PROGRESS

Well, we are getting closer to finishing all the projects on the house so that we can put it up for sale. I'm kind of sad that we are doing all this hard work and making the house nicer and then we will be selling it (hopefully). But I really hope that we can sell it and find something bigger and better. Last weekend we put rock in the backyard. Most of the yard was dirt and it was really too much dirt to do much landscaping with it. So we did rock were all the dirt was. Plus we have a little section of fake grass at the edge of the patio. We rented a Bobcat through my dad's work and it made the job so incredibly fast. We moved 10 tons of rock in just a couple of hours. I don't really have any "before" pictures of the yard, but you can see all the dirt area in the pictures of Mike in the Bobcat.



Here are a few pictures of the yard now.

We built this shed and did the tree wells to match the patio/porch. The small brown thing is the dog house. The small patch of grass right in front of the shed is just temporary. The dogs like to lay there so we are leaving there until we list the house.
There used to be a chain link fence in the back and we had the wall put in. Mike built the gates for the yard. One big one for the back (seen here) that leads to the alley and two small gates on either side of the house facing the front yard.
We built this porch and patio. There used to be 2 sliding glass doors on the back and we made the one into a window (on the right) and put a new slider on the left (did all that a couple years ago). Mike built all the wrought iron for the windows and doors. The big water tank on the left is our make shift pond where our goldfish and koi are until we get a big house and can build a pond.


Wednesday we are going to stucco the garage. Then all that will be left is to put rock in the front yard and Mike wants to pull up the asphalt driveway and pour concrete. Everything is looking nice around here. The end is finally in sight. In other news, we went for a mountain bike ride on Saturday and I wrecked and got a big bruise on my hip. My new bike has clip-in pedals and I didn't get unclipped in time and fell over. Luckily it was in a nice dirt spot with no cactus or rocks. Then we went again today and rode 13.3 miles. That is the most I have ever ridden. We are trying to get ready for the mountain bike race in October. My race is 16.2 miles long and it will be way harder than the trails I ride here. I'm just hoping to finish the race. Mike is doing the 35 mile race again and a bunch of the guys from his work are doing it this year.