progress

The Sun room – finished!

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Yes!  It’s done!

The sun room is now cleaned and put back together into a usable space!

The challenge in rearranging the room was that is has to fit two uses.  One is to have a nice space to just sit and enjoy.  The other is to put away and store tools and supplies.

The initial cleaning was a huge job, so the difference is very stark!  Here are the before and after pictures, starting with the East side. (click on them for larger images)

 

The dresser now holds the tools that I found in the sun room as I was cleaning it up, including a collection of saws.  I even found one with a long, very thin blade that would be perfect for cutting branches in odd places.  Except it looks completely dull, so we’ll see.  I also found several different types of hammers and hatchets, including a hatchet that is also a hammer. :-D  Buckets of screws, clothes pins, and even the containers I used to take deer feed out, are all now tucked away into the dresser.

I just realized, I forgot to check under the seat of my dad’s walker.  He used to keep tools in there, too.  :-D

That tiny instrument hanging on the wall is a music box.  I remember it from when I was a child!

 

Now, instead of pictures on the walls, I have saws.

Which is much more my style, anyhow. :-D

On the West side…

 

I chose a before picture that was taken after the dresser was moved out, since that was added by us from another room and was only there for the winter.  I’d also already moved the plastic couch that is in the East side “after” pictures.

Whoever wants to use the rocker will have to move my dad’s walker out of the way.  Depending on how things work out when we clear out the old kitchen, it might end up being stored in there.  My mother likes to use it when she visits.

 

In the “before” picture, about half of that stuff is what we brought into the room, including the weed trimmer.

I am keeping the prie dieu and plan to pick up some wood oil for it.  The side facing the wall is in much better shape.  I am guessing the majority of the damage to it is from the sun (as I notice it is in a sun spot…).  It’s a bit rickety at a pair of joins on the bottom, and I want to investigate the best way to repair it.

There are a few things not going back in, including one shelf (the dresser is a much more useful and attractive fit for the space) and the metal table.  Having packed all of the books, phone books and magazines my mother had in there, the two shelves I did decide to keep have nothing to put in them for now!

Knowing us, that won’t last long. :-D

My dad’s favourite seat is a glider rocker that has lengths of pipe added to the legs to make it higher, so it would be easier for him to get in and out of it.  I am happily keeping those, since we’re not exactly limber, either.  I plan to replace the cushions when I get the chance.  These original ones are very old, and very stained!

With both the glider rocker and the rocking chair on the same side, we have to make sure they don’t get pushed back too far, so no one will bump into the windows!

There will, of course, be other changes made over time.  I want to add some hooks on the wall by the old kitchen window, so I can hang the extension cord when it’s not being used.  We might even add some decorative items on the walls.  Who knows?  Minor stuff.  For the more major stuff, the outside doors need to be replaced completely.  The screen door doesn’t even close properly anymore, and the inner door has a lot of water damage on the bottom.  Even the doors into the old kitchen should be replaced at some point, but they are in better shape.

No hurry on any of that, though.  The main thing is that the room has been packed up, cleaned and can once again be used!

Next and last room (not counting the basements) to pack up, clear, clean and rearrange: the old kitchen!

The Re-Farmer

This is concerning, plus progress

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Not a lot was done in the yard today.  We made a much needed dump run with garbage and recycling – including a lot of garbage from cleaning the sun room out, then my younger daughter and I went into town to run some errands (plus play some Pokemon Go for community day, while we were there ;-) ).  It was almost evening when we got back, but I still wanted to get at least a bit more clean up done today.

As I headed over to the Eastern end of of the bushes and trees I’ve been clearing out, I found something very disorienting.

In the false spirea I was planning to clean out was a large branch.

Funny, I think to myself.  I thought I’d cleared away the crab apple branches I’d cut.  Did I miss one?

Except this branch wasn’t a dead branch.  It was mostly green.  I didn’t remember cutting a green branch in that area and leaving it there.  Also, it wasn’t apple.

Then I started to pull it out and saw the end of it.

At which point, I stopped to take pictures.

Here is the branch I found.

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It’s a maple.  Aside from a couple of small dead side branches, it is in full leaf.

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That’s burnt wood right there.

What the heck?

I started looking around to see where it came from.  Then I called my daughters out to look, too, just to make sure I wasn’t jumping to conclusions.

This is where we think it came from.

