Musings, and Other Nonsense

I want to catch up on some of the things I am working on. We are doing a couple of big projects and I think it is time to talk about some of them. The first on is the conversion of our garage into a workout room/music studio for Rachel's music classes. We are getting so close to being done. I have insulated and sheetrocked the garage walls and ceiling, installed lights and plugs, painted and trimmed out windows and walls and doors, put carpet down in the workout space and just last week, I bought carpet tiles to do the floor of the studio space. It has been a long project, because I haven't been able to clean out the garage until about two weeks ago, so we are just now going to start and carpet the floor. That has been waiting now for about a month or two.

We also started working on putting the back yard together again. That has involved making kids pick up rocks in the yard for quite some time. It was good work for them, and on the plus side, now I have about 10 yards of cobblestones to line all the yard paths, build fire pits, and any number of other uses. We are even going to put in a meditation maze in the rocky area under our horse chestnut tree:

As a part of getting the yard ready, I cut down three trees in the yard, three pines that were not very nice to look at. One was rotting in the center, and the other two were just kind of in the way. So I had a friend come and help cut them down. We got lucky and only hit one fence (chain-link, that popped right back up once the tree was off it) and nothing else in the yard. I have been splitting firewood for several weekends by hand. It's a good workout, especially since these were 40yo trees that had a ring of branches every three feet. And then stump removal has been the other issue. I have been burning one of them out, and that has been fun. I drilled out the middle, and a hole or two in the side and lit it up. It wasn't going fast enough so I added some air. I also decided to try melting some aluminum. It worked.

 

We also had 72 yards of topsoil brought in to plant grass, since I was never going to be able to remove enough rocks to make enough of a difference: 

The landscaping guy says this isn't enough, so when he cones to do the yard work, he will bring more. He says the dirt I bought (for way too much) will make a pretty top dressing...

We also had new windows installed on the ground floor of our house. I don't have any pictures of this, but it has made a BIG difference in our heating bills. They are triple-pane, argon filled, foam filled fiberglass framed, low-e coated, and a ton of other things. I took the heat vision camera home from work one day to see if it really made any difference, and while I don't have the photos to back up my claims, I can tell you that it really does.