2011 Ch 4 ~ The Project

After selling my truck I had some dough to play with. Being me, I couldn't just be responsible with ALL of it, so I decided we needed to knock out one of our lingering, much anticipated and dreamed about projects: the arena.

Of course, being February, the timing wasn't great, but we lucked out with a very nice dry break in the weather and we were able to get it done. And of course when I say "we" I mean mostly the boyfriend. I pretty much just wrote the checks and cheered him on. I did run the roller for an hour or so one day. That was an adventure.

We rented a big (to me, boyfriend wasn't real impressed) roller and dozer for the project. First we (he) leveled the pad off with the dozer and got it to slope the way he wanted for drainage.

After he had that right, he rolled it pretty good so it was solid.

When that was ready, we brought in a few truck and pup loads of gravel, leveled and rolled that. Because the weather was so nice for us we actually spent a lot of time watering the gravel so that we could get it compacted enough. Who'da thunk that it would be too dry in February in Washington?!

The boyfriend spread the gravel out with the tractor and the TR3 rake, to make it all even and nice before we rolled the crap out of it.

That was the part I got to run the roller on and since I was actually working, there are no pics. Those things are pretty weird! Needless to say, my passes across the pad were not all straight and perfectly lined up like his were. Mine looked a little drunk. Maybe a LOT drunk! lol

The whole time we were working on this project we were checking the weather reports constantly. Hoping that it wasn't going to freeze too bad or rain or snow. Like I said, we really lucked out. After the base was about as good as it was going to get we started getting sand in. The dump truck driver was really great to work with and realized that we needed to get the base covered up before a storm rolled in and made it happen. He was so considerate of how he pulled in the driveway and drove nicely across the base so he didn't mess anything up and left as little evidence of his being there as possible. The extra care he took was definitely appreciated!

We got the base mostly covered up just in time for a big storm to roll through and the rest of the sand was delivered in the snow.

Once the weather cleared up a bit, the boyfriend got the sand all spread out and drug it a few times and we were ready to go!

We don't plan to put rails around it. Right now all of our horses are broke enough that we don't need fence and we've got portable panels we can put up if we do end up needing them. Plus, this way we can expand it later when we get tired of loping little circles.

I got my first ride in the arena on March 2nd! So far it's been a fabulous arena! Even with the massive amounts of rain we've had this year there were only a couple days that it was too wet to ride in. It drains great and has been excellent all weather footing! And let me tell you, having an arena at home so we can just tack up and ride is the most fabulous thing EVER!!!

Sunday Stills Challenge - The Elements

I've been just a touch busy lately *snort*, but I had the perfect picture for this challenge just chillin' in my archives so I had to get it up.

Check it out...all 5 elements in one pic! My interpretation of the 5 elements in one pic, of course, but I think it qualifies.

It's a picture from when we were clearing our property last year and burning all the brush. So we have 1. fire (obviously) 2. earth, lots of dirt, rocks, etc. 3. wind - the industrial fan 4. water - there is a hose that I promise you is full of water 5. love - Cheyanne and the boyfriend are both in the pic, they are my loves (and while love isn't neccessarily pictured, it counts because I say it does! ;) )

I added this pic in just because I like it. Earth, wind and fire.

Alrighty, I'd better get my butt back in gear. Hope you're all having a wonderful weekend!

Rays of Golden Sun!

This just happened to catch my attention this morning as I was leaving for work. I was running late, as usual, but I absolutely could not pull out without atleast snapping a couple pictures. I really could have stayed out there for hours getting different angles and shots!

It was just a touch foggy and the sun was shining bright through the trees at the bottom of our property creating the rays. It was absolutely amazing!

Side note: This last picture is a bit of a preview of a future B&A. I'm posting it regardless because it's shadowy and dark and certainly not the focus. Can you guess which project it might be?

B&A - Garage Flower Bed

That is B & A, as in Before and After, not BA, as in Bare Ass. We don't do BA's around here so get your head out of the gutter!

On to the B&A...

I think, maybe, just possibly, the little area in front of the garage is finally officially finished now! YAYYYYY!!!!

1 down, 3,796,241 to go!

I mentioned it a little in this post last fall. It was the third project that I finished last weekend, officially classifying me as a total rock star for how productive I was. The other two projects were The Great Clipper Encounter 2009 and getting the closet in my office/craft room painted and organized.

Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of the real before, how it was when we bought the house. I'm discovering that I do that a lot. It's annoying.

