Pet Projects: A few "BEFORE'S"...and we've got fish! (Shy fish)

Lillies!!!

Michael has been working so hard on getting the koi pond up and running. We've both always wanted a water feature in the back yard and luckily we already had the basics laid out when we moved in. We learned from the landscaper (who has been doing the yard work for the past year) that the koi pond hadn't actually been operational for over 3 years. No wonder it was funky. I'm surprised it wasn't funkier. We've been skimming and cleaning out the debris regularly and cycling out with all new water. We had no idea until after we put pea gravel in to make it look nicer that this is in fact a bad idea. Whoops. Oh well, live and learn. I got the lovely surprise last night of coming home to beautiful water lillies and....fish! We now have four koi! I think. They won't come out from under one of the rocks so I've only actually seen some fleeting moments of them so far. A tail here or there. The waterfall was made to look just right, Michael patched the hole in the liner with a repair kit, and now we're in business! The dogs have discovered the fish and Pete just had to do his Godfather impression....thanks Whitney for the great caption!

Pete meeting the fish and pretending he's Marlon Brando

We got a taste of the Amish lifestyle this past weekend. A crazy storm came out of nowhere Saturday evening and left us without power until Monday at 9:45pm! Not cool. We were just lucky it was such a beautiful weekend and could have the windows open. For a storm that lasted maybe 10 minutes, the damage was insane. Over 150,000 LG&E customers were without power, the last of which were just restored as of yesterday. There were trees down everywhere and the wind damage cost a great number of people some homeowners claims! Luckily no damage was done to the house and all of the falling limbs from the trees landed in the yard and not on our vehicles.

The house is coming along great and the only two rooms that need finished are the "drum room" in the basement and the spare bedroom. I've made some headway in the spare room but there are still some boxes to be put away and things hung on the walls. We've got some priority projects that are needing attention such as the deck seriously needs to be power washed and stained, and the gutters are as full as they can get. I took some "before" pictures of the landscaping so you'll be able to see the transition in the upcoming weeks. It's all very overgrown in the front and I can't wait until we're able to actually see the front of the house. I'm thinking of building another mound on the other side of the driveway mirroring the one on the right. Everything else is pretty much just maintenance. So far so good and I can't wait to showcase some more projects!