Covered!

Today's the big day! Making the house beautiful day! New patio cover day! And tree trimming day! And still painting day! It's a good thing I am such a capable construction foreman. The patio cover has only been up for a few hours now, but I can already feel the difference it's going to make in the family room. It's so much more comfortable (because while the rest of America freezes, I almost had to run the AC yesterday.)

Looks nice from the inside too! (and you can see Lulu on the arm of the recliner - she insisted on following me around the house, meowing at me. Just to make sure that I was safe!)

Our Australian willow, all trimmed and beautiful. It's one of my favorite parts of the house.

Not pictured - a giant, obnoxious and useless tree that was cut down in its prime (you can reference a picture from the other day to see what it looked like.)

They just cleared the dead out of the pine. The guy was up in the cherry picker, basically using a chain saw like a barber uses scissors.

It's quite the pile!

The second biggest improvement in my opinion is the side yard, where we had the old cover and fences taken down. At first, I thought not having the little fence was going to force us to look at the trash cans all the time. It's really not that bad, and having all of that rotted junk out of the way makes the side yard seem enormous!

Before

After!

You can also see that we had the out door light fixtures replaced. Before they were cheap motion sensors that NEVER stayed lit long enough to do anything in the back yard. Now we have some lovely lanterns that will stay on!

Huge thanks to Gigi for volunteering to pick up Ellie from preschool so she could go and nap in a quiet place. Goodness knows, around noon today certainly was not quiet at this house! Adam has been a very good boy about it all - he took a nice long morning nap (which I spent cleaning) and then we had lunch and he went back to sleep just before everyone finished up and left.

He also did some supervising with Grizz. It's funny - I had just been wondering to myself if my dad was going to stop by, or if this is a low enough budget job that he doesn't feel like coming over to bust anyone's chops, when I heard the front door open and him yell hello. He takes good care of us.

The painters say they're going to be 90% finished by the end of the day, and the new side gates are set to be installed on Tuesday morning. So hopefully we'll have everything buttoned up by the end of the day Wednesday, depending on when the painters can come back to paint the gates. Now the next tasks are finding patio furniture, and having poor Ricardo come over and help me figure out what to do with my dried up, weedy hellhole of a yard. Probably should just put in astroturf.