Chaos

We have so many projects going on concurrently right now, it's a little overwhelming. It's all good stuff. Very good stuff that I'm excited about. But I also feel like our backyard is a full-blown construction zone of mayhem when I've tried so hard to keep the garden redo from overtaking everything. Too many projects in motion at once became an explosion of chaos.

The garden paths are in progress. We are waiting on our pea gravel delivery for later this week, but we fully intend to keep going full steam ahead. We have the square pavers, the weed blocking fabric and plan on going one foot at a time until it's done. Or our backs break. Whichever comes first. (Kidding, I hope!)

The garage is in the process of being painted (YAY!). While waiting for the stone delivery we switched gears over the weekend to get the garage repainting started. I power-washed all the loose paint off and we started repainting. The only hard part is the mess... we had a lot of old scrap stuff leaning against the garage out of the way that now needs to be dealt with, lying all over the darn place. And all that paint that came off the garage is like an explosion of tiny paint chips that sticks to everything like glitter. It's E.V.E.R.Y.W.H.E.R.E.

To make the mess worse, we now have stone piles all over the place. Our neighbor is moving and had to clear it out before they put their house on the market. Since I love free stuff and can always find a use for stones and pavers in the gardens, I took them up on their offer. They just had A LOT more than I realized that they threw over the fence for us. It's awesome, but now we have to do something with all of it.

This is about 1/3 of the stone pieces we received. I'm very excited about them, and super grateful... it's just going to be a lot of work to move them all!

We have a massive pile of bricks and pavers behind the playhouse too (more than you can see in this poorly taken photo). I'm not sure what to do with these yet.



In the way back, we have these huge square slabs. Way more than I imagined we could have. Morgan Mayhem has been trying to use these stacks in the way back to jump over the fence. She's so agile she walks stack to stack. Luckily she's been thwarted from escaping with the bushes on the neighbor's side. (These massive pavers are perfect for creating a path in the way back to the compost bin when we are moving on to that project.)

Oh and in addition to those stone piles? They gave us a huge pile of firewood that they literally tossed over the fence for us (it's on a platform that they also gave us). It's very nice of them. But it's also a huge mess now. We really need to have a big fire one night because we also have a huge pile of scrap wood (untreated, perfectly safe to burn scrap wood) to get rid of. Fingers crossed that our old fire pit buried in the garage is still in good shape, since I converted the good one to propane.

Beautiful big pieces of  vinyl gray lattice are leaning against the garden fence. I am very excited about them (no painting ever! Gray!), but I have to figure out what to do with them. Or at least make room for them in the garage so they aren't just here being messy. And do you see the wheel barrow peaking out, full of edging we should reuse elsewhere? Need to deal with that too.

Oh and the pea gravel finally arrived! We have 5 cubic yards, in a giant pile in the driveway. This is our third giant pile this year and it's feeling  a bit much (first mulch, then dirt, now stone) even if we really do need it. This one will be the most painful to clear since those rocks will weigh a ton (or if I want to be literal, 7.5 tons). I'm tired already.

Of course our goal is just to chip away at all of it, a little bit at a time, every day that we can. Little bits add up fast. Move some stone to be a garden border. Paint another section of the garage. Haul a couple loads of pea gravel. We'll get there. I just have a hard time relaxing on our patio when all this chaos surrounds it. Our comfortable, beautiful patio under the pergola, surrounded by flowers, with the furniture we bought last year... it should be an oasis where I sip cocktails in the shade, not stress about the thousand projects I should be doing (which I can't ignore when I'm staring straight a them!). I think I need to close those curtains?