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Day 304 - Spent the majority of the day making trips to Irwin Stone. The only work I had done beyond loading and unloading is putting this set of steps in for preparation of laying bluestone.
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Day 305 - We purchased some real nice red mulch. Hauled it to the fence and this is Lana's baby... |
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Day 305 - After a full day of laying bluestone, I almost got it to the step.
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Day 305 - The work has begun at the pond. She usually goes inside and googles something during a job??? |
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Day 305 - Lot of pond pictures. We're so happy to have it back up and running.
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Day 305 - Doesn't look like too much progress yet. |
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Day 305 - The entire pond landscaped area is all built with irrigation to water all the plants. A solenoid drives a time controlled soaking.
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Day 305 - Wall material ready to be placed. That will have to happen Sunday or Monday. |
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Day 305 - At the end of the day. The landscaping looks gorgeous.
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Day 305 - Haven't seen the fish any happier! |
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Day 306 - Washed done patio bluestone. Now ready for a swim.
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Day 306 - Ed, I can't figure out this cleaner. Can you please come help. |
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Day 306 - Part of the patio looking from the original patio over the stream
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Day 306 - Got the frog spitting out water now also. |
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Day 307 - This was the 2nd to last job that I completed today. Laid all the top caps on the double sided wall near the pond.
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Day 307 - Placed the gator dust inside the patio bluestone. Didn't have enough to complete this entire area |
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Day 307 - We'll have to see how well the gator dust settled. I spent a good amount of time washing it off afterwards.
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Day 307 - It's really coming together finally. Just in time for summer time. |
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Day 307 - Everywhere you stand, you have a beautiful view of the property.
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Day 307 - The pond is pretty much complete with pond plants. May have to try to work on the skimmer leak a little bit this week. Just plain tired of working on the pond. I did get all the filters covered, but we still need filter media and bacteria to begin working on the small algea we see in the pond. |
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Day 307 - All automated. Water feed to plants and pond completed!!! Got a lot of winterization projects with all the irrigation though.
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Day 307 - I'm going to feed this area with a manual piped watering from the pond pump water to water these plants with the leftover irrigation parts that I had from the pond area. |
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Day 307 - Got these palm trees for Lana at Xmas. They should grow in the next couple years to sizes of 8-10 feet with proper winterization.
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Day 307 - Putting the gator dust in the bluestone. This process is pretty detailed. Need to sweep all the dust into all the crevices, pound the stone to get it in, spray and vacuum all the mortar on the bluestone. I got the process down pretty good on the second day. This particular day, had a lot of remaining mortar on the stone - nothing muriatic acid won't take care of. |
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Day 307 - Continued to work on the first part of the deck that needed gator dust.
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Day 307 - This was the last project for Memorial Day. Time to relax soon. |
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Day 307 - As I said, it's time to relax...
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Day 309 - Time to continue working on the bar area.
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Day 309 - These blocks were all cut in half to save both money and space, glued up and then mortared in back for added support. |
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Day 310 - Spent all day mortaring all the blue stone in the fire pit area, added gator dust on the patio floor and you can see all the bar work that was completed yesterday.
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Day 310 - This is a recurring theme, work all day, sit down and ponder on the work with a Sierra Nevada on tap, sore, but happy! |
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Day 311 - We had our first party and lit the firepit up for the evening. All went very well. It works great. Lana did say it smoked too much. Never been at a fire where it didn't though.
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Day 312 - The entire firepit area is complete. The bar has to wait until we get delivery of the appliances, so we're off to completing the back wall and working on the shower area.
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Day 312- Had Lana working on filling up the keystone block with drain stone. This stone supports the block much more. We added drain stone on the very edge of the inside of the block also. |
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Day 312- Working on adding crusher run also for the entire fill outside the drainstone.
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Day 312 - Disposing of all the cut bluestone as fill in this area. We're building this area up by at least a foot. The only scrap that will be left will be whatever is cut for the paving on the second deck once we get this area complete. |
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Day 312 - The pipe sticking up will be the drain for the shower. I'm going to build a french drain with a garbage can so most of the drainage will go directly down into the ground. Will work on that later this week.
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Day 312 - This will be an interesting design. Due to the elevation changes, I'm going to set the shower area off about 3 feet from the pool house and there will be an alley way going back to the back of the pool house. That will be interesting. |
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Day 312 - Lana and I were out there from 8:30AM till 10:30 working on the shower area and I woke Patrick up to ask him for some help. He worked from 10:30 to 1:30 with us, which really helped. He made a comment that this was "HARD" work. Kid's amaze me how they complain about so little work. We've been doing this continuously for 8 months and I normally have been working 12 hour days on the weekends. We sat in the hot tub discussing their perspective. Maybe someday, they'll realize their own drive and potential. Until then, I can only provide a good hard-working example.
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