July 2021 – Concerts, Total Craziness and Taking a Break!

Well our July 2021 started off almost like a “normal” July before Covid meaning: We did way too much over the 3 day, July 4th weekend and totally exhausted ourselves. It was REALLY hot and sunny and crazy humid. We went to two concerts and had a big family get together at our place. It was A LOT. Deciding last minute to have a party out here meant Lodi and I were scrambling all day to prepare for it and then running to try to enjoy a concert and then working again all the next day before the next concert in some pretty impressive summer heat! It does mean we had our new lower deck and fire pit complete WAY ahead of schedule though I’m not convinced how much we stressed ourselves out was totally worth all we got done…

NOTE: We love our new pea gravel lower deck and fire pit – I promise there will be a ton of posts about everything we got done later this year!

Another NOTE: A couple of fun things happened this month for us here at Grandma’s House DIY! We were asked for our advice here along with several other home experts AND, a custom printing company thought that we were so cool that they wanted us to wear their tshirts! And they’re really nice tshirts!

Living in northern Minnesota comes with one absolute truth: We get about thirteen weekends of summer and every single one of them would have us triple booked if we don’t learn how to prioritize.

It seems everyone went a little nuts with activities this year.

Who can blame them?

Every single event was called off last year giving us northern Minnesotan’s living in tourist areas the weirdest summer of all time. I’ll admit though I really enjoyed the lack of traffic! Lodi had a bit of a culture shock as, even though he’s lived here for nearly two years, this is his first REAL summer experience.

EVERY. SINGLE. VEHICLE. WAS ON THE ROAD TODAY. ALL. OF. THEM. AND. THEY. WERE. ALL. PULLING. SOMETHING. THEY WERE ALL HEADING TOWARD US – NORTH.

Its been suggested that our town of 3,000 balloons to an average of around 15,000 every summer and I believe it!

July 2021

Us locals have been known to basically hide most of the summer but not this summer – we all had some serious summer to catch up on!

My Mom looked at me (clearly as exhausted as I was) and laughed, “I shouldn’t be allowed to have another three day weekend!”

Same, Mom, Same!

Regardless of the fun and seeing family though, there really is only one activity I love to do the most.

Just chilling on our deck and enjoying our home alone with Lodi.

That’s it.

I know I’m boring lol (and an introvert besides) but I just didn’t get enough of that throughout June. Not with the 6am concrete pours on triple back to back weekends etc. Not to mention that awful heat making it just miserable!

Lodi and I work really well together but when that’s practically all we’re doing we end up missing each other.

July 2021. Unfortunately it does seem that I need to hit this wall every year…

“Nope. No one is staying. No one is coming over. I’m not going anywhere.

I need to rest.

I need to enjoy summer by not moving at all or changing out of my pajamas. I need to chill with my man for a minute!!!”

I swear I can hear Ferris Bueller in the back of my head saying if you don’t stop to enjoy life once in awhile it will pass you by. Sometimes doing literally nothing but enjoying your own backyard with your favorite person is living life to the fullest.

One thing that is lovely though is to see our family and friends enjoying all of our hard work. I really did design a party house back in 2014 when I started all this and Lodi is helping me really see that reality come to fruition.

But still – everyone deserves a break – and we took a couple of weekends to do very little after the 4th of July 2021.

Its not OK for our homes or us to be accessible at all times to anyone. We simply can’t have healthy lives without boundaries and that even means saying NO to ourselves once in a while when we feel we should be working on something.

I remind myself often that I won’t get anything done if I don’t also take time to rest!

That second weekend in July I must have needed the break. Mentally I just commanded myself to stop everything and SLEEP.

And wow I really did!

Friday night I slept 16 hours, Saturday night I slept over 12 hours and even on another 9 hours of sleep I still didn’t really want to get up Monday morning!

I kind of hate July for so many reasons…

I just ordered our pellets for the winter and we were very fortunate, also, to find hay for our gelding for this winter too. This drought is long past record breaking, the cost of hay is three times “normal” price.

My heart breaks for the people with a lot of livestock. This is the first year in history (that I know of) that we will feed our grazing animals hay ALL year.

Our yard isn’t dead grass anymore – its becoming just dirt. I have no idea how my Grandma’s old perennial flower bed is green at all let alone blooming with day lilies… kind of a miracle actually…

For the first time in my memory our county sheriff’s department issued a pleading: “Please don’t pick wild fruit this year at all!” I began seeing it all over social media. Our poor wild life is so short on food this year its really getting quite scary.

We had a bear visit us and our dog Annie is still not quite over how offended she was by that. He took our suet feeders and don’t blame him one bit!

We were totally surrounded by wildfires and hit record breakingly bad air quality here in Minnesota. Poor Canada burning covered our entire state in smoke that was just unbelievable.

Our vegetable garden has become a green oasis in our desert yard.

July 2021 the garden… Oh our wonderful little vegetable garden… It is just the best of little chores at the end of the day. Are we obligated to eat fresh radishes even when we’re totally sick of them? Oh yes! I’m not sure if I’ve ever found anything better for me than having a garden.

There’s that little miracle every year – I’m always just amazed that it works lol. That we can throw some seeds in the ground and watch it just flourish!

It is a nourishment in every way.

Two weekends gone to us in August meant that, at the start of July, we only had seven weekends of summer left.

Now with July 2021 almost gone that means… Only three.

Of course we could have an absolutely gorgeous September and October… but this is northern Minnesota and the melancholy of Labor day will always hit hard. We are already over halfway through this year, “How in the hell did that happen!?”

We did not take all of July 2021 off, of course, we devoted the last weekend entirely to our garage addition.

As of now we technically have a building!

Yes, it still needs plywood, steel and siding but the structure there!

We kind of forgot about fixing the house from last fall’s project of switching the door and the window from the workshop to Lodi’s room.

(Erm… probably not the right way of putting it… In all honesty we didn’t forget it we were just VERY sick of that whole situation…)

In my head I think I figured we would fix it when we did the siding on the new garage addition because, frankly, I’m not sure we have enough materials for even the little bit of siding needed on the South side of the house.

July 2021, so, that’s my excuse.

We’re siding the new garage addition hopefully by the end of August and picking up plenty of materials to do it. So, we’ll be taking care of the South side of the house on top of the little bit of finishing the existing garage has needed for years…

(A gutter down one side, brick molding across the top of one door and steel eve caps.)

That was a pretty darned good paragraph to write.

That is doable and that would officially complete our summer to do list… which might be a first!

I hope you’re all having a wonderful summer. Don’t forget to take breaks and remember to rest!