Backyard: Finished Product

Here's what the backyard looks like now. The girls love it, of course. And I love not having to stress over the lack of grass back there.

You Load 16 Tons...

Okay, it was only three tons. But three tons is a lot of pea gravel to shovel into a wheelbarrow and cart into the backyard. That's six thousand pounds of pea gravel. It sounds like a lot. And my aching back says it was a lot.

Here's the front-end loader loading one and a half tons into my dad's trailer:



Relatively impressive, right?

So why doesn't it look like much when it's in the yard?

Backsplash Progress

One of the first things we did when we moved to College Hill was to get rid of the old stove. It was a mammoth 1960s stove, six feet tall with push buttons. If it had worked, we would have loved to clean it up and keep it. But it did not, and it also took up the space where we were used to having a microwave (above the range), so out it went. We bought a new stove and microwave to put in, but we had to run electric to where the new microwave plugged in. This was the result:



We had to rip out all the tiled backsplash in order to cut a groove in the wall for the new wiring. We planned to replace it with new tiles identical to the old ones. We were going to get right on that.

That was two years ago.

In December of 2007, I made a New Years resolution to finish up some projects, including that backsplash (more "before" pictures at that link, including the original stove).

That was one year ago.

But today I made progress. Check this out:



Woohoo!

Rather than replacing with the same white tiles, we've opted for tin ceiling tiles. These tiles are the same gauge and type of tin that was used for ceiling tiles around the turn of the century (the last century, not this one).

Eventually I am going to replace all the ceramic tiles with the tin ones. Also in the plan: paint the cabinets; switch the knobs out for polished silver knobs; replace the current light switches with original-style push button switches. I hope these items don't take as long as getting started on the backsplash did, but at least we don't have to be quite as embarrassed when we have friends over.

Old Pictures

Back when we had the new heat pump installed, we also put more insulation in the attic. There are a few of small spaces off the attic room, where there should have been insulation but there wasn't. As I was crawling around I found a couple of interesting items. They certainly aren't the sort of thing we'd take to Antiques Roadshow, but you also won't find them in the attic space of your average modern suburban home.