Food Preservation Frolics and Follies

This year was an interesting one for food preservation.  So, let’s get to a few things I did so far.

First off, I did not plant a garden this year due to having to work on the house and deck this summer, so that was a failed goal to be sure.  I really did miss the fresh produce, especially lettuce, over the summer and I lamented the loss of my tomato plants and the potential for even green tomatoes to make into green tomato chutney (a new favorite around here), but it was what it was.

I did, however, want to preserve my rhubarb this year and I found a recipe for rhubarb chutney that sounded good and could hopefully take the place of the green tomato chutney that I had been planning on using this year in recipes.

Guys that recipe was an EPIC fail for me.  I followed the recipe exactly and really don’t know where it went wrong, but boy did it!  The rhubarb (might have been due to our crappy weather changing it’s texture or something, not sure) when it cooked, it turned out WEIRD!  The strings in the rhubarb became the same texture and consistency as fish bones.  It was disgusting and was hard not to gag on as it was like having a hair stuck or something in your mouth every time you tried to taste it! 

I tried to think how to save it.  First thought was to blend it smooth.  So, out came the immersion blender.  It chopped the pieces of stringy nastiness down but not even close to edible.  I then put the mixture through my food mill.  Twice.  Better, but pieces slipped through.  So, finally, I broke down and forced the mixture through a fine mesh sieve.  After tons of work I ended up with some pints of rhubarb chutney sauce instead of actual chutney.  I ended up freezing it versus canning it because I changed the consistency so much and plain had no idea what would be a good safe time to can it for.  I’m going to use it in the Hawaiian chicken marinade and hopefully it turns out okay, but yeah, that was not a fun experience.

Next up was a recipe that did turn out really well for me.  I took the raspberries I had left over from when my husband’s friend gave him some of his bumper crop last year and decided to make raspberry curd with them for cakes and things this winter after seeing Becky on Acre Homestead on YouTube do it.  The raspberries were REALLY tart so I hadn’t used them in much, so I did end up using a bit more sugar then the recipe called for.  But the eggs in the curd really helped to dull the flavor a little bit and it turned out really tasty.  I’m really looking forward to using it in desserts this winter :).  I froze the curd since curd freezes well (pumpkin pie, lemon pie and such for instance) and am hoping it defrosts well.

I took all of the little bits of vegetables, frozen and fresh, I had that needed to be used up but were a bit past their prime and I made a big pot of vegetable stock.  I wanted to make it for the turkey brine this Thanksgiving as vegetable stock is expensive now a days!  I managed to get 12 out of 16 cups out of what I made so now I just need to buy one box instead of 4!  Definite win!

Not really a preservation project, per say, but I did make our yearly aged eggnog and put it in the fridge yesterday to start aging for the holidays.  I used the alcohol I had on hand only again this year and just made the ratios work.  So far it is really yummy so I am hoping it turns out really good for the holidays!  Next year we will have to buy rum and bourbon again, but not this year, so that definitely saved me some money as well this year!

I harvested what chives I could when they were still growing well and froze them to use on baked potatoes this winter.  I didn’t get a ton (aforementioned crappy weather), but I hopefully got enough to last us a bit.

I did make erbswurst as well during a food prep day I did last weekend as well (more on that day later).  My husband loves this pea sausage and makes soup from it tons when sick.  We were nearly out of the last batch I made so I bought a pound of split peas and made him some more.  I used my old coffee grinder to grind up the peas into a coarse flour and it worked great.  So, Erbswurst done for a year or two!

I still have a few preservation projects to do (I got frozen berries yet to process for one...long story, but I'll get into it later), so hopefully I’ll have more to report on the food preservation front soon, so stay tuned for that!

Enjoy!

Frugal Frolics: Money Saving Recap

I want to start by saying how much my heart goes out to those effected by Helene.  I pray you are all safe and that you did not suffer any awful damage from the hurricane.  I know how terrible it is to recover from a natural disaster and I have so much empathy for those impacted by this one.

