Fleeting Time

We get up each day and marvel at what day we see on the calendar.  The old adage "time flies" certainly seems to apply to our lives right now.  We both have been working hard, and we have been making progress, yet we both feel that time is slipping away like oily water through our fingers.

Part of that sense has to do with the number of appointments we have had this week.  Monday Rick spoke with an insurance broker about supplemental insurance to go along with Medicare.  On Tuesday he went into the dentist to get a crown.  On Wednesday, we both had doctors' appointments, and after those early morning visits, we got to work.  Yesterday, we spent the whole day traveling to Wisconsin Rapids to visit with my mother whom we have not seen since we returned north.

With the ceiling painted white, Rick cuts in
Lake Placid on the entry wall next to the closet.

Your work on Wednesday involved both inside and outside work.  We decided that we would move the equipment out of our lower level exercise room and turn that room into a weaving studio.  After Rick moved everything into another room, he taped the room and painted it.  We had picked out a light blue paint called Lake Placid.  He was not sure how he liked the paint when he had started the first coat.  He said that it looked purple to him.  By the time the first coat was on the walls and dried, though, he liked it much better.

Rick paints along the baseboard aided by light from the single
window and the two banks of fluorescent lights in the room.

I thought that the color was fine.  The second coat helped even more; now that the room has some color on its sterile white walls, the room looks more homey and and inviting.  Since we have limited light in the basement, we were a little worried about the room closing in, but with the one high window in that room, it turned out well.  Rick also painted the ceiling, so now the whole room has a refreshed look.

The first coat of blue starts to add personality to the otherwise
colorless room.

While he was working inside, I went outside to start the destruction of our overgrown landscape.  About 20 years ago, we planted four evergreen trees, three dogwood bushes, and one Miss Kim lilac to provide a natural border between our property and the rental property on the corner next to us.  The Miss Kim never filled in the way we had hoped, the dogwoods were half-dead and scraggly, and the evergreens are so overgrown that they are on the neighbor's property and into the electrical wires.  They all have to go!

Two dogwoods are down, so I had one dogwood and the Miss
Kim lilac next to the shed to cut down yet.

We also had another smaller evergreen tree that someone planted way too close to the house on the southeast corner.  To keep the tree away from the house, I kept trimming it until it was in a wedge shape.  Each year I also had to lop off the top because it was growing under the eaves.

With all four bushes gone, I have only to remove the stumps yet.

I trimmed the dogwoods, the lilac, and the small evergreen tree.  The larger trees have to wait until the electrical company can come in to "top" them away from the wires. Then we can safely cut down the rest.

The small evergreen was too close to the house.

Now only the trunk remains.  Once we remove
that, we will plan where to plant the new
lilac bushes.

To get our privacy back on our screened-in patio, we considered various alternatives.  We thought we would just build a six foot fence where the trees had been, but that is impractical since the land slopes down just before our yard ends.  Six feet of fence would not give us the privacy we want.  Additionally, digging a fence post hole in the root-infested and clay soil would be very labor intensive.  And the fence materials themselves would cost us over $1000.

Our alternative is to hang sunshades inside the screened in structure of the porch.  When we want shade or privacy, we can simply lower the shades, and the materials costs will be substantially less -- as will be the labor! Saving both money and effort seems like an intelligent choice to me.

On the north side of the house, where we removed the evergreen, we are considering planting some better-spaced lilac bushes.  They will give us color, privacy, and plants that we can easily prune and control.  Again, this seems a good choice.

Today we went to the paint store for another gallon of paint.  We have decided to finally add baseboard to the main room in our basement.  That larger room will become our new exercise room and sewing room.  We have almost a full gallon of paint left over from the new weaving studio, so we bought one more gallon of Lake Placid to finish the main room too.

We have only been back a week, but we have made progress in choosing what jobs we want to complete in working toward meeting those goals.  We need to pay attention to this house now to make it our northern vacation home for the summer.