the patch of ground between the sidewalk and the city street was, but apparently it’s “parkway.” This is an interesting bit of land, in that it technically belongs to the city, but we can gussy it up as we like. In fact, I think it’s somewhat expected that we tend to this area… as it’s “ours” to take care of, even though it belongs to the city.
This was a large, circular container… filled to the brim with curved, black and white photographs. I’m not sure if the photos had any direct relationship with the vessel they were in, but it seemed to be a mishmash of images: some of heavy machinery, others of what looked like a school or church.
Out of necessity, Liz and I ended up scouring our moving boxes for our summer clothes. We found some of them set aside in the guest room, but I got lucky and found one of mine in our main office (read: storage).
But it’s slowly getting there, and slowly growing together again. We set the mower to its highest setting (4 inches), and are going to be taking another pass this week to get it a little lower. It almost got wild on us for a second there, but it’s really starting to look like a true and actual lawn.
It’s a Honda 21 in. 3-in-1 Variable Speed Mower (disclaimer: Amazon Affiliate link), but it definitely didn’t cost quite as much as what this link shows. More like half, actually.
Yesterday after work, Liz made a really terrible discovery: we have visitors in our yard. Despite the tremendous amount of weeds and soil that was removed from our backyard, we have some uninvited guests poking through the sod.
On Friday, Julie trekked up from Frankfort to meet up with Liz, after getting an invitation to visit a seller’s wares at his house. A guy named Gabe shows up at the I-80 Flea Market, and his booth is one of her first stops, whenever she attends.
When the yard was still half-uncovered, I asked if they were planning on returning tomorrow. I found out that they were intending to finish today – and in under an hour, the rest of the yard was covered in sod!
After a few weather delays last week, today a new crew from our landscaper (Christy Webber) showed up as we were leaving for work. They had a lot of soil with them, along with a Bobcat – and this is what we found on returning home.