And then it rained

So my DH and I have been getting all enthusiastic about doing some much-needed work on the house, right? You'd think this would make all good things better.

Well.

The last thing we had to do on the deck was to replace two joists. Simple, right? It began as a bit of a chore, because a lot of the screws that held the deck surface to the joists didn't want to come out, and some of them broke off. This is normal stuff for decks. When my mother rebuilt her deck, she came across the same thing.

But then when we pulled the first joist, we found that about three feet of the beam tied to the house that supported the joists was rotten. Not just a little rotten. I pulled out handfuls of sawdust and a couple of termites. On top of that, the wet damage extended down below the beam. I could push my fingers through the siding there. It ran along the family room window.

We have T-11 siding that's tied directly into the framing. There's no intervening plywood.

In short, we have a hole in the side of our house.

This isn't a DIY situation. Luckily, I have a neighbor who's a contractor. When the rain lets up, I'm going to ask him to come over and frown at the damage with me.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention. After a long dry spell, it's now raining. And we have a hole in the side of our house. After listening to it rain all morning from about 7:30am, and after the panicked realization that we have a hole in the side of our house and maybe I should like, you know, cover it?, I decided to check the weather report. Intermittent rain after 1pm, it says. Well it's pouring right now. I'm a little afraid to find out what it's going to do in the afternoon.

There's a tarp on the deck now. The section in front of the sliding door isn't safe to walk on, because it's missing a joist and the surface is too soft to trust our weight to it. But at least it's staying dry at the spot where there's a hole in the house.

Weeeee!

I don't know what we're going to do, but I expect that whatever we do will probably be expensive.

Wish us luck!

There's Never Anything to Do Around Here

So we have all these projects, and while we're asleep the projects get together, make crazy love and produce baby projects that grow up fast and become full-blown projects in no time.

Have I mentioned that I want a pony? Oh yes. Like a spoiled child, I want a pony, and my DH is humoring me. But first, we want to rearrange the dogs. Chase is doing great inside, but she really needs a safe place to run for extended periods of time. She can't be with the big dogs because she beats up on poor Brian, so that means the big dogs need somewhere separate to run.

Genius idea: the big dogs can roam the backyard and veggie garden and keep the deer out. So, step one, create a new goat pasture because the goats are running out of blackberries to eat (yay!) and step two, run a long fence along the road, then step 3 connect the long fence to the new pasture. Voila! The big dogs will have at least a half an acre of run, and no deer eating my roses or tomato plants anymore. Also, the raccoons won't have anywhere close to the chickens where they can take shelter. This is full of all good things.

When the big dogs are contained, I can start work on a new goat shelter, as the buck should really be separated from the does and besides, there might be a time when I want to separate the pony from the goats, and so they'll need separate shelters. Since we'll be building anyway, might as well throw on a new coop on one side and a potting shed on the back.

Then, I suspect I'll have to set up a bit more fence so that the pony has access to the ornamental parts of the garden but not the veggie garden, because I suspect the pony will find zucchini delicious. I also have to go over a list of plants potentially toxic to ponies and make sure that the pony doesn't have access to areas of the ornamental garden where I have toxic plants that I can't relocate.

I would have finished the fence along the road by now, but I had to reinforce the deck first for safety reasons, and I've got writing and design work to do.

Nothing to do around here but eat bon bons all day and daydream about ponies ....