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The arrow at the top is pointing to the end of a branch that we think it came from.

The double ended arrow is between the two power lines.

If my guess is correct, some time during the night, the branch hit the live power line, got burned, then broke and fell down.

Now, I can’t say for sure that this is where it came from, but it must at least be close to the source.  There just aren’t any other maples close enough.

I am not feeling confident about this.

I had asked for the electric company to come out and check the line a second time when, after the first time they came out, the woman who followed up with me could not see anything that said they’d checked more than our own power line to the house.  The second call, I basically was told the same thing as the first time; whenever we hire someone to clear the lines, let them know and they’ll cut the power for us.  I don’t know when anyone came to check the lines a second time; this was after we had to put locks on our gates, and we did not get a call from anyone to let them in.  However, someone could have stopped on the main road and simply ducked through the barbed wire fencing.  The locks just keep vehicles out.  People can get through easily.

I’ll be asking some advice from family who works with the electric company before I call them again.  There’s no point in calling again, if they expect us to clear their lines.

After clearing the burned branch away, I cut back the spirea completely.  Here is the before picture from a few days ago.

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All I did was cut away the spirea, plus break off a few dead lilac branches that were overhanging them, so I wouldn’t stab myself in the face or something.

Here is how it looks now.

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To the right of the lilacs was the beginning of a path to the big garden.  It is now almost clear and open again.  At least at this end.  The other end has dead spruces partially blocking it.

Here is another look at the lilacs.

20180616.cleanup.bushes.east.lilacs.before

You can see where I broke off the branches that were overhanging the spirea.  Most of the lilacs appear dead.  These lilacs used to be so thick with greenery and flowers, you couldn’t see stems and branches.

It should be interesting to see how they recover, once all this is cleared up and they are getting sun and space again.  It might take a few years, but lilacs are so resilient, I am sure they will grow back well.

There is still lots of work to do, but it doesn’t take much for it to look so much better.

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: after

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I have just finished working on the bushes in the west yard, near the fire pit, for the day.  It’s not finished, but there is a storm moving in, and I did get the big stuff done.

So I have after pictures I can show you.

I actually went deeper in then I’d intended to.  I started in the area around the linden and plum trees, to get more dead branches down, and everything was getting so hung up, I had to go further in, just to stop that from happening.

In the process, I found the lilacs that used to form a tunnel I’d crawled into as a child.

20180614.cleanup.bushes.lilacs.before

Yeah.  Most of the lilacs are dead.

Between these and the tree directly behind the linden tree, there was just no way to avoid getting hung up on dead branches.

Here is the after, for this area.

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Still lots to clean up, but the dead stuff is mostly gone.  The remains of the lilacs might actually survive.  They are very hardy.

Here is what it looked like around the linden tree, when I finished up.

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Then I started working my way down the rows.

Here is the before of the first section;

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I believe this is another crab apple tree, and it looks like it has some sort of fungal disease.  I cut away lots.  Here is it, now.

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I freed up more plum trees in the process.

There are still signs of spotted and yellowing leaves higher up in the apple tree, but I got as much as I could reach for now.

While working in between the rows (there are three rows in total, in this location), if I had to choose between getting rid of a caragana and something else, or a false spirea and something else, I would choose the something else.  This was not a difficult thing as, in the process, as the “something else” was usually a fruit tree.  I also found a giant caragana in the back row.  Unfortunately, the biggest trunk of it was dead and so rotten, I broke it off and yanked it out without having to cut anything.

In fact, I was doing that a lot, today.  Yanking stuff out right by the roots, or breaking them and pulling them out.

The next section has a dead tree in it.  Here is what it looked like before.

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There was a lot of false spirea around the base of it.  In clearing that out…

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… I freed up some more plum trees.

That dead tree is going to need more than the little hand saw to take it down! So it stays, for now.  Though I was able to just break a branch off of it.

Next was another crab apple tree.

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This one has a lot of tiny apples starting to grow on it, but it also is starting to show spots on the leaves. :-(

Also, a lot more of it was dead then I thought!

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I was taking out lots of dead branches, and even a couple of trunks.

Like this one.

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This is probably the biggest thing I cleaned out today.  It wasn’t until I cut it, then started dragging it out, that I realized how big it was, so much was hidden among the branches.

