There is one project I have been dreaming of since we bought the place, and it is finally done.  Can you guess which room this is?  Hint: it has white walls, 8-inch baseboards and a tan floor...

That's right, it's the garage.

Now equiped with epoxy floor covering, painted walls, and that's right, baseboards.  It looks awesome.  I didn't do it myself, but the amazing Dan did a great job on it.

It has been a while since I blogged any of my home improvement projects. The garage has been my nemesis since moving here, because it has remained cluttered, disorganized and dirty. A couple of months ago I started to get a handle on the chaos by building a workbench to store all my tools. My brother Nathan was visiting and helped. It is 6 feet long and on wheels. I am putting wheels on all the garage shelving so that they can be wheeled outside when cleaning the garage. My former garage had nice shelves, but it was a pain to clean under and around them. Plus with the dirt driveway, we need to clean out the garage frequently.

Today I built another shelf for the garage and 2 for my shed.  I recently had the shed resided and reroofed.  It had been finished with just OSB and leaked like a sieve.  Given that this is our pump house, and the source of our water supply, I feel that it should be clean, dry and critter-free.  It is all of those things now, except for a few lingering wasps that survived the eviction that happened when the contractor ripped off the old roof.  There had been some easy entry points for critters, and I have found wasps, snakes (non-venemous), birds and rabbits there in the past.  The contractor did a great job of closing it up tight.  The shed is roughly 9x10 with part of one end devoted to the well and related plumbing and equipment.  But now that I am looking at it as usable space, it seems huge.  The two smaller shelves in this picture are for the shed.  Sitting on the middle shelf are also a set of brackets I made from 2x4 that will be used as rack space for all my scrap wood.

Also a few weeks back my friend Justin signed up to help me build a retaining wall.  This was punishing work.  Those rocks are a lot heavier than they look, and many took 2 of us to lift and position.  I'm really happy with how it came out.

The parting shot is our house as seen from a neighboring lot. For those who haven't been here, this gives a sense of our "neighborhood."

For a while now I have been meaning to learn about some of the birds in our area.  I spent a while tonight with Google and Wikipedia and learned that have Red Tailed Hawks, which we knew, and lately juvenile Red Tailed Hawks.  We also have American Kestrels.

There were 3 or 4 (or more) adult Red Tailed Hawks that were constantly perching or hunting in the area right around our house during the winter and spring.  Lately they seem to have ventured elsewhere, because we have rarely seen them.  Lately there was a similar-sized bird around that looked a little different, and that is what prompted me to do the research tonight.  On the way home today from dinner out, one of these birds was sitting right beside the road and as we watched it, the bird picked up a mouse from its feet and swallowed it whole.  The kids enjoyed a real close look at this bird.  It looked very much like this picture from Wikipedia.  Btw, this