In my news, I had some “fun” on the home front.  The pressure tank for our well, located in my pantry/utility room, blew its pressure switch and sprayed an inch, or more, of water all over my pantry.  Thank God my husband was able to jam the switch back in its hole long enough for us to drain the tank or that would have been REALLY bad.  And might I say as a side note that wet dry shop vacs are the best invention ever.  Man, if not for one of those suckers, I don't know what I would have done!

Bright side of the train wreck...the pantry is very clean now.  I don't think the floor has ever been cleaner.

As is, it was not a fun week as I pulled everything out of the pantry, threw away pretty much every piece of cardboard that was in there (so waterlogged) and drying everything as it came out.  

Then it was the running of the fans to dry out the pantry as much as I could, running the carpet cleaner in the hallway (water leaked into the carpet from under the stairs, saturated the carpet and everything started to smell because it wasn’t drying fast enough) and then moving the fans to the hallway to dry out the carpet.  I nearly have everything rearranged (had to accommodate the new lack of cardboard boxes that used to house stuff) and back in the pantry, but man it is a slow process.  So, yeah, the pantry tour is a bit delayed.  I will get to it, though...it is just going differently than I had planned.

Bright side, we have been having problems with our well pressure for a while and my husband was worried it was the pump, but it was the nipple that fed the pressure switch that was just clogged shut that caused it.  We replaced the switch just to be safe as well and everything is working well again.  So, a 65.00 fix and lots of cleaning versus a well pump we’ll into the thousands of dollars?  I’ll take it.

Now onto some other stuff going on around here.

1.  I have been working hard on my kitchen this week, rearranging things, again, to make the kitchen more functional.  I am planning to eliminate the two kitchen carts in my kitchen to open the dining area a bit and get rid of visual clutter.  

A lot of this came down to my decision to get rid of some of my Tupperware.  I really do like the stuff, but it just takes so much room to store and at some point you just have to accept that your space is small, you have to maximize it or live in constant clutter, and clutter gives Alvah anxiety it turns out.  Every time I eliminate a bit more clutter, the happier he gets.  I already decluttered the living room a bunch and he’s been really happy with that too.  So, getting rid of Tupperware so I can store more in the hallway closet is totally worth it.

I have been working on food preservation this year, after a break of a few years, as well.  I’ll cover that in the next post (well part one of a few posts I'm sure), and I’m still working on things, but slow and steady wins the race.

2.  I’ve actually been doing this for a while, but thought I’d share this “frugal hack”.  We have stopped eating out as a family every week due to costs and schedule, but we do get Alvah French fries from Red Robin after swimming once a week as a treat (he is over 6’ now and starving all the time).  Every time we pick up his fries I ask for seasoning salt and I put up any extra they give us in my spice cabinet.  When I get a big enough pile I sit down, tear them open and put the salt into my big Red Robin salt container I bought years ago.  Doing this I haven’t had to try another copycat recipe for the stuff or had to buy a fresh bottle in years.  A benefit to getting take out if there ever was one.

3.  I finally broke down and made an appointment with the eye doctor to get new glasses.  The anti-scratch coating was breaking down on my current pair (still is as I’m waiting for the new ones to come in) and it is impacting my ability to see clearly now.  This time when I went I took the daughter too as she’s never had a full on eye exam (just the basic ones in the past and even that she hadn’t had in a few years) and since it is covered by insurance I figured it was time.  So glad I did that as it turns out the bad eyes on both sides of the family (my husband has great eyesight but he’s the exception not the rule) caught up with her and she needs glasses.  At least we had our tiny savings as I was able to take the cost out of that instead of having to put it on credit card.

4.  I mended a few pairs of underwear, a bra and a shirt.

5.  I saved 10.00 a month the last 10 months to buy a cast iron Dutch oven rack (associate link) to hold my Dutch ovens (I use them nearly every day, it seems) so I could eliminate one of the kitchen carts that is being used to just basically hold said Dutch ovens.  It is a lot smaller than the cart so I am hoping it will work well (Amazon shipped it slow speed so I am two more weeks out to getting it, which annoys me as it was supposed to be here by their original estimate last Monday). I’ll let you know how it goes.