There is still lots to do here, including clearing out the section of false spirea at the end, so I can reach the dead lilacs behind it.  It’s going to be a while before all the bits of dead branches and twigs on the ground are cleaned up, though I did take out the hidden ones I found by stepping on them.

All of this was about 3 hours of work, give or take.

When I was a kid and mowing the lawn in this area, when the crab apples at the end of the row were full of fruit, I would pick a whole bunch of them when I went under it,  I would eat them as I mowed my circuit, then gather more when I got back.  They were small, hard green apples, and very sour.  I loved them!

We also had a pear tree next to this crab apple tree.  It was another small, hard variety.  My father told me about having this variety when he was growing up in Poland.  They were too hard to eat as they were, but they would be gathered and buried under rocks in the fall.  In the winter, they would freeze.  Later, the rocks would be removed, and the frozen pears taken out.  The freezing not only softened them, but made them sweet, as well.

I have no idea what happened to that tree.

I also wonder what happened to the mountain ash (aka rowan) that used to be here, about were the current diseased apple tree is. We had a few of them.  They never got very big; nothing like the ones in the city we just moved from – I had no idea they got that big until we started living there!  But they were beautiful, and produced masses of red berries.

A lot has changed over the years we’ve been away, but a surprising amount has stayed the same, too.

The Re-Farmer

There be Cows Here!

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We had a nice rain today and, when it was down to a drizzle, the girls decided this was a good, safe time to get the fire pit going and burn down the pile of wood we had in it.

Then we had a cook out.  Because, why not?

While we were out, I could hear the sounds of cows mooing.  Not unusual, except that the sounds were much closer.

Like, really close.

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This is taken from the gate beside the fire bit.

My mom rents most of the land out to someone, including the other quarter section.  He’s had his cows grazing there for a while, and now they are here.

While we had the fire going, even though it was still kind of raining, I couldn’t help but work on the area near the fire pit, cleaning up the area next to the log cabin that’s got a collapsed roof.  There were a lot of dead branches to clean up, plus saplings to trim away, etc.  More stuff for the fire pit! :-)

The roof of the cabin is decidedly interesting.

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That is a lot of nails.

This would be the remains of one of the trusses.

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This board would have had shingles nailed to it.  They were all wooden shingles, most of which seem to be gone, now, leaving their nails behind.  !!

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We also had a squirrel go onto the roof, where it seemed to find something to eat among the pieces of fallen roof!

My head just clears that truss piece, as I walked back and forth under it, making my daughters very nervous! :-D

As I was cleaning up along here, grabbing dead branches and dragging them out, the toe of my shoe caught on something under the decaying leaves along the wall, and I almost tripped.  Going back to pick up what I got caught on, I found it was a piece of board.

With nails in it.

Pointing down, thankfully.

I pulled more boards up out of the decayed leaves, also with nails in them, until the girls insisted I stop working in there.

Cleaning up under there is going to have to be a very careful job!

After we had our cook out, I stayed outside to burn more of the wood pile.  While there, I started to hear strange metal noises coming from the barn.

I knew exactly what it was.

I got my younger daughter to tend the fire for me, while I went to check on the cows.

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Who, for some reason, decided they needed to graze around this collapsed shed, with all the sheets of metal lying about.  They were walking over the metal, and that’s the sound I was hearing.

They didn’t like me coming over and were already moving away when I took this picture.

The wire in the foreground is an electrified gate.  There are two of them the renter puts up before he brings the cows over, so they don’t go into the house area; this one by the barn, and another closer to where the cows were in top photo.

With the electrified wire there, I went through the barn to get to where the cows where.

I moved things around as best I could but I’d really rather fence this area off until we can get this stuff hauled away and cleaned up.  There’s little I can do about it.  Some of the metal bits and pieces could not be picked up and moved, so I used sheets of tin to cover them as much as I could, then adding whatever I could on top, to prevent the wind from blowing them away.

On the far side, I stepped on something that felt like a potential problem.  It turned out to be part of fence wire that was likely rolled up and left there.  Except it was there for so long, it was now covered in ground and I could not pull it up.  It was completely hidden in the grass, and a definite risk to hooves!  So I covered it with sheets of metal, then dragged a metal headboard out of the pile (I have no clue why anything like that would be there!) and tossed that on top, both to weight it down, and to make it more visible.

I really look forward to when we can start getting rid of piles like this.  It might be a few years before we get to the stuff on this side of the fence, though.