When I got started on it it had a huge and very dead rose bush with massive, evil thorns. It was huge. And evil. It took a lot of very careful pruning to extract. Then I pulled out the huge, mostly dead juniper shrubby thing. It had completely over grown the area and over hung the little fence border by a good foot or more. It was ugly. This picture was taken after pulling all that stuff out. There was plastic covering the whole area and the little fence in the back was the border around the whole edge.

I worked on it a little last fall, got it "done" but then decided that I really wasn't satisfied with the way it looked. I wanted to add dirt to it, bring it up level to the concrete and re-do the rock border.

I talked the boyfriend into pulling out the juniper root finally a little while ago and he turned up the dirt a bit while he was there. Last weekend I pulled the rock border out and got him to bring a couple scoops of the good horse poo dirt out for me to add in and got to work re-doing the rock border.

This was what I ended up with. Much better!

I still wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to plant in there so I decided to think on it for a while and see what ended up inspiring me. I'm a big fan of low maintenance when yard work is involved so that was a big consideration. There are big, pretty green leafy bushes that seem to grow and spread pretty fast and don't need watering in front of the house so I decided to pull up some of the shoots and transplant them over there. They should fill in pretty quickly and then we can just snip it back to keep behaving itself in it's little area.

Then I hit Home Depot for paint and supplies for the office and found these cute little flowers that are also supposed to be low maintenance, spread out to form a mat and bloom all spring. Plus, they were on sale and I do loooove sales! I think I would have gotten them even if they weren't on sale though. They were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Only cuter!

Aren't they cute? I think they are adorable little flowers!

So after adding the bushes and the little flowers to the area, this is the finished product...

Everything should fill in and grow together eventually. The leafy bush should grow quite tall, the one in front of the house is going on 5 feet tall. They also get cute little white flowers on them late spring. I really like the way it turned out!

So YAY finished yard project #1! Not sure what's next outside, but hoping to get after pics of the office by next weekend! Finger's crossed.

Spring is here!

Or so I hear.



As jrosey said on her blog, I don't think Mother Nature has gotten the memo yet.

I took the camera outside last night to try to find some lines (this week's Sunday Stills challenge) since it wasn't raining at the moment. I didn't do so hot with the challenge, but I did end up finding some evidence that spring may indeed be on it's way.

The trees are coming back to life. The weeds are sneaking in. The grass is growing again. The birds are chirping. The boyfriend also mentioned that the frogs were noisy again. I love listening to frogs. To me they are the epitome of spring and summer and nice weather. They are also a great lullaby. I was really happy when we discovered we could hear frogs in the evenings after we bought our house last year. Life just wouldn't be the same for me without the sound of frogs at night.

This morning when I left the house I heard them for the first time this year. I had to take a moment to enjoy it. It put a smile on my face. And I could take a moment to pause on the deck this morning because, as my truck informed me, it was a balmy 45 degrees this morning. Never thought I'd be so happy to see 45 degrees! I didn't even crank on the heat when I got in my truck. It was weird.

I'm getting all excited to get outside and do some yard work. And no, I didn't imagine I'd ever in my lifetime utter those words. I might have to take a trip to the store this weekend to get some new gardening gloves and see what other fun things I can find to get me inspired. I've got a lot of work to do this year!

Progress

I can't even express how excited I am about this project. I have dreamed for I don't even know how long of having my very own real arena at my house. Now I can see that dream becoming a reality! I'm ecstatic!

The boyfriend totally rocks on the tractor! He's been a busy bee around the property playing with his new toy and getting things cleaned up and looking good. I was blown away the other night when I came home to the arena-to-be all graded out, looking level and beautiful. Of course I had to grab the camera and take pictures.

*grins*

A new toy

This year, because of our house, the boyfriend and I each ended up getting bigger tax refunds then we had been expecting. In our discussions of just what exactly we would do with that money we batted around ideas that ranged from saving every last penny of it, buying another horse, doing our arena or getting started on our barn and fencing to putting it towards house updating projects and all the other practical, but not all that fun things that are requiring our money and attention.

After much deliberation, we decided a practical, but fun use of the money was to put it towards tractor. It is fun because it's a big new toy, but also practical because with horses and raw property there are plenty of ways for it to make itself useful.

