A Very Productive Weekend

This weekend Rob and I were so busy. We did so much hard labor that I went to bed at 9:30 Sunday night and I’m still sore today. In addition to keeping up with our usual cooking, cleaning, and cat-parenting chores, we also managed to finish three major home-improvement projects.

The first thing we did on Saturday morning was paint a couple of dirty, discolored doors (living room and front bedroom). It was quite a satisfying endeavor. The doors are nice heavy old things, and we painted them a clean snowy white. Since our cats enjoy getting paint on their paws and running around on the furniture, they spent the day in the Little House (the old detached kitchen). They weren’t too thrilled with this arrangement, and there were at least a dozen attempts at escape. I think the only cat who didn’t try to escape was Leroy, who is tubby and sweet and very lazy. There’s this dumb bathmat he likes back there, and his hobby is placidly sitting on it.

The front-bedroom door, freshly painted. We hope to paint the whole room (golden yellow) in a couple of weeks.

Leroy, content in the Little House. I mean, he was content until I offended him with my camera.

Carl pouting

Probably the most important work we did was pressure-washing the house, a project we started on Saturday afternoon. Well, we didn’t really pressure-wash the house. We just sprayed it with this solution called Jomax (mixed with some bleach), and the mold and mildew came off “like magic,” as Rob so joyfully declared. I should add that it was a particularly exhausting, drenching sort of magic, one that left us achy, wet, and reeking of Clorox.

The house, all clean and shiny. Those are woodland sunflowers in the foreground.

The last major project we tackled was mowing the woods behind the backyard. (We did this on Sunday.) Mowing back there is always a big job because our poor woods are choked with invasive nandina and ardisia. I’m serious, these plant pests form a wall-to-wall carpet of horror under the trees, and the only way we can control them at all is to mow them down periodically. I hope someday, if we keep mowing them, we’ll finally wear them out, but right now that shows no sign of happening. Both the nandina and the ardisia are still annoyingly healthy and robust.

I was on the riding mower on Sunday, and I must admit I was thoroughly enjoying running them down. I became a bit careless in my enthusiasm. I’m usually a very cautious person, but I was taking real chances that day, mowing wildly over rough terrain. I ended up stuck in a hole, stuck up on a stump, then stuck between two trees. If my sisters had seen me, they would have laughed, because I’m famous for being kind of a terrible driver.

The woods after mowing. Around each tree, there’s an island of invasives I still need to pull by hand or take down with the weedeater. And yes, this picture does embarrass me.