The Re-Farmer

Sun Room Cleanup – West side

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Once I had cleared out half of the sun room, I had the space to work on the other half.

Here are some before pictures.

20180608.sunroom.cleanup.westside1.before

The moving boxes, I added to have them handy to pack things.  We’ve been using empty cat food bags as garbage bags, slated for the burn barrel.  Except we’ll probably just make another dump run tomorrow, with all the stuff we found.  Including many, many phone books for various cities, and years of seed catalogs.

Aside from the box for the weed trimmer, the rest of the boxes on this seat were here when we got here.  Including the one under the cat food bag with a toilet seat in it.

Also, an empty bottle of vodka.  ???

The orange extension cord coming out from under the door is plugged in in the old kitchen.  There is another old household extension cord coming through the kitchen window, that my dad used to power a clock and a radio.  I needed something more heavy duty for the trimmer.  When I got the room cleared out, I was able to put it through the kitchen window, too.

20180608.sunroom.cleanup.westside2.before

The dresser in the foreground had been upstairs, and was slated to go into the shed for storage.  I have decided to instead keep it in this room, and plan to put it under the shelf across the window in the other side of the sun room.  It will be good to hold things like our tools, gloves, etc.  The extension cords on it are the 100ft cords my older brother and his wife got us, so we could have electricity in the garage to plug in the block heater for our van.  Lately, I’ve been using them for the weed trimmer.

After getting the top of that couch cleared, I moved it to the cleared side of the room and found…

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A whole lot of crap.  Literally.

And bird seed.

I moved the bird seed out so we could put it into the bird feeder, when I noticed something odd in it.

A used strike plate for a door knob.

Because where else would you store a strike plate?  Right? LOL

The outside cats made a MUCH bigger mess under here.

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That plant was there when we moved in, in the fall.  I have no idea if we were supposed to tend it, but by the time we noticed it, it was too late.  Not that we could have reached it, anyhow.

The table it’s on turned out to be a very old metal topped table with a drawer.  The drawer had some tools, and all sorts of odd bits and pieces; outlets, screws, a refillable lighter, scrap bits of fabric…  With that curtain being used as a table cloth, no one would have been able to access the drawer.  Who knows how long it was all there!

The box you can partly see under the table had decorative bottles, a bag of chess pieces, and… very familiar toys.  Toys my girls played with, when we last lived in this province.

No clue why they were kept, and why they were left there!

That laundry basket has been there so long, when I tried to move it around, it practically shattered on me.

The old boots ended up being tossed.  There were also a number of single shoes.

We’ve found all sorts of old shoes while cleaning things up, in some very odd places.

Here are the after pictures! :-)

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I swept up so many dead bugs and spiderwebs.  *shudder*

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Right in the very corner, I found another nest of dead Asian Lady Beetles.  :-(

What a difference!

After this, we basically just put what we were going to keep, back into the room.  It’s supposed to rain tonight, but… well, the weather predictions have been calling for rain or thunderstorms a few times, and we’ve not been getting them, so who knows.

The next big thing I will do here is empty the room completely, then mop the floor.

Meanwhile, we have more boxes and other stuff to haul to the shed for storage.

I look forward to this being a usable room again!

After this, the only room left to pack and clean is the old kitchen.  THAT is going to be a challenge. :-/

The Re-Farmer

Sun Room Clean Up – East side

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Today, while the girls finished raking up behind the other house and adding to the flower garden, I finally got started on the sun room.

This addition to the house was the brainchild of my late brother, to create a space that my parents could sit and enjoy “outside” without being exposed to the elements.  My late father used to love sitting there.  It was also easier for him to get outside with his walker, as there are no steps to clamber up and down, like at the main door.

We’ve been using the room to store bags of feed for the outside cats, deer and birds, and now we’re using it to store the yard work tools we’ve been using.  However, we’ve basically only been able to use one side of the room.

Here are a couple of before pictures.

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My dad’s walker is still there, and still used by my mother, so she doesn’t have to struggle with bringing her own walker over here.

Behind it is what appears to be an antique prayer kneeler.

I’m keeping that, and hope to be able to refinish/preserve it.

That plastic church on the shelf across the window is something I thought was one of those Christmas village things.  It wasn’t until I started packing it that I realized it’s a hanging bird feeder!