6.  I took advantage of having to run into the store to get milk and picked up a pumpkin for Halloween while I was there.  I scrubbed it with rubbing alcohol and oiled the pumpkin after it dried to hopefully keep the pumpkin from rotting before Halloween.  Worse comes to worse and we’ll carve it early.  I’m not sweating the small stuff at this point.

7.  I fixed a ceiling light.  Alvah jumps on his bedroom floor a lot and the light in my bedroom ceiling managed to vibrate out of its bracket over time and fell from the ceiling and was hanging by the wires when I found it.  I had to take it the rest of the way down, rewire it and rehang it.  My husband was stuck in a traffic jam on the way home, so I handled it (he is a Journeyman electrician so I tend to leave that type of thing to him).  I worked as an apprentice electrician years ago, so it was interesting doing that work again on my own home.  I now know to check said light from time to time as the way it is constructed the problem could occur again.  

8.  Alvah managed to break the new support system my husband had installed in the loveseat.  This time when we fixed it we did a two pronged attack on the problem.  My husband put a piece of unistrut across the length of the loveseat and then I went and made sure the spring steel system of “springs” the loveseat had were snapped into their brackets properly and then I took lengths of rip stop nylon belt/strap material I had bought years ago for some projects and I basically wove an entire new seat with it, being sure to weave it in and out of the existing steel frame and the spring steel “springs”.  So far, so good.  The loveseat has been holding up well to daily abuse and I’m hopeful that this time we fixed it for a while.  Here’s hoping!

9.  I finished up Alvah’s TEFRA renewal paperwork and got it sent in for the year.

10.  We hung up Halloween decorations later than normal due to us being busy, but we got them up last week.  Last week we made Halloween themed sugar cookies.  This week we’ll make some more treats.  I really didn’t want to feel rushed this year so I am glad we are getting things done slowly but surely.  

I'm also working on food preservation projects this week to get my upright freezer emptied and defrosted properly as it is still building up ice flows in the bottom of the freezer.  I am hoping it's not slowly dying on me (I mean it is 15 years old, so it might be something bad coming my way there), but I want to see if I can take care of this problem as right now I can't use the bottom bin in my freezer or everything gets frozen in the freezer with ice, which leads to a bunch of frustration and wasted space.

And yeah, I think I will leave it there for now.  I’ve got other stuff to cover, so here’s hoping I can get some other posts done!

Life Update and Some Frugal Stuff Thrown In

 

Hello again fellow frugal warriors!

Sorry for the lack of communicado.  I have just been crazy busy the last few months and haven’t had much free time.  It has been crazy busy around here, don't know about you all.  Let’s get into some of what has been going on around the old homestead.

The biggest thing that happened was actually exciting.  My half sister and her adopted mom came up and stayed for a week last month.  She is the first family member from my side to visit me so it was great seeing her again!  Especially since the last time I saw her in person was right after my dad passed away over a decade ago.

We were able to save some money while they were visiting, for them and us, by having them over for dinner at our house every night.  It also allowed me to feed them healthy meals, which my sister is supposed to be doing as much as possible (she is battling major metabolic problems and other stuff).  I tried to use foods that I had around the house to also make the meals as frugal as possible.  I actually did really well, only having to spend about 30.00 on some extra chicken and some bell pepper for meals.  Having a well stocked pantry with staples you use all the time definitely pays off at times like this.

We crammed a lot into one week and showed them very cool, but inexpensive things that were local to us.  We went to the Wasilla transportation museum, the Reindeer Farm in Palmer (and we walked across Palmer and got to show them some fun things before that) and we went up to Independence Mine and toured it before driving over Hatcher’s Pass and working our way back home.  

Amanda and Cyndi did some fun stuff on their own in Anchorage and Whittier a few days, but we always ate dinner (or supper depending on where you are) at my house so we got daily visits in.

Amanda had a blast (Armina did too, especially at the reindeer farm above...tearing her away from the baby reindeer was almost comical *laugh*) and didn’t want to leave, so I feel good that we did our job as hosts well.  It was a lot of fun having family visit.

