Not just watching the grass grow

Besides enjoying the lovely out of doors this weekend, we did get a little bit done on the inside.

Saturday, we created the attic trap door. We'll add trim around the hole, and paint white. This is the plywood that was there. Adam added hinges so it'll open up.



This is the real coup, though. Remember this pantry?


Well, now it looks like this:


We got most of the kitchen door trim up-- a short in the extension cord burned out the table saw plug, so we couldn't finish the shims we needed for some of the pieces. And we have to build new baseboards. But everyday, it looks less and less like a construction zone.

We got more patio furniture from my grandmother's and we found some seriously cool shit there too-- like my great grandmother's butter churn from 1909 and a cane that came from someone special...? It's pretty fancy. Pictures to come.

And I got the bathroom cleaned and unpacked. That ALONE makes the house feel better:


And I mowed. Not too bad for sleeping in both days ;-).

n7vmg78ufyhgt or, the pretty patio

The title was an accident. And I'm too lazy to change it.

But there it is-- our new dinner spot for the upcoming temperate evenings...

Birth of my patio...

Just found this by accident in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

100 YEARS AGO Feb. 1, 1908 FORT SMITH — The work of paving the streets of Fort Smith will begin March 1. The brick plant is now turning out 65, 000 bricks per day.

A friend of ours, who happens to know a surprising amount of town history for someone who dislikes the place so much, told us a little about this just a few weeks ago. Apparently, the brick plant just outside of town was having trouble shipping the bricks-- the roads weren't paved and couldn't withstand the weight of the carts. So the brick company offered to pave the roads (free of charge, I think) in return for the rights to drive their shipments on them.

I've mentioned before that our road was still brick up until about 15 years ago or so. I remember riding my bicycle on those bumpy bricks when I was a little kid-- it's part of why I loved this street and why I wanted to live in this neighborhood my whole life. When they finally tore it up to repave, a local antique dealer got most of them and through him, they made their way to the home's owners at that time. They created this magical little brick patio that we are so looking forward to using when the weather turns warm (that's a "street lamp" that you see in the foreground, btw, not some weird pipe).

We've made some alterations-- the picket fence was riddled with live termites, so we built a 4 1/2 foot privacy fence (I think it hides the yard just enough, which makes it like The Secret Garden for me); and someone broke the little flagstone bench, though there's a bigger more usable one in the yard. And we'd like to replace that scraggly business you see on the upper left with a Japanese Maple. I just need to watch the yard at all hours to see if it gets reasonable sunlight. On the right, those are 4 o'clocks and lantanas-- I adore them and they withstand the Arkansas heat so well; but they'll choke out everything else so they need some supervision (they were easily 8 times bigger when we took over the house than they are in that pic-- I spent an entire Saturday clearing them out, along with some massive canna lilies, so the Terminex guys could get close to the house).

But the patio itself will stay the same. Most of the bricks are stamped "Fort Smith"; some are from Pittsburgh, some from Coffeyville. I hear that the Ft. Smith bricks go for $5 a piece. Guess we know where to go if we can't make the mortgage...