The past two years has been a flurry of building a house and stick built shop. Managing subs, scheduling deliveries, meeting with inspectors, and many long, hard days of physical labor.
Now that all that is done, it is time for the finishing touches. There is a punch list with about 40 small items that need to be completed. Things like shim the shop toilet so it doesn’t jiggle and we don’t damage the floor flange, put up the range hood extension piece on the chimney to cover the pipe, and put the decorative hardware on the garage doors. It’s also time for landscaping.
Landscaping for us will be scheduling our excavator to come out and fine tune what he did last year for lawn prep. He did it last year, but we ended up with vole/mole problems in the lawn area, so we put off hydro seeding until this spring. Good thing we did. Over the winter, there was quite a bit of ground settling with the new soil that had been spread, and we were able to see that we had a drainage problem with our gutter downspouts. The excavator will be addressing all of this with five truckloads more of topsoil, and fixing our downspout issue. As soon as that is done, we can call for hydroseed if. Then the sprinklers will be running almost nonstop for a few weeks until the seed sprouts.
In the midst of all this, I have been scrambling to find cedar 2x6s, 2x8s, and 8x8s to build a pergola, and get all the materials for building a greenhouse/shed combo for all my gardening stuff. Containers, tools, soil, fertilizer, etc. I have been able to source the posts from a local, custom miller. The frame and top materials from a local specialty wood supplier, and the decorative 1×2” pieces from someone in a neighboring town. Because the posts are custom and will take about three weeks to manufacture, I had to work with my builder to rearrange the schedule a bit, since he will be here in one week. Apparently there are now shortages of many materials that we once took for granted.
Speaking of shortages; I also had material delivered today for building a greenhouse/garden shed. I have all the materials to frame it and cover all the sides, but my supplier for twin walled polycarbonate has absolutely no panels available for the roof, and isn’t sure when their order will arrive. They are hoping before the end of June. It’s a good thing it will be good weather for the next four months. The roof won’t be critical until autumn. Until then, my few greenhouse plants will enjoy lots of fresh air!
I am currently sitting in a uhaul, waiting for some of the pergola lumber to be loaded. Which explains why I have time to blog. Once they are done, I head to a hardware store for a twelve foot long sonatube. That’s a tube of compressed paper, or sometimes metal that is used to hold cement around posts in the ground. Once that is added to my load, it is home to unload the wood, then gas up the beastly truck on the way to return it.
Once all that is done, I will pick up my dad ant home and get him out of the house to run errands. I could really use some home time to prepare for the upcoming feast of Shavuot/Pentecost that we are hosting on Sunday, but since my father injured his hand/wrist in a fall a couple weeks ago, he hasn’t been able to drive. So it falls to me to make sure he can get out of the house daily.
As time consuming as it is to be the caregiver for my aging father (83), I don’t think I would do it differently. I cannot even imagine home trying to make it on his own with his limited budget. And he would be lonely. The days I spend with him I cherish, as I know that each day brings us closer to the end.
I pray that you find a way to cherish whomever it is that takes up your time today. Tedious as it may be, inconvenient as it may be. whether it be a toddler, a teen, a widowed sibling, a sick spouse or an aging parent. Time is short, let’s make it count by making life more beautiful for the people in our lives.
An Ordinary Life 