It is now hanging off the stand in front of the living room window, waiting to have some bird seed added to it.

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We’ve been using my dad’s old seat to hold the feed bags (just cat food, right now).  It’s one of those glider rocker type seats.

The crutches in the background, leaning against the shelf on the right?  Those were there so long, the padding of the handle leading on the shelf was actually stuck to the wood!

Of course, cleaning this all up was… interesting.

I started at the window, taking things outside and getting it cleared enough that I could move the seat outside.

When I moved the green garbage can, I figured I’d better check to make sure there wasn’t any actual garbage in it.

I found a plant pot.

Full of gloves.

Then I spotted a… wire whisk?

Ugh.

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I don’t want to know what’s on that.

It got thrown out.

Yes, I was wearing gloves for all this!

When I finally could move the seat, I found this, under it.

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The cat poop, I was expecting.  During the winter, we sometimes found one of the outside cats had snuck into the sun room while we were putting food out, and at least twice, we discovered a cat in the room the next morning.  There is no way a cat could be in there that long, without making a mess.  Unfortunately, we had no way to even look for it, never mind clean it up, until now.

I also found the world’s cheapest, dullest knife.

Once I could access the shelves, I finally could start packing up the books, magazines and old Polish newspapers, as well as the various odds and sots around.

Speaking of odds and sots…

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There were tucked away behind the kneeler.  Mouse and rat traps.

Very gross traps.

The got garbaged.

The scrap carpet got added to the haul-away pile, outside the yard.

Here are the after pictures.

20180608.sunroom.cleanup.eastside1.after

The far wall is one of the log walls of the original part of the house.  Behind the bookshelf that was there, I found a pile of dead Asian Lady Beetles, that had made themselves some sort of a nest to hibernate in, partly under the paneling.

I really hope I swept them all out, but probably not.  We’d have to remove the paneling.

I’ve left the shelf across the window to finish clearing later.

20180608.sunroom.cleanup.eastside2.after

What a huge difference!

Once this side was clear, I had the space to start moving things around to work on the other side.

Which will be in my next post. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Special Delivery!

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20180608.pole.delivery

Yahoo!!

The new power pole was delivered this morning.  Ready and waiting to replace the one the movers broke.

That pole cost almost $400, all on its own.  The delivery fee was only $35.  It’s treated, and 30ft long.  About 5ft of it will be under ground, so the final height will be greater than the old pole, which was 21ft high.  Hopefully, that will mean no more possibility of someone catching on the wire again!

The Re-Farmer

Front Yard Clean Up – the shrine

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Cleaning up the south yard, I finally got around to working on my mother’s little shrine area.

Here are some before pictures.

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That statue of Mary has been featured in a few different places in the yard, if I remember correctly.

I don’t know what the pedestal was for.

The little structure to the right is an actual shrine.  My oldest brother built it for my mother; it is based on the kapliczki, or roadside shrines, in Poland that my mother remembers from her youth.  Sadly, it has not been maintained over the years, and the wood is starting to rot in many places.  For a while, it had a place of honour, right on the concrete landing at the main entrance.

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Another “before” view of the area, at the fence line.  The post in the foreground is for the clothes line.  I’m guessing the rope is to keep the post from being pulled by the weight of clothes on the line, but with the amount of slack on there, I’m not quite sure what it is really there to accomplish. :-D

The first area I started cleaning up was the tractor tire planter.  It was overrun with vines!  The roots had circled under the edge of the tire, with two big clumps of vines pushing their way out in such a large mass, they actually deformed the tire!

I’m starting to develop a strong dislike for those vines. ;-)

Once I was able to reach it safely, I took the statue out completely.  Then started working around the back, cutting away and pulling up a huge mass of dead vines.

I then found a whole other flower garden area!

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Bricked up and everything.

I vaguely remember noticing a couple of bricks there, shortly after the snow melted away, but did not expect to find this!

It had nothing but dead vines and leaves in it.  Any flowers that were ever planted there were long gone.

Feeling how my feet sank when I stepped in it to cut and clean away the debris, I figure it never actually had soil added to it.  It’s all basically composted leaf debris!

Here are the after pictures.

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When the tire planter and bricked areas were clear, I pruned what I could reach of the willow trees, taking down more vines that had climbed their way up the trunks in the process.

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Then I gave Mary a good scrubbing, before returning her to her concrete block.  There was moss starting to grow on her!