When we bought our house it came with almost 5 acres of mostly wooded land (see pic above). The whole perimeter of the property is fenced, but I wouldn't call it secure horse fencing by any stretch of the imagination. Even if it was at some point, it's old and posts are rotted and the only reason a lot of it is still standing is because it's being held up by the blackberry bushes that have taken it all over. I think the whole length of the perimeter is fenced with barbed wire. Then there is the not-horse-friendly, big square field fencing on part of it. Then there is the t-posts with two rows of 3 foot mesh fencing stacked for a 6 foot fence, held up by tposts for part of it. It's a bit ghetto, to say the least. Actually, it makes me laugh looking at it. It's just silly.

The property was mostly wooded when we got it but we changed that rather quickly and rather in a panic last summer. Since that initial clearing we haven't done a whole lot with it. We have an area cleared and mostly graded for our arena (see pic above), but it needs some cleaning up. The pasture needs lots of grading and we've decided there are a few more trees we would like to take out and lots of brush to clean up.

The pic above is how our property looks right now. If we can get the right implements for the tractor, I think we can make quick work of clearing fence lines and sinking fence posts. We did get the box scraper which is great for grading, so hopefully we can get the pastures cleaned up and seeded soon. I'm also hoping we can get the ground in the "arena" ready so we can bring in some sand soon. I'm excited because the tractor will help us turn the mess above into a picture perfect horse property. Or something. We've certainly got our work cut out for us, but I'm excited to see it all come together and hopefully that will happen much faster now!

I wonder...

...does Mother Nature get P.M.S.?

I think she must. Why she has chosen Western Washington to pick on for the past few weeks I'm not sure, but I do know that she is being rather nasty. First there was rain. Then there was snow. Then there was melting snow. Way below freezing temps. Ice. More snow. More ice. Rain. Rain. More rain. Some wind thrown in for kicks. Then more snow. Then non stop rain on top of suddenly warm temps causing way too much snow to melt and come gushing down the mountains. Add that to lots more rain and we've got quite a mess out here!

I'm very thankful that it was rather soggy and near flooding when we were house shopping so that we were concious of how wet any land that we looked at got. Our house is up on a hill and the whole property slopes just enough that it doesn't get too terribly soggy. Atleast I hope not. I guess we'll be finding out for sure here shortly. There is a creek that runs thru the front of our neighborhood that is now more closely resembling a raging river and I think I heard we have a new lake down there too. Things are getting pretty dicey down here by my work too. Sounds like there are evacuations going on all around me. Good times.

Could someone please tell me where I might be able to locate good ol' Mother Nature so I can pass along a big bottle of Midol? Thanks!

Happy New Year!

Wow. It's 2009 already. I think I may be in shock. I really can't figure out where the heck 2008 went! I swear it just disappeared. I guess it was a pretty darn busy and BIG year though. We bought our first house. My best friend got married. My sister bought a house (she got hers first and was probably most of our inspiration to get off our perfectly-sassified-renting-butts and go buy a house). We moved. We cleared our property. We started cutting and reining and chased buffalo. We got a new horse and a puppy. I was introduced to the world of blogging, eventually starting my own, even though it's more for my own amusement then anything. I started getting into photography. I came to know and love all things Twilight. I'm sure there is plenty more, but that's what sticks out in my mind at the moment.

It's hard to imagine (and even harder to really appreciate) how far we've come in the past year. Looking back over my list of resolutions and goals for 2008 I'm sure I didn't imagine myself in my own home, living out here in BFE with all that I have now. I really didn't do very well with my goals and resolutions in 2008, which is hard to not be disappointed with myself for, but I'm pretty sure I didn't factor in actually buying a house and all the work that being a home owner entails. I've decided to not beat myself up too badly for not accomplishing my goals and just try to set more realistic ones for myself in 2009.

So far my 2009 resolutions and goals include:
~Getting our credit cards paid all the way off
~Making a budget and savings goals and sticking to them

And a very ambitious list of home and property improvement projects like:
~Painting the rest of the interior of the house - bathroom, office, living room, bedroom and extra bedroom
~Getting our barn finished so that the ponies have real shelter next year
~Getting some sort of arena in, even if it's just footing for now
~Fencing for our perimeter and pastures
~Finish grading and seed our pastures

It's already shaping up to be a busy year, but I think it will be a good one. Hopefully we'll be a little closer to having our property functioning the way we want it to for the horses, which is a very exciting prospect. And I'm sure we should be able to accomplish more this summer because I think we were still kind of in shock that we actually bought a house last summer. The whole clearing the property with 3 days notice thing certainly didn't help that either. I'm thinking this summer we'll be a little more prepared and really be able to dig in and get things done. That's my plan anyways.

