major landscaping work

As I’ve mentioned, one of our big goals for this year was to improve the yard! We started out with hauling away a TON of garbage, then mowing, mowing, and mowing. Once we tamed a lot of the tall grass and weeds we set our sights on some of the big bramble patches and our amazing neighbors helped us hack those down. It was amazing to see how much the form of the backyard changed as we hacked away at the choking overgrowth and discovered old stone foundations, pear and apple trees, old garden plots and of course lots more garbage piles. Our neighbor Fausto actually borrowed our other neighbor Mike R’s tractor to come over and push around some dirt and rocks, cleaning up the remains of what must’ve been a foundation of a big old barn. It was a massive undertaking! He piled the huge rocks back on top of each other, shaping and revealing this beautiful rustic stone wall beside the pear tree, where we’d once had only a giant morass of weeds and garbage.

hard to see what’s going on here, but trust me, things are improving.

Later, Judy and Stephanie helped us plant chrysanthemums in the bare earth in front of the wall.

Meanwhile, more weed-whacking revealed another pile of rocks, another wall of the same old foundation. I started clearing away the nettles and trying to stack the rocks back in a neat line.

stone wall: before. it started as a messy pile of rocks…

That’s when George came over and went into stonemason mode. One sweaty afternoon of hard work, and he transformed that mound of rocks into this gorgeous stone wall!

LOOK AT THIS BEAUTIFUL STONE WALL!

more guest room updates

We did some work on the guest room in the spring (see previous post here) and finally finished up painting the trim and put everything back together in June, I think. Then Lynn (our amazing hired carpenter!) went back and replaced all the missing trim pieces, so now we’ve got to go back in and paint some more. But things are definitely starting to look pretty good in here! (especially compared with the rest of our house, haha!)

much improved

It’s great to have one room that’s almost done!! In addition to painting the new pieces of trim, we still need to put in a ceiling light and switch, which will be a bit of a project because this room has never had a light switch! we’ll need to cut a hole in the wall, run wires through the walls and ceilings, and probably do some patching and re-painting afterwards. And then it should be all set, for the moment! Someday I’d love to replace the ugly ceiling (it’s a filthy, seventies-looking dropped ceiling with those pressed-fiber tiles) and strip & repaint the floors, which have a patchwork of old lead paint colors. But that stuff can wait another five or ten years! Here’s a “before” picture for comparison:

before: yucky carpet and battle-scarred walls

first hike of the spring

first hike of the spring: bradbury mountain in Pownal

camping out

We had our first sleepover!!! It was just like camping out, but with comfy beds. Jess and Laszlo and Hattie and Christina came up to visit for a weekend, and we did lots of preparations to try and make the house hospitable (or at least inhabitable). Cleaned everything upstairs and put linens and blankets on our bed and guest bed, gussied up the bathroom with a fresh shower curtain and bath mat, mopped all the floors, packed most of our moving boxes neatly into a closet and generally tried to convert the second floor from a giant construction site into a homey place. Aside from trying to be hospitable for guests, we’re also trying to get ready for moving in… We’re hopefully just a few weeks away from moving in now!

Kit and Lazslo helped us build a new firepit!

campfire!!!

before and after!

Spent the past three days working hard in snow and rain to empty out all the crazy junk that’s been packed away and left behind in the ell! This is the first floor (attic photos to come later!)

before cleaning the ell

after cleaning the ell!