You can really see the one spot where a clump of vine roots distorted the tire.  The other spot is hidden by the pedestal.

With this area, I don’t know about planting anything there again.  What I’d really like to do is get rid of the tire planter.  I’d like to get rid of all the tire planters!  It will be a huge job to clear the tractor tire planters, so it might end up waiting until next year.

Until then, I just want to make sure those vines to take over again!

After finishing this, it was all I could do not to just keep on going and work in another section of the yard!

Have I mentioned, I really love this kind of work? :-D

The Re-Farmer

Front Yard Clean Up – by the gate

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Today was another awesome day of clean up in the yard.  It is looking so great!

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I so missed this kind of work!  I love it so much.  There’s the feeling of accomplishment, and at the end of the day, when the body is sore and achy, and I’m tired – it’s a good tired.  You know what I mean?

Oh, and I also got some great news today.  I got an email from the electrician.  The new pole to replace the one the movers broke will be delivered in the next couple of days.  Whoot!

Meanwhile…

While the girls started on the HUGE job of raking between the trees I cleared out yesterday, and adding them to the flower garden, I started working on the south yard.  I figure, it’s about time I did some work on the parts of the yard people see when they come to our place, rather than the parts hidden away behind houses. ;-)

The first section I worked on was West of the people gate.  This is where there was a mass of dead plants that turned out to have a wire fence in it – and a bottomless glass bowl. :-D

Here is what it looked like, before.

Tree tire is tired and broken.

This is how it looks now!

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Cutting away those vines – both the old, dead ones, and the new ones that had started to grow – was a huge job, all on its own.  The mass was so thick, it was hard to find what I needed to cut with the pruning shears (those anvil shears (affiliate link) are amazing!).

Then, after getting the big stuff off, I had to go back and find more vine roots and clip them.  They spread through their roots, so there was a lot of pulling up.

I like vines.  I really do.  But my goodness, they are invasive!!

That done, I moved on to the lilacs section.

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This is how it looked after I first started working on it.  There was a lot of clipping and pulling out of vines, cutting away dead and dying branches, and figuring out what lilac stems were keepers, and what had to go.

Lilacs also spread through their roots, and can become invasive, if they’re not kept in check.  Except when they’re being choked out by vines.  :-/

As I worked my way to the far end, I found…

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… Seriously?

The biggest lilac bush at the end of the row was growing straight out of a pile of horse droppings.

I’m getting really tired of finding horse droppings all over the place.

Here are the after photos!

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This is from the West end of the lilac row, after trimming and raking.

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And here’s how it now looks from the East end.

With all the vines I pulled out of there, I think I just extended the life of these lilacs by quite a few years!  Well.  As long as we keep on top of cutting back the vines as they try and grow back, that is.

I’m pretty sure my mother had flowers planted in here, too, but they don’t seem to have survived the vines.  I don’t have any plans to plant anything here this year, but we’ll see what we decide to do with the area next year.

Next post; cleaning up my mother’s… shrine?

The Re-Farmer

Yard work and home care visit

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Today was very much an outdoors day!

Thanks to the AWESOME riding mower my brother and his wife gave us, I was able to finish mowing the yard yesterday.  Which means that one of the goals of the day was to get out the weed trimmer to clear areas the mower can’t get close to.

A loud and messy job, so I waited until after our afternoon appointment with someone from the home care department.  This was a follow up on the last visit, with a different person.  So while we waited for her to arrive, I started working on cleaning up the flower bed on the west side of the house.

At one end of the flower bed, there is an unusual variety of lilac; it’s bushier, has tiny leaves, and masses of sprays with tiny flower buds right now; it’s blooming period seems quite a bit later than the other lilacs, which are near the end of their blooming period.

One of the problems with it is that there is a maple tree growing out the middle of it.

Plus, lots of dead branches.

So I started cleaning away dead branches and cutting away the many suckers at the base, just to get at the maple.  Where I found this.

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This is the trunk of the maple tree (which would have been self-sown), bent around a lilac stem.

I had to cut away more of the lilac before I could take out the maple, which had to be done in sections, due to the size.

It was very awkward work.  The lilac stems are surprisingly long and bendy, and many were wrapped around each other.  So much so, I found myself wondering if someone hadn’t done it deliberately at some point; perhaps they were overhanging the space between the house and the flower bed or something.

