Many Projects in the Works.....

Well it has been a busy week and a few more items have been completed on my house.  The columns are progressing and from the picture below you can see that the stone is getting closer to being completed.  I figure I am over the half-way point.  My brother also worked on the top part of the columns.  You can see the far three columns are already painted but still need the molding added.  Since the wood is not perfect, my brother has been working on filling the imperfections with an outdoor spackle.  He then sands it smooth and paints over it.  It makes the wood look much more uniform and adds a great finished look. 

Just to give you all a bearing of my house, below is a Google picture where you can see where everything is.  The picture is about 7 years old because it has all the junk in the yard from the original owners but at least it will help until I can find a better picture. 

We also planted a few more bushes outside my backyard fence.  This will be on the left side of the above picture.  Even though I will not see them much, it will be nice for the neighbors since weeds were just there before.  I will probably get to adding mulch in this area next weekend.  In the below picture you can also see the fence my brother painted.  The fence is probably almost 20 years old but with the solid color stain you would swear it is new.  My brother painted my entire fence in about a day and it took 5 gallon of the stain.  It cost me about $90 after the rebate I got from Home Depot’s 4^th of July sale.  It was a cheap renovation that made a huge difference. 

There is also a picture that shows the large trees in my back yard below.  Most backyard work will not happen until next year but I have completed a few projects.  You can see that my brother and I added landscape lighting to the backyard this weekend.  I bought the spot lights on e-bay for all of the trees so the whole backyard only cost about $200.00 with the 6 post lights I bought at Home Depot. 

I have also included a couple pictures of the things I am growing at my house.  Below you can see all the tomato plants I am growing.  They have gotten huge and they actually all came from seeds.  My brother grew over 200 of them this year and gives them away to friends and neighbors so I took a few off his hands.  Like the front yard, the backyard has a drip watering system so I do not have to hand water anything.  There are even tubes running to the new bushes outside of the fence.  You can also see some of the landscape lighting in this picture.  The trellises are repurposed from the renovation of my apartment complex three years ago.  They were being thrown out about 6 months ago after sitting in storage for two years so I brought them to my place.  They are polywood (plastic composite) so I will never have to paint or replace them.  It adds a nice architectural element. 

 

Lastly, here is a picture of some of the pots I have been growing.  They are starting to fill in nicely and since we have about 10 weeks left of summer they should be huge!

Well that is all for now....the work continues....