Working Hard for a Saturday!

This morning we woke up early and went to Home Depot! Wheeeee! What for, you may ask? The cooler project, of course! Got some more submarine sealer spray, a couple of Aspen pads (old one had a big hole on it), and more compression nuts since I had overtightened so much on one that it broke in two! I also wanted to find a way to cap the water line that had leaked , so an employee showed me this cool cap that you can just pop on and you don't have to solder or anything! I think it was maybe $2 at most.  UPDATED: Got the fitting on and it was easy!




After we went back home, I worked on the coolers a bit but realized that I didn't let the sealant dry long enough before filling the base with water. Great. So I drained them both and will give them a couple days to dry before I try again.

Since it has been raining almost non-stop here for the last few days, the lawn was both really green and really long. So I got out all the yard work tools and mowed, trimmed, etc. Looks good now.






After all that was done, I decided it was time to finish up the re-grading job I had been working on. I actually started it a couple of months ago when we got the dirt to fill our planter's boxes in the backyard. I used some of the old dirt and sand that was back there to fill in the grade on the south side of the house, since it wasn't sloping away from the foundation like it should. However, that only took care of a little more than 1/3 of the job. And I ran down of dirt.

Luckily, our neighbor's son had a trailer full of fill dirt that he was kind enough to offer to me! I said that I couldn't use all of it, but I would be happy to take some of it off of his hands. Fast forward a week, when I finally get some time, and all that dirt is completely soaked from the rain and is basically just mud now. Still, this needed to get done and I needed that dirt.

I started off by raking all the river rock away from the side of the house, since the dirt is going to go underneath that. Those things are heavy.










Luckily for me, I had NO IDEA what the word "heavy" meant at this point, as I was about to go shovel all that mud. I struggled with it (and it started raining again), but I was able to fill about five wheelbarrow-loads before I was just too tired to get any more.






I wheeled them all over and dumped them along the wall, spreading it out as best I could with the rake. I was going for a sloping look, but since it was so muddy it was a bit tough to make it perfect.










Since I had some black plastic sheeting still around from I have no idea what, I used that as my weed barrier to go on top of the dirt. This was also useful to prevent any water that falls on it from draining into the ground right next to the house -- it would have to slope off of the plastic. I laid all that out and sprinkled some rocks on it to hold it down.






Finally at the last step! I shoveled and raked all the rocks back into place over the plastic. I tried to even them out as much as I could but it sure seemed like I lost about 20% of the rocks since there seemed to be WAY less than I had when I started! Oh well, I think it looks OK and now it slopes away from the house. I think we can check this project off the list.










Since that was done I finished up a couple more things, like fixing the gate on the side of the house. Since we moved in, we've had to lift up on it if we wanted it to open. I had enough of that today, so I moved the "strike plate" (I don't know what you call it) down a bit. Now it opens and closes like a dream! How very exciting.






I also finished transplanting some of our seedlings that we started about a month ago. It seems like they're going slowly, but maybe we just started them too early. Anyway, they are in their final spots now, so let's see some veggies already!

We've got broccoli and cauliflower on the right, and on the left we have cucumber and zucchini seedlings:






We have two rectangular containers, each with different kinds of onion seeds along the front and different bean seedlings along the back:






To finish the day off, I spent about 1/2 an hour spraying mud off of our wheelbarrow and the shovels. Then another 15 minutes scrubbing the rust off of them with a wire brush.

It reminded me of my Army days, when we would have to do that with all our really dirty tools whenever we came back from the field.  Ugh.  Everything had to be clean before we could go home. I guess that still is in effect here!