still going...

 I had an email from Matt this morning asking if everything was okay here, so I guess he does read my blog and a few days of not blogging had him worried.  Apart from being covered in bug bites (I'd forgotten how much deer fly bites hurt), bruised fingers, callouses and being stiff all over, I'm fine.

 It's been more of the same around here... carrying, opening and spreading bags of rocks.  BAGS and BAGS of rocks.  We actually got an extra 10 bags delivered by accident last delivery, but even so I still had to go and put a few more in the back of Gary (our hired YARIS) to finish up.

 We finished off the "patio"....

 And did some sewing that evening (sorry the photos are in chronological order).  This is what our dining room looks like right now....

 Ella and I raided my fabric scrap pile that I had up in the shed and made a banner for her room.

 And while I was photographing things in her room, this is the pile of craft books that she keeps by her bed to read at night...if only we could take them all back to SG with us.

 Then yesterday, we finished mostly (apart from 7 more bags of stone I put out this morning) the area by the shed.  When we came back this summer, this whole area was overgrown with grass and weeds (and where I came face to face with the groundhog that has moved into our yard since our neighbours got dogs...and we don't have Honey around).

 It's a mix of stone...some of it was put down by our contractor when the shed was built, but I cleared all the weeds and leveled it out a bit and dug out some of the rocks.  There's a stone wall running up the side of our property which at some point was broken right by where the shed is built (I think it was to put in the electricity pylon which for some reason is on our property rather than the driveway that runs up the side) and all the rocks were just left in a big pile there.

 you can see here how I've only just started priming the back of the barn here...

 Here I am walking out through the break in the wall and you can see across to our neighbours' house.  The road there is a driveway that goes up to one more house.

 looking back down towards our house....and Gary

 Here's the "barn" and you can clearly see that we need to have all our roofs replaced.  Those two flues don't even go to anything anymore!

 looking down into the courtyard from the road that goes up the side.  The open doors go into the back room and the kitchen.

 Ok, so here's the other area I added stones to.  I would have loved to have matocked all of this path and added more steps to make it level like we did with the path at the front and the steps I'm standing above but considering that it took weeks and all the man power of Matt, Oscar and Remi I settled by matocking a bit and putting down weed cloth and stones.

 I really do have to remind myself that there is only so much I can do each summer....

 (And I did finally finish around the front door today)

But OH MY it looks different from when we bought it...

Unfortunately I only have these two photos in snow (the first with the dead tree that we had to have removed before it fell on the house in the background) on Matt's laptop to compare.

And while it does look gorgeous with icicles hanging down the sides, I am very glad that it's not that awful zombie skin colour anymore.

Oh and I also have to tell you how glad I am that I took all those photos of the rock piles the other day as my neighbour just told me that some guy came and knocked them all down because he got sick of all the tourists stopping there to look at them (and he doesn't even live across the road).  Apparently it was on the news here.  The guy who started building them did so as therapy as his dog had died and he's already back there building more.