So here's to a fabulous, happy and productive 2009! Cheers!

So many projects...

...so little time! It always seems that there just aren't enough hours in the day for everything that I'd like to do. That's become incredibly apparent lately with these gorgeous, sunny, crisp fall days just calling my name, but only having an hour or two after work to enjoy them before it gets dark. It's torture I tell you! It's just not possible to squeeze chores, yard maintenance, yard/property projects and riding ponies into the small window of time that I have outside while it's light out. Something has to give, and lately it's been my pony time.

Generally speaking, giving up pony time is not a good thing. Riding horses is my therapy! Both mental and physical. It keeps me sane, relieves stress and makes up for the 8+ hours a day I spend sitting in a chair slouched over. My back can always tell when I don't ride. It starts screaming at me sooner or later if I'm slacking. It needs the exercise and balance of sitting up straight and working the horses to make up for my awful posture at work and the hour and a half minimum that I spend in my truck every working day. Luckily being on a drill team with weekly practices gets me on my horse for a good, solid two hours one night a week. No matter how much I whine and complain when it's time to leave for practice, I always feel 100% better when it's done. There is just no therapy quite like riding a horse.

The last couple of weeks I've been having tons of fun working on yard and house projects, so I've hardly had time to miss riding. Atleast not too much. I've been suddenly inspired to tackle a few projects outside before the weather turns for the year and it's been a lot of fun. We have 4.3 acres, most of which was wooded when we bought the house. There are some very odd flower beds around the house, garage and gate. The one by the garage had a lovely (at one time I'm sure) huge rose bush that was very, very dead and had the most evil thorns every where on it. That little flower bed area also had a huge, mostly dead shrubby thing. I believe my friend told me it was Juniper? Not sure, I don't know plant names. It was also prickly and evil. I decided to tackle that project one sunny weekend day while the boyfriend was off hunting for Bambi.

Unfortunately, I didn't take "before" pictures of it with the dead stuff still there, but here is what it looked like after I yanked all the crappy old dead stuff out (ok, more like waged a war against their prickly evil-ness), except the big root for the shrubby thing (don't you just love all the technical terms?) that I could not get out of the ground to save my life! The previous owners also put plastic or fabric EVERYWHERE! It has been a huge PITA (pain in the a$$) and doesn't seem to do much of anything in the way of actually keeping weeds down. The little fence was the border with the mostly dead shrub thing growing thru it and just looking gross.

I had planned to do paver blocks every where around the house. Bordering all the flower bed areas and making for a very nice look. I knew that would be some time in the future, like maybe after we win the lottery or something, since paver blocks and a nice yard just aren't at the top of the list of projects to pay for. I kept dreaming about it though, trying to picture what it will look like someday. Then one sunny Sunday I woke up and thought, rocks! I'll use rocks! Duh! We are VERY successful rock farmers since we cleared the property and I need to pick them out of the turn out area and arena anyways. Best of all they are FREE so why not kill like 5 birds with one stone?!

I like the overall look of the rock border, but I do realize that this was my first attempt and it does need some help. I have also decided that I need to fill it with some more dirt, bring it up level with the concrete, and raise the edge of the border a little bit more. I planted a couple tulip bulbs in there, but that's about it for a while. As I've mentioned, flower beds aren't at the top of the projects to pay for list. Any money we spend on things like flowers and plants, is that much less money that we have to spend on things like arena footing, stalls or our tack room. Those are definately priorities for me.

Eventually, I'd like to have some sort of tree or taller, not evil shrub against the building that will take up some of that empty wall space. Then I would like to find some sort of ground cover that is colorful and fun, but also low maintenance. I like things that bloom and I love having lots of color around the house, but I don't like yard work or things that are high maintenance. It takes away from my pony time. The name of the game for me when it comes to gardening and yard work is low maintenance!

So that was the first project that I have tackled and finished. It is very minor considering all that I have to do still, but it's a start! This is my next project. It's a strange little "flower bed" area, minus the flowers I guess, that seems to be centered around the lamp post and over all sorts of interesting, random things that I assume is wiring and stuff for the gate and lights at the entrance or may have been part of the gate at some point. I've already made a lot of progress on it, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to finish it before I run out of nice weather. Fingers crossed!