Almost Wordless Wednesday, Family Edition

 

Diploma finally came in! I have a Masters' degree now

Eating shrimp on the porch with my Aunt & Uncle

Frozen leaves in the birdbath

We got snow in Raleigh!

Snowy Boone Trip

 I'm totally late posting this, but at the end of January we made another trip up to Boone to work the land a bit. Funny enough, there was still two feet of snow on the ground so the truck got stuck, totally blocking an intersection. Took me about 90 minutes to get it unstuck, and I only got maybe 10 minutes to work on the land. At least we got some really cool animal shots from the field camera left onsite.

Only 5* deer covered in snow, they don't care.

Totally blocking the intersection. Had 10 cars backed up before I could move

Snow was pretty deep

Still got part of the building site staked out

We've had a few updates on the process up there. First, we're still waiting on the perc test to see if we can build at all but the planning is going great. We're ready to roll. Second, my wife got accepted into grad school at App State! She starts classes in August, so this is very exciting. And it puts a real deadline on building this house -she has to attend classes in person and will have to stay at the house those nights. Game on!

Final Table Pictures

 Kelley took some really nice pictures of the tables I built. They are listed for sale in my Etsy store, thought I would share the pictures.

Finishing Concrete

 So last summer I blew out a disc in my back by pouring a concrete, required surgery to fix it in September. Finally I got around to finishing the sidewalk, and it took a lot of the same culprits that led to the back pain. I still have back pain, but it's not nearly as bad as before the microdiscectomy I just have to be more cautious about lifting. To finish off this job, I had to run the tiller around part of the gravel driveway, excavate where the sidewalk hits the gravel driveway, and finally pour some more gravel.

Before - leaves, rocks, no diggity

This should look like a real parking space

I filled in with some planer shavings just to add organic material to the tire troughs

Mixer is ready to do some work

Rebar is in place

This time I used 50 lb bags instead of the 80lb bags that pinched by back

Mid-pour

Each square takes about 800 lbs of concrete

I finished pouring the next day, 48 of those 50 lbs bags all in

Then I spread another 1500 lbs of gravel over the area

This project has been a long time coming. You can see most of the sidewalk in that last picture, I started working on it at the beginning of April 2020 and finally finished at the end of January 2021. I still need to fix up the other side of the driveway, but after finishing the porch project and moving through all of the front yard landscaping it feels really nice to have this one under the belt. Now I need to move to the other side of the driveway, remove some plants, clear some space, and relocate part of a fence.