Photo Album 3- House and Yard

HOUSE AND YARD

2001 The right side of the front of our house	2001 The left side of the front of our house

2004
The Barn
We built a big storage barn in the back yard. I didn't want a giant blank wall out there, so I made my husband turn it into a "town".

The "jail" is on the left. The "hotel" is next to that (the gray door is the only working door, the rest are fake). The "general store" is next and the "livery stable" is at the right end. The bottom part of the livery is for the lawnmower and garden tools. The top part of the livery is accessed from the large opening at the left end of the barn and is for storage.

Yes, it's big! It's about 56' long and 14' tall and 12' wide. ugly giant blank wall.

It is still a work in progress.

Hotel
Here's the hotel/restaurant part.

The mercantile

George

George on the hotel balcony

We had a blank fence on the opposite side of the yard and a lot of scrap wood left over. So......

Church
The church/school

Mine
The mine/dog houses

Bank
Assay office, bank, dentist/barber

Barber
Dentist/barber and train depot

Blacksmith and feed and grain

Fence

Carrying on the western theme

Saloon
In the lower part of the yard we have the saloon. This is what started the whole western theme. My husband and our friend built a patio cover that ended up looking like something out of the wild west. Just recently my husband finished off the back wall and added brick paneling to the interior.

The horseshoe pit is the graveyard.

Side yard

I decorated the side of the house in Spanish style. I now have a water fountain out there. I'll have to take another picture.

There used to be a slope out there. We had to rent a jackhammer to knock loose the hardpan clay soil. What fun!

The Inside of the House

February 2008
The Dining Room Makeover

Dining room before
This was what our dining room looked like before.
This was taken in 1996.

Dining room during
There's Charlie and Dennis (our friend) putting up shelves.

Dining room after
Here's teh finished product.

The following pictures were of weather events that I referred to in the welcome messages.

The Wind We get some pretty hard winds around here. The wind has blown over around 13 of our trees over the years, most of them full grown. Here's the worst ones:
12/96 A large pine tree in our front yard fell into the street blocking the entire street. It pulled up our main water line when it fell.	This is the rootball of the tree in the front yard. See the pipes that got pulled up? The hole in the ground is full of water. By the way, if you have a giant tree that is upended like this one, don't cut the top of the tree back until you prop up the rootball. It will drop right back into the hole it came from when enough weight is removed from the top. My poor husband had to dig the water main back up once the tree buried it.
12/96 Five pine trees of various kinds fell in the back yard.	This is another view of the trees in the back. They pulled down our wooden fence.
7/07 Shows the cottonwoods in our back yard. I drew a yellow line along the top of the roof of the patio (saloon) so you can get an idea of how tall they were.	10/07 Here are parts of the cottonwoods that fell during the high winds
The tops of the trees broke off and landed on the patio.	Here's one of the branches coming through the patio roof.

1/3/05
The Hail Storm
We live in southern California. We usually get a couple of inches of rain a year. We don't get snow where we are and we don't normally get hail. The night of January 3rd, 2005 our weather got weirder than it already has been.

We got a good 2-3" of hail and some BIG lightning and thunder. I'm typing this at 7:00AM the next morning and there is still a lot of hail all over the place.

The wash behind our house with lots of water in it

January 2005: The Rain

(I'm writing this 1/10/05)
More rain has fallen than in all the years they've kept track beginning in 1887.

The month, so far, has brought us BIG hail, earthquakes, and now rain.

This winter we've already had more freezing mornings than I ever remember since moving here in 1985!

Is Jesus coming soon?

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