Much needed yardwork

I have always heard friends of mine who are homeowners talking about "random projects around the house" that take up a lot of their time. Today was one of those days for Keith and me. Actually, this weekend is the first weekend we have been home in a long time, or so it seems. Keith has been awesome at keeping up with the grass mowing over the past month since we moved in, but in all honesty, we hadn't really done much else!

Today's projects included:

- Keith mowed the lawn and trimmed the edges with the weed-wacker

- We moved all of the boxes that we used for moving (and a friend of mine borrowed for thier move) from our garage into the crawl space

- Keith cleaned the gutters on the back side of the house (he had done the front ones a few weeks ago). I held the ladder! :-)

- We "cleaned up" an area of our side yard that had lots of tree limbs and random weeds and small trees growing. Keith said they were small oaks. I guess that's what happens when you have big oak trees...you get small oak trees??

- Keith raked and cleaned up the area near our garage that had lots of leaves in it. This area (we were told by our home inspector) would need to be landscaped and drainage added so that water doesn't buildup there and go into the crawl space. Well, lo and behold, when Keith started raking up the leaves, guess what he found? A drain....it's been there the whole time, just covered in leaves and other random stuff (like another small tree that Keith had to dig up...guess that is what happens when you live in a woodsy area!!) Anyways, we were very delighted to see that there is already a drain there and now we don't have to pay someone to come out and install one!

- I sprayed some weed & grass killer on some areas of the yard and driveway. Our driveway is gravel and we have some very unattractive grass growing in parts of it. I hope it will die!! I did have a little bit of a scare when I was spraying - a small animal raced out from under the flowerbeds and made me scream. At first I thought it was a snake, albeit a small one, but maybe it was really just a lizard. Either way it scared the crap out of me and I ran to tell Keith about it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, in my opinion), by the time he came over to see it, it was gone.

- Keith raked up 4 bags of leaves from our back yard. You might be asking why we are raking leaves in the summertime and the simple answer is that no one raked them last fall so now we have to do it! I am sure that with all of the trees that are in our yard, raking leaves is going to be a weekly occurance for us. For now, we wanted to get the yard looking a little nicer before more leaves end up in it.

- I used some "Ortho Max Defense" spray around the perimeter of our house. I also sprayed around the inside of the house in areas where we think bugs might be able to come in. To our dismay, we have been finding pretty good sized black ants, about 7-10 each week, in various places in the house. Our hope is that this stuff will kill anything that is in the house now and will protect us from getting anymore "uninvited guests".

- Keith also swept out the garage and we organized things so it looks a little less cluttered.

Tomorrow, while I am at work (yes, work on Sunday....training camp starts!!), Keith and two of his friends are driving to West Point to pick up our new dining room set! I am so excited about getting this set, and I am even more excited about finally having a place to put our china. It has been sitting in storage bins since our wedding, almost 2 years ago!! I will post some pictures of the new dining room furniture once we get it all set up.