I have not spent as much time this weekend putting the blocks together as I had thought I might. This is what I have done so far – the sashing is time consuming getting the corners and the nine patch area done. I do not have a design wall so this is where I start to go back and forth to the living room – laying it out on the floor to make sure I do not mess up the placement. I am done for tonight – I’m at the point where I felt I was going to start making mistakes! That tells me I’m tired and to leave it for Tuesday. I still need to cut my large triangles and do more sashing of course. Tomorrow I am visiting my mom for the day (a 2 hour drive both ways) so I know I will 
not get back to this until Tuesday at the earliest.
We have made quite a bit of progress on the porch and the deck so it is time for photo’s I guess. This first photo on the right is of before the work this past week. The railroad ties were rotting – it doesn’t look like it in this photo, but the part closest to the plants was. At first we thought to take 
the top one off and replace it but then we found the ones underneath were worse so we dismantled the whole thing and the plants are now in other places in the yard. We decided to take the railing down on this end and extend a deck = like this photo on the left. At the end of that photo where the plants are is where my swing area starts – we are going to put cobblestone type of stone down at the end here 
where the dirt is and it will tie it all together. I will show another photo when we finish it. Here is another view of what we have done on the right – this side faces the driveway. While Mike was building all of this I was using the pressure washer to clean all of the old porch floor boards to make it the same as the new so it would blend together. It really all came clean too. When I got done with the floor boards and the railings on the far end I decided to do the siding on the front of the house too seeing as I could reach it all! That is what I was doing yesterday.(I didn’t take a photo after the siding was clean too – it is much lighter now!)
Even though this has been a lot of work the last couple of weeks I am glad we have changed it. On the stone area that needs to still be finished we are going to put a round firepit that we bought at Lowe’s. It has a domed screen top and I have wanted one of these for sometime now. We spend a lot of time outside and with our mild winters we really do spend a good portion of the year out here. We have never had any luck growing grass in the front yard – it is hard as rock and it is more moss and weeds than anything else so why not cover it up!
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