Look at this garden

It's huge!

Seriously, those zucchini leaves are bigger than my head (on the left)

and we have two new beds with lettuce, radish, and basil coming up nicely.

Its been pretty awesome, I have to say. I even made pickles the other day. And we've got a ton of tomatoes about to burst so there are canning plans in my future, for sure :)

A couple odd jobs

So a while back, Matt noticed something funny about our garage door. Mainly that the support holding the track wasn't really quite as sturdy as one would hope. In fact, the track is attached to a 2x6 which is attached to the beam at the top of the garage. Now, because of this set up, and because the 2x6 is only really supported about halfway up, there's been quite a bit of pressure for probably many years on it, and well, it just couldn't take it anymore and cracked. 

Here you can see Matt pointing out the crack.

And here you can see that not only was it cracked, it was actually split right through. Not ideal, when you consider it was holding up the very heavy garage door over our rather important cars...

So, Matt replaced it. Turns out it was actually pretty difficult and required him to shave off a bit of the face of the 2x6 that he replaced the old board with. But, being the rockstar he is, he got it done and up.(that's a shadow, not a crack, I promise)

And here it is, good as new.

The next night, he finished up a project that we started quite some time ago. Like, seriously long ago. But that's ok, at least we are getting back to it. On the up side, it went pretty quick this time because, well, for one, we've done it before, and two, I cut the piece when we did the first project so we didn't have to do any measuring or anything. And, I'm saying we, but honestly, Matt did the whole thing while I made dinner. The only thing I did was hold the piece in place while he put in the first nails.

Yay matching windows with matching flashing!

Mowing is hard enough

Especially when you have a double lot and a bunch of trees. Now we've done a pretty good job raising the canopy around the yard, but, at my request, we've been holding out on trimming the cedar and the pine on the west side of the house. Mostly this is because we have a storage unit on that side and the branches help to hide it. (Personally, I think the storage unit is an excellent neighbor. Quiet, unassuming, and no one is ever there except occasionally during the day on the weekend. Pretty great, actually. But I'm aware that the people that might want to buy our house might not feel the same, so I've been trying to keep the branches until we come up with another plan, like bushes or a fence or something)/

However, because Matt is totally awesome, he's the one that mows the grass (seriously, I've only done it 2-3 times and we have been having to mow almost every week this summer) and last week, having to duck and weave around the branches just got to be too much, too often. So, we got out the chainsaw and went to work. 

Here's Matt, contemplating the havoc he's about to wreak. 

And here he is mid swing

Halfway

And done!

You can see the storage unit a little more clearly now, but mowing doesn't make Matt nearly as angry, so I think it was a good trade.

One thing every day

So Matt and I have been trying an experiment in which every day we try to do at least one thing on the house. Its been going pretty well and I thought I'd do a mini homage to the small things in life. 

First, we rearranged the laundry room. It was fine before, but see that structure we lovingly call the bomb shelter (we made it ourselves, and it probably could survive a bomb. I mean, look at all those 2x4s...) Well,  we've been using it mostly as storage for cat stuff but the problem is that once we put the door back on the laundry room, it sort of blocks the bomb shelter all the time, making it far less useful that it really could be. 

So, we decided to do some rearranging and moved it next to the dryer where I can now easily get to all the kitty supplies and use is as a table for folding clothes.

As a bonus, now the kitty litter is behind the door, which is a much better thing to be hidden behind the door all the time.

Next, while we were cleaning the garage I found the shades for the kitchen windows, which, to be honest, I had totally forgot existed. Its a pretty subtle change, but if you look at the top of the windows you can see that in the second pic we now have lovely pull down shades so that at night we can have some privacy again.

We also found the cover for the light. Granted, its a pretty crappy light, but no one likes bare fluorescent bulbs staring them in the eye all the time. 

So, not amazing, but better, for sure.