Old House by the River

As summer flies by things continue to be busy over here. Along with the endless list that needs to be tackled on our house, Nick's also been helping his sister, Jessie, with her new house and has been spending a lot of time over there working on getting her new furnaces set up. There's a lot going on and it's easy to get overwhelmed by everything that needs to get done, but we're slowly making progress! We got our new refrigerator a few weeks ago and I love it! The one that came with the house had been vandalized by the previous owner, and it was also a style we really hated because it had such limited space. We got a 'door-in-door' style, and I love how big the freezer is and how many extra shelves the fridge has! I've been making decent progress on the back bluff, clearing brush and unearthing more pathways. I had a bit of a setback though, when I realized I was highly reactive to poison oak! Both of my legs are covered in it right now and the itchines

One of the big pluses about our new house is that we have Grand River front property. Not only will this come into play down the road for re-sale value, but we're really excited to use this area for a kayak launch and then a fire pit/gathering area. However, the area down by the river is very wet and it was completely overgrown. One of our neighbors informed us that the previous two owners of our house tried to tame this area and both gave up. But, put a seemingly impossible challenge like this in front of my husband and it's game on! The first thing we did was figure out why it was so wet in some areas. We discovered that there's natural springs in numerous places, which is very cool, but tricky to work with. Nick's toying with the idea of building a ram pump down the road, but for now he's identifying where the water is flowing and then digging trenches and putting in drain tile. This is a very labor intensive project and little by little things are being set up

A few days ago we experienced our first big summer storm at the new place, and we realized that all these pretty trees we have can be a big hazard in bad weather! We were fortunate to only have a few come down, compared to many of our Lamont neighbors who sustained much more serious damage, (including one house that had a fire), but our downed trees made a big mess and we have some damage to our roof that needs to be fixed now. Our patio furniture also took a beating and one of our chairs is beyond repair-bummer! We're assessing what needs to be done with some of the trees that are still standing near our house, to prevent this from happening again!