October 2021 – Glorious Weather and Tackling our Fall Check List!

October 2021 shame on me for enjoying such an absolutely glorious fall and not getting many pictures of it lol. I am an embarrassment to bloggers everywhere! Seriously though I wonder if other bloggers get tired of recording absolutely everything? Honestly I don’t know how they manage it unless they blog full time. I think of those hard core Instagram “celebrities” where its almost daily posting and it gives me anxiety just considering it. October 2021 was absolutely stunning as far as weather was concerned and though we did get quite a bit of work done we also made sure we enjoyed it at least a little bit!

Last month Lodi gave me the absolutely incredible gift taking me to a Green Day concert and this month, on October 1st, I returned the gift in taking him to see Eric Church. It was an absolutely wonderful concert!

Admittedly though we are officially event fatigued.

Back in quarantine last year had us planning more than we probably should have for this year.

No regrets but it is possible to have too much fun and, sometimes, between work, day jobs and projects here at home, even “fun” just adds more stress no matter how much we enjoy it.

October 2021, after that concert we really came home for this month and enjoyed the weather puttering about our yard and completing our final fall chores. Its going to take another two months for me to post all about finally completing the garage addition.

But we did it!

The addition is roofed, sided, trimmed out, complete with electrical (even lights) and a brand new garage door that opens with the click of a button.

I am so relieved to put this six month project behind us.

I know I’ve mentioned how crabby and rough this summer (and that particular project) was for me. It had to do with the insane hot weather besides serious stress at my day job on top of it.

But it was also because the last part of this project left a knot in my stomach.

You guys know I’m up for tackling just about anything but even I have my limits and that garage door on our addition just filled me with dread. I’ve heard too many horror stories of people being maimed or even losing eyes to over tightening garage door springs…

Besides that we couldn’t even buy / create the garage door at the height we actually wanted! (Our building was too low.)

Lodi encouraging me to call in the professionals took an ENORMOUS weight off my shoulders. I’ll get more into it later but I will say this: For the first time, without that dreaded job in my future, I actually got excited about our garage addition and we got the door height we actually wanted and needed!

It meant my motivation to completing it just about quadrupled.

I haven’t had the chance yet but now, with it complete, I’ve already started planning and organizing in my head everything I want to store over there. (So much adult joy lol) We’ll be putting in a bunch of shelves for all of our yard tools as well as for long term storage.

We also plan on moving our wood storage over there and I’m getting excited in building a rolling barn door between the new addition and our original garage so we have easy access between them.

Fun stuff for later this year or next!

We were finally able to burn the pile of stumps and stuff that’s been sitting there, throughout the entire three month drought, in the middle of our yard.

We made a little Sunday night date out of it – it was cool and rainy – perfect big bon fire weather!

We hauled a couple of camping chairs and a little table down to the horse shed so we didn’t get wet and had ourselves a little bonfire picnic while we watched it burn. You can see our old gelding Garcia was quite annoyed that we had a fence between us…

(If that horse could he’d spend his nights in the living room content with us and the dog.)

It absolutely poured later but the pile still had time to burn down almost completely. We had another fire right on top of it later in October 2021, taking care of wood scraps etc. from the garage build and really got that pile of stumps good and gone.

October 2021, we didn’t even see freezing temps until nearly the end of the month!

(Its not unheard of to have serious snow on the ground by this time in a normal year so we took full advantage.)

Even now on Halloween its still quite pleasant out.

With the garage addition complete I still had a couple of things I wanted to build / finish before it got totally miserable outside. One of them I’m tackling ASAP which is an awning over our garage side door plus (hopefully) at least a partial gutter down that side of the garage too.

I was going to build it with support cross beams but Lodi mentioned using posts instead and that would be even easier to build actually and I’m all for that lol.

Not a big project but everything takes time!

We got VERY fortunate with our extras from the garage build. We have literally the perfect amount of steel leftover for both a 6 foot x 3 1/2 foot awning over the garage side door AND enough to perfectly cover a little old shed that’s out in the horse pasture!

It was a well house (the well long ago dried up) that I’ve been using (poorly and very disorganized) for long term storage.

It has a cement slab under it and is in pretty good shape minus being kind of gross and moldy like any practically-abandoned-totally-untouched-for-over-a-decade building would be.

It even has a screen door and a decent steel door besides…

Covering those tired shingles with steel will save it for many more years and give us an out of the way little spot for whatever we feel like doing with it.

(October 2021… totally wheels turning in this girl’s head… a bunk house… a she shed… a potting shed… a man cave to send Lodi when he needs a time out… or when I do…)

Its only 11×11 but, if nothing else, some serious shelves in there would give us a lot of long term storage which we could definitely use!

As you can see from the pics its only about 100 yards from our garage.

It needs a new covering of siding and trim at some point besides…

Ugh I just can’t stop making more projects for us!

Guess its time for me to get started on our 2022 summer to do list… (It is perfectly reasonable for you guys to feel at least a little sorry for Lodi at this point…)