In other, more mundane, events, I did not get the deck 100% done this summer, unfortunately.  Close, but no cigar.  I only got a bit more to do, but the ever present rain started up and just hasn’t quit, so I am thinking that project is over for the year.  I feel good about what is done, though, and know the stuff I didn’t finish will make it till Spring without issue if I can’t get enough good weather to button it up in the next few weeks.

I have kept careful tabs on our finances of late.  My husband’s Union shafted him and others in their new contract and my husband has taken a significant pay cut (like 800.00 a month type of pay cut).  Luckily, when he got the pay raise a while back (to make pay more competitive with the private sector as the state couldn’t fill positions) we continued to live like we had before and just tried to keep up with inflation and scrape together a teeny, tiny emergency savings.  We are able to still make our bills (not looking forward to winter, at ALL because our electric company hiked base rates by 11% starting in July…no matter how you cut it that is going to hurt), but haven’t been able to save anything since the pay cut kicked in.  Two steps forward, three steps back.  

Honestly, I am just grateful that we are able to make our bills as I know there are SO many people out there that just plain can’t right now.  I have been there too many times in my life and I feel so horrible others are going through it.

I was going to start blogging regularly again starting at the beginning of the month, but I still had a ton to do.  We had appointments with Alvah’s OT from our contact school, Armina started working as an assistant swim instructor at the pool, I had to figure out how to input a phonics screen into Alvah’s LAMP program for his speech therapy (I did it, though, just took a bunch of extra steps as my program didn’t work the way the tutorials online did), got the curriculum for both kids in the mail and we officially started homeschool the last few weeks.  I still have TEFRA renewal stuff to do for Alvah, but I feel like I've been making forward progress.  I FINALLY feel like we are getting back into a regular schedule, so hopefully I can get to blogging regularly.  Here’s hoping anyway.

One area I have been working really hard on organizing and stocking well are my pantry and freezers and I'm feeling pretty good about what I've done, although it is still a work in progress.  I am going to do a pantry tour as soon as I’m done so stay tuned for that.

I have also worked hard on just decluttering and organizing throughout the house to make things work better, especially the kitchen.  I’ll try to do a kitchen tour if I can find a nice gap where I can keep it clean and tidy for five minutes without having to cook or bake something lol.

A few things we have accomplished around the house as well on the frugal front:

1.  My husband fixed the support spring system in our love seat(put in a wooden subframe made up from wood recovered when I took apart the old couch and loveseat…recycling at its finest) and fixed the legs while he was at it (again with recovered wood).  Alvah has been really hard on the loveseat over the years, so it was nice to be able to get rid of the stack-o-books-leg and you can sit on the loveseat without sinking into it weird and quickly realizing something was not right with it.  I still get a kick out of sitting beside Alvah and the cushion is nice and stiff and right where it needs to be.

2.  I mended a few pairs of jeans, a few armpit seams in some of my son’s shirts, fixed a few missing buttons on some shirts and adjusted a pillowcase that we got for free down to a standard pillowcase from a king sized.

3.  We celebrated my son’s birthday at home and I made him his favorite breadsticks for dinner.  He had a good time and blew out his candles a bunch (he learned to love that a few years back).

4.  I pulled the screens from the windows, took them outside and removed the copious amounts of pollen and dust from them before putting them back in the windows.  Next steps are to try and figure out how to put new weather stripping tape on said windows for winter prep (I have the weather stripping tape,  but really want to avoid removing the crank out windows to apply it because that would require scaffolding on the back of the house, sooooo I've got to figure out options here).  I also cleaned up the cold air duct for the furnace as well because it needed to be done.  I need to vacuum out the heating duct in the kitchen/dining area, vacuum out the furnace and place a new furnace filter in it and we should be pretty on top of things for this winter when it comes to the forced air heat.

