We do live in the mountains!!!!!

You just get used to your surroundings.  Complacent?  Lackadaisical?  Maybe.  It still surprises me to have people talk about a mountain lion down the road from us, attacking and killing someone's prized sheep.  Or someone's puppy being picked up and taken off all from a mountain lion or a bob cat.

Well ,last week they caught the mountain lion and had pictures of him in the newspaper.  Saddened my heart that they put it down.  We do live in the mountains!!  I told my dad about the mountain lions being in the area and he just looked at me and said "I wouldn't live there, they can attack you and you not even know it". (I thought to myself, I think I would know it when it is attacking me.) Well that was unsettling, so for the next couple of days I was actually nervous about leaving my house even to go to the garage.

But I figured (self-justification) that if a mountain lion would attack me, he would have to be pretty desperate and be half crazy and surely we don't have crazy mountain lions here, so I am safe!

But this year, I have to tell you, I have seen A LOT of coyotes, I am averaging two to three a day.  I try to keep my camera on the table by the window so when they come up my hill, I can catch them.  I know they are stalking my chickens...so every day I am double checking and triple checking my coop.

Andy is working on a house a couple of doors down yesterday and calls me and says "There is a coyote coming down the road and he is BIG!"  I grabbed my camera and waited, NOTHING!! That is ok, I have plenty of coyote pictures to last me and you a while

These were taken yesterday after he (she)  leisurely went past the chicken coop for the second time, I wonder how many times he came by that I didn't see?

I think she is a girl, what should I name her?

Oops!  This is the one in November, however, belief it or not, it did snow yesterday, and it's May!  But as soon as it hit the ground it was gone, but what a beautiful picture huh?

She was moving at a really good clip.

Goin right past my neighbors, move on coyote!

Now just have to be careful with the rattlesnakes, after all we do live in the mountains!

Construction-It Never Ends!

Guess what I got for Mother's Day?

I hope everyone's Mother's Day was special.  Mine was Great!  I had the nicest Mother's Day because of ONE particular item that was on our to do list.

We are big on construction.  We are ALWAYS working on something.  That keeps us going.  Weather warming up and knowing that the front will be our focus this summer, we have been wanting to restain our deck.  Now it looks like it would be a easy thing to do, right?  WRONG....

This is how the story goes.

We put a beautiful redwood deck in two years ago, it is over 1,000 square feet, which is huge!!!  Love it!  Well the deck needed to be stained soon after installing it, easy enough right?  WRONG!!!!  Ok play by play of what we did. 

Staining, step 1

When you go to stain a deck, remember these important  details.....
Take the stain with a sponge on a handle and dip it VERY carefully in the stain and start at the beginning of the wood, continuing all the way to the end.  Then go to the boards next to it (we can do two at a time) and continue all the way down again.  Now this sounds elementary, however, what we did was stain areas at a time which meant that when we were ready to do the second segment we overlapped the stain which looked awful!!!! 

And let me tell you nothing works unless you sand it all the way down, because if you just try to sand it where it is overlapped, it will look awful!  Also, don't try to power wash it, especially on the narrow setting, I have found that the wood splinters!!!!  I also thought it would be cute if I decided to write my name in with the power washer, Andy didn't think that was too funny.  I did until I had to take a sander and try to sand my name out of the deck, crap!

So, we decided last year just to let nature takes it course and naturally bleach out the color and it did.  So now this past weekend we tackled it.

Cleaning step 2

Andy asked me to take the pressure washer, this time with a different nossel and wash the deck, he said it would take a few hours, NAW!!!  I had that thing washed in 15 minutes.  Andy walked up to me and asked "How far have you gotten?"  I told him I was done!  He just looked at me, I hate that look!!

He further instructed me that EACH board had to be pressure washed to take off the stain and get to the bare wood.  WHAT?  That will take HOURS!!!!  So he took over the pressure washer and six and a half hours he had it done!  Boy, was he sore!!!

Mother's Day we brushed and brushed the deck off and put on the new stain, I say we but we all know it was Andy.  Four hours later he had the front finished.  Now I am not mentioning that we had winds come up to about 30 miles per hour and ugly storm clouds with the wind chill about 35 degrees!!!! 

But it got finished and all I can say is:


IT IS BEAUTIFUL!!!!!

I took pictures of it so you can see the difference between the two.

Tomorrow we tackle or should I say he tackles the side deck!  I am very happy with the color I picked out too, it will blend really well with the dirt.

The nice thing about this is  that now we have corrected the problem and know how to stain a deck the correct way, next year we will only have to power wash it like I did and not for six and a half hours!

See the difference between the two?

Looks like two different pieces of wood!  Incredible difference!

This is the one that was powered washed and just treated the railing can't wait to get the pictures of it tomorrow!!!

You would think that the way the sunlight is hitting this it is an illusion, but it isn't.  that is the WAY difference in wood. WOW!!!!

More pictures of the transformation to come....