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Once the maple was out, I could see the damage it did to the lilac.

I’d already had to cut away a branch of that stem, and I’m not sure if I’ll have to cut the rest of it away.  Without being regularly pruned, the stems are so long that, without the dead and dying branches (and the maple tree) holding them up, they’re just sort of… flopping.

It was while I was working on this, that the woman from home care arrived.

While she was here, she went over her form questions, double checking my husband’s mobility needs and what we’ve got around the house.  She even took a look at our bathroom (higher toilet, bath chair, lots of arm bars in the tub/shower, and we made sure to bring the special hand held shower with us when we moved; you can shut the water off at the handle, rather than at the wall, and it has an extra long hose).  She asked about how he finds raising his legs over the side of the tub, and brought up that, if he ever needs it, there is a transfer chair available.  Which we already have, as my father needed one, and it’s still quite new.

She checked out the hospital bed as well, confirming that my husband is now able to get in and out of bed without losing his balance.  He’s really enjoying that thing, and finding it very comfortable to sleep on, too.

She also went through her list, asking about cooking, shopping, laundry, etc.  If the girls and I were not around to take care of this stuff, he would be able to get home care to come in to help.  As things stand now, it isn’t needed.

Which brought us to the only thing that we are hoping to be able to get; a ramp, to make it easier for my husband to get in and out of the house with his wheeled walker.  One of the things we learned is that, if we were to qualify for a ramp, we would need to get a contractor to give us a quote to pass on to them.  Qualifying for funding is another issue.  I had found out about the program online and read that there is an income cut off that can change, so they said to contact to find out what it is.  I’d sent an email and finally got a response.

Based on that, my husband’s disability payments put him at too high of an income to qualify. :-/

She’s still going to see if there are other programs available, but if we can just get someone to assess the location for us, and give us the information we need, then we will have something to go on to get it done ourselves, at some point.

So that meeting went well.

After she left, I headed back out to work on the yard.  I just cleaned up the trimmings I’d cut down earlier, then got out the weed trimmer – and the two 100 ft extension cords we’d been using to get power to the garage.  With those, I can reach pretty much anywhere in the yard.

While I worked on that, the girls cleared out the large pile of branches I’d cleared away from the maple grove.  The dead stuff went to the piles by the fire pit, but most of it was green.  The green wood pile by the fire pit is already getting big, so they decided to add to the pile I’d started outside the yard, when I cleared the back of the garage.

I didn’t think to take photos before I started with the weed trimmer in some areas.  After going around the house, I went around the east yard, including clearing a path to the Saskatoon bushes.  When I started working on the south west yard, I was finally able to go around parts of the “spare” house in the yard (I have no idea what my mother has in mind for that building; I did ask her, but the only answer I got was that it’s for storage.  !!  It was originally intended to be moved to one of the other quarter sections, for one of my brothers to use as a home), and the south fence line.  There had been a single mowed pathway leading to around the back of the other house.  There are several curved rows of spindly trees, planted close together.  I’d asked my mom about them, and she told me she planted them to be a “living fence.”

Personally, I’d like to get rid of them, as it’s really not a good place for trees.  I don’t think she really thought about what they will be like, at full size.

And that doesn’t even include the two rows of fully grown trees immediately behind the other house.

Very little of the area is mowable, and no one has tried to clear in between the trees, at all.  So I started clearing parts of it with the weed trimmer.  There isn’t much I can do behind the other house, until we clear away the junk and fallen branches, and random cinder blocks.  :-/  It’s a big job, and I wasn’t able to finish it today.  Weather willing, I’ll continue tomorrow.

Once done the yard work for the day, I decided we needed to have another cookout.  This time, though, I did baked potatoes.

I will post about those, separately. :-D

My husband was even able to come out and join us for a little while.  Not long enough for the potatoes of finish, unfortunately, but even a little bit is good.  :-)

After the fire was no longer needed to cook food, my younger daughter and I took advantage of it and started adding more from the clean up pile.  Unfortunately, we seem to be adding to it much faster than we’ll be able to use it for fire pit fuel! :-D

Since we were tending the fire, anyway, we also took turns cutting down some of the logs to fire pit size lengths.

We’re going to be set for wood for a good, long time!

We’ll just have to find lots of reasons to get the fire pit going, I guess. :-D

The Re-Farmer