Our Irish Manor: Summer Recap

I realize that it has been a LONG time since I have posted. Honestly, we have been busy! Some house stuff, some summer stuff, but I'm going to pause and catch my breath for a moment before we move on to the next exciting project - the bathrooms! Yes, finally we will be doing the bathrooms. More because we are forced to replace the upstairs toilet and to tear out the downstairs sink to repair some plumbing, so we may as well remodel both bathrooms while we are at it ;)

Summer has flown by. We have done a lot, yes, but not as much as we had hoped. We set the bar pretty high around here. We don't often make it, but we keep trying.

Here is a collection of pictures of various projects around our place. I promise that I will use a fancy little slideshow next time, but these were all uploaded. Better to use what you have than scrap it all for perfection, I say. I will try to put in captions so you can figure out what we are doing. Enjoy!

Edward and I added wood chip paths to the existing lasagna garden. This was before we realized that most of the front yard is completely in the shade and unsuitable for vegetable beds. So we moved all the flowers and most of the dirt.....

... to make 2 large vegetable beds and several rows that will serve as a cutting garden of sorts until I come up with a new plan of where my vegetable garden will go. I don't know if I will get to have a garden in the front yard at all because it is so shady! It is west facing, but the trees on the south side really over shadow any potential garden area. Oh well. Back to the drawing board!

Mr. Ireland started hauling loads of junk to the dump. There were 3 trailer loads of random items and lumber left by the previous owners. He also used his truck to pull down the decaying green house structure and to jerk the blue steel container forward over the property line. He works so hard! He had a little fun with the green house when he took a splitting maul to it.

The baby turned 1 and promptly started to walk and climb the stairs!

We went to the zoo to meet my childhood best friend! It was wonderful to see her. I wish we could do that more often.

Not long after that, our house got painted! It is a VERY big house and it took a week of scraping and rescraping to get all of the terrible beige paint off. It is now a very dark green. I love it!

There was a bit of a greenhouse effect with all the windows taped over with plastic for several days of sun. Our house already is very warm in the summer. We survived, but it was hot!