I am going to call it good here as I have to get to making pizza for dinner in a few minutes, but I thought I'd pop in and say "hi" and let everyone know that I am, indeed, still alive...I was just really busy all summer long, unfortunately. The summer I had planned with relaxing periods in between the work just did not work out for the most part.  I had fun while my sister was here, but I have to say that it was tiring as they came with a list of things they wanted to do in the week they were here and we ended up cramming as much as we could from that list into the week they were here.  Doing that while also just trying to do the busy day to day things I have to around here...it was tiring, but worth it.  Just not very relaxing *laugh*.

And there you go folks.  A bit of a glimpse into the last two months for us.   How have you all been?  Well I hope?  

Where I've Been and What I've Been Up To

It has been a hot minute since I posted, I know.  I'm sorry to worry so many people.  I made a post on Facebook to hopefully reach some and put up a comment in response to a reader as well, but I've been so "hair on fire" hectic, blogging just was NOT on my radar.

First, I want to apologize to Ranee, as I did not respond to her comments earlier and it appears they have been deleted now.  I'm sorry I didn't get to them sooner and I hope you are doing well, Ranee.  I responded to your last comment that you deleted, so hopefully you can read my response.  Please feel free to e-mail me to talk if you need or want to (you can find the e-mail under the "Contact Me" page)...a lot of times that is the best way to get ahold of me as I check that a few times a day in case I get something important in.  Responding to comments on the blog takes me a bit as I have to set up my computer to do it as the blog comment responder thing doesn't work on my phone, but e-mail I can do on my phone when I have a second during the day.  I'm sorry about your loss and about having to go through all you have gone through lately.  Please, let me know how the whole insurance situation turned out.

Right, so let me get down to what is going on around here.

My father-in-law passed away in May.  He'd been in declining health for a while, but his final decline happened so fast, it was a shock.  We got through the funeral (I'm still not sure how much Alvah has processed about the whole thing as he was sick and he and I didn't make the funeral as a result) and my husband especially has been super busy trying to go through things with my mother-in-law to find homes for stuff that needs to be found homes for, and there is a lot of stuff to go through in other ways as well as my father-in-law owned multiple businesses.  We are slowly working our way to a new normal without my father-in-law, but it is like peeling an onion.  It always seems like there are more layers to go through.

All the while things were happening on top of that.  Our home owners insurance came and inspected our home back in March (you know, the guys that screwed up the insurance renewal process every year so my mortgage consistently went up?  Yeah, those guys), in the middle of a snowstorm, when you couldn't see much of anything because it was all buried in snow still.  They came back, in the beginning of May, telling us if we wanted to renew we needed to replace our roof (our roof is fine) by July (like even if we needed a new roof, a window like that wasn't going to happen).  

We sealed around the chimney so it was professional quality work to take care of that "loose shingle" issue they were claiming we had (two shingles...I mean, really?), so we got that done (which in the heat wasn't fun for my husband).

I had just said to heck with it and found someone to do our gutters beforehand and just put it on our home equity loan because the way finances were going I knew I wasn't going to get it done if I waited to just cash it out.  Unfortunately they were so booked and so busy that we had to wait and we ended up getting the gutters put in the same week my father-in-law passed away and everything was going on at once.  But, the gutters are in, the company did a great job (highly recommend Denali Gutters to anyone local), make the house look about 10 bazillion times better and I am so relieved we got them in before we had to worry about the roof rotting around them.  

After the gutters were in, it was time to fight the moss.  Moss had grown in the old broken gutters and was contaminating the garage roof, so I spent a ridiculous amount of time out on that roof in May and June, scraping off little bits of moss from around shingles and spraying them with a bleach solution (1/2 bleach to 1/2 water works!  It does kill the moss once you scrape it and stops it from coming back...at least for the small amounts we had).  This was to cure the "active moss growing on roof" claims the insurance company was throwing out (the only real sizeable moss chunks we had growing were in the actual gutters before we got the new ones in, mind you).  Once we had cured what they had said leaded us into needing a whole new roof and had cleaned up the back area around the house (it did need it, so we cured that one right away without issue), I called the insurance company to see if they would reinspect the property.  Their response was "call us when you get a new roof".  So, yeah, at that point we were done with them.  It just got nuts after that as we scrambled to do as much as we could to the house to make it right so we could get new insurance without tons of issues needing to be cured to get insured.

Side note here in the current time:  Our only experience with home owners insurance was with SageSure/Occidental over the years and when we first got the place we had some pretty weird hoops we had to jump through to get insurance so we assumed we would have the same problem with all insurance companies.  Turns out that wasn't true and our new insurance company was WAY nicer and more laid back about everything.  I hope that continues in the future as well.

Anyway, that scrambling to get EVERYTHING done to the house that needed to get done well...cue, what I have been working on ALL summer long.   This is seriously the project that just doesn't seem to end.  I'll get to everything else we've been working on and all the things that decided to break and need to be fixed this summer in another post (it's been a bombardment and believe it or not I've gotten a bunch of other stuff done too), but let me give you the details on what I've primarily been up to.

The deck and front porch.  Yep, that's the big projects I've been doing.

Unfortunately, my husband hasn't been able to help me with this much at all, so I have done it all on my own.  He did replace the few rotten timbers we had in our front porch (the water from the broken gutters had just poured down for three solid years onto the front porch in one area and the wood just gave up).  He also helped me to chisel out the rotten wood as I'd find it on the deck and repair what we needed to (a few places where there were knots, and there was a LOT of knots in the deck wood, had just absorbed water the last few years and rotted around the knot, so we chiseled the wood out and put a paintable two step epoxy in the holes to stop it from getting worse and then I just painted over where the holes used to be), but otherwise he's just been busy with everything else, everywhere else.  Lucky for me Armina has turned into a really good babysitter for Alvah this summer (mind you I was right out the door, but he does need someone to help watch him) and I was able to work on this before everything just rotted away...it was getting close, I'm not going to lie.  The wood on the deck and front porch that wasn't rotten and was still hard, was distressed to say the least.  

Bright side, I inadvertently stumbled across a great product that helped to make the whole thing work without me needing three different products to get it all done.  Last winter I had bought a five gallon bucket of "Dock and Deck Super Coating" from Sherwin Williams on super sale (it was down to like 120.00 from 400.00 normal price) and had grabbed it to work on the deck this summer.  I thought it was just deck paint, but I was wrong.  It is way more than that.  It turns out my husband loves this product more than I do because the stuff goes on SUPER thick, sets up super duper quick (so you can get this stuff down and have it dry before a rain shower wrecks it) and it cures into a kind of rubberized coating that is super tough.  It ain't cheap, but just the amount of cracks I was able to fill in with the coating versus having to go over everything with wood filler, waiting for that to cure and then paint it and hope it matches?  Worth it's weight in gold.  And it, of course, being dock paint, is textured (so I won't be sliding across the deck with a small layer of ice this winter if I need to go out there) and is waterproof (obviously), so hopefully it will last for quite a while.  Man, I hope it lasts quite a while as this has been so much work.  

Guys, I've been working on this project all summer long and I'm STILL NOT done!  I have gotten to a point where I need to paint between the slats on the deck (as it was starting to rot in between the planks, so I want to make sure that part gets sealed well) and the underside of the deck and stairs as well as hard to reach spaces and I'll finally be done.  I'm getting there.  I was able to work pretty constant up to the fourth of July and then it just started raining.  We've had a few breaks in the weather, but have been so busy with other things that I haven't had an opportunity to get back to the painting.  Hopefully I can get a bunch done this weekend as it is supposed to clear up, if it dries out underneath fast.  Here's hoping.  

First there was sanding the deck.  I had to sand in between the railing uprights by hand as I didn't have a sander that would fit in an area that small, but otherwise I used a belt sander or a detail sander to do it all. 

I killed two belt sanders working on this sucker (my husband is not pleased, but it was truly accidental) and ended up finishing it up with a SKIL detail sander (I really like that little sander and they are pretty cheap to get as well).  Thank you again to those who buy through my Amazon link on the blog as the associate fees from that helped to pay for the detail sander, which really helped, especially with the stairs as I was out of other sanders to use by then.

Sanding took forever.  There was wood that had become saturated with water and had to be sanded down until I could find hard wood to dry out (thank goodness the weather got nice, or I don't know if it would have ever dried out).  The uprights on the railing...Lord those things take SO LONG between sanding and painting.

And then the painting started.  It took a long time as I had to do the deck floor, each of the uprights on the inside AND the outside and in between (I still have to take a ladder and get the very bottom of the outside as I can't reach between the uprights from the deck landing itself).  

I also had to take a break in the middle of painting the deck and switch to the front porch because my husband decided we needed to get a new insurance company lined up ASAP for our home owners insurance (I wanted to get as much as I could done and THEN get a new insurance company, but he won) and the front porch looked...well terrible honestly and needed some serious work.  So, after my husband fixed what was in big time need of repair (ironically the old insurance company never mentioned the porch or the deck and I was like "What????"), I got to work sanding and painting it.  We used the same coating we used on the deck to do the front porch and I have to say...it might not match our original paint (it used to be yellow and brown just like the house), but I think it turned out looking really nice.  Oh and please say "hi" to our cat Sepp who decided to photo bomb the picture I took.

I also, when I was out front painting, now that the weather was actually not raining and snowing constantly, started to clean things up.  The sod from the yard, with little maintenance being able to be done to it the last three years, had overgrown so it was up against the stairs and completely wiping out our front concrete walkway.  I am still ripping up sod, in places, but I got a lot of it taken care of.  Please ignore our overgrown yard.  With constant rain the last few weeks, the yard weeds have gone bonkers and started to take over again.  Our yard WAS looking nice up until now.

Bright side, the home owner inspection guy showed up in the middle of me painting the front porch (after the major stuff was take care of and looked WAY better), so I was happy that the insurance company would at least see we ARE actively working on the house...maintenance got delayed for sure (earthquake, Covid, weather, not to mention finances), but it IS getting done now.  We passed the inspection (thank goodness) which is the most important thing for me and our new insurance policy starts today (yay!!!).

Here is a shot of the deck at about 80% done (since I'm still working on the underside and stuff)...

And another angle...

If the deck looks speckled in the photo, by the way, it is because it is raining again today and I took the picture in the rain.  I moved the wood furniture (I bought a set of chairs and small table to match our ones from last year with a Christmas gift card and I'm so happy I did as it allows us to sit on the deck together as a family) under the eaves to protect it from the rain the last bit as the old set of furniture needs to get treated with oil before it sits in the rain too long.

I moved the grill around so that we have the nice wide open space on the deck to sit and eat dinner. I found a side benefit of moving the grill to its new location is that I can see it from my kitchen window so I can run in to work on getting the table set and things while, say, chicken is cooking, and be able to quickly see if the grill is having a flair up or something, which is great.

And here is a shot of my own version of "The Exorcist" stairs.  I had to show my daughter the actual "Exorcist" stairs as she didn't get the joke.  The deck is on the second story so we have a lot of stairs and when I was sitting on the stairs working on them I'd look up and think, "Gee, those suckers are steeper than I thought they were".

I'm really glad I got the stairs done as they were really starting to suffer from the water damage even as I was working on the main part of the deck as we'd get rain storms and things.  I'll feel tons better once I have the underside of them completely painted and sealed (I'm about 3/4 of the way done with that), but at least I made it better than it was.

I've  been grilling a lot out on the nice painted deck the last bit (it's been hot a bunch this summer) and it is supposed to get hot again this weekend, so I'll be grilling out there again so I don't heat the house up.  It is nice being able to enjoy the deck without feeling sick about how it was just was getting worse and worse and worse.  I'll probably do a final reveal of the deck when it is 100% complete, if for no other reason than to document my progress and what I've gotten done this year.  So far.  I'm actually impressed with how much I've gotten done so far this year, especially with all the stuff that has happened.  For now, though, I'll leave you with the mostly done pictures of what I've gotten done so far.

I hope you are all doing okay with the hot weather that has been hitting down south and are able to have at least somewhat of a good summer.

I'm off to bake bread before the heat picks up again tomorrow.  See you, hopefully, soon!