So Cliche . . .

When I said that the fireplace work would start tomorrow . . .that is what I thought. The carpenter had other plans. He is supposed to start tomorrow from today. So over a week later. Which, worked out well as I have been frantically staining my new front door, and the weather has just been awful. Rain, rain, and more rain. We had over 5 inches of rain in 24 hours from Saturday night to Sunday. It had been raining for 3 days prior, and rained all day on Monday. Thankfully, we just happened to be having a plumber come out to clear a slow drain we had under our deck. I don't even want to know what would have happened if this wasn't done.

So, the front door/fireplace work "should" begin tomorrow and hopefully I will have some great pics to put up. After that, we are left battling the backyard. Sure, if we had an infinite budget - we could get it all done in say. . .3 weeks. We don't. Our budget is bursting at the seams and we will most likely have to do a lot of the work ourselves. The improvements we want to make are: new floor boards and railings on the deck, new deck stairs and move their location, demolition of our huge planter boxes, new fence, new grass, level out the yard, new flagstone patio underneath our deck. Our budget for this project is not going to cut it. For real. If we do the deck work, demolition and grass ourselves, we will still be about $1k over budget. Who knew a backyard was so expensive?

Well, here is a picture of our yard now (and by "now" i mean in the last year or so). . .

Ideally, I would like to have yard done in the next 8 weeks. Which gives me a deadline of July 15th. We'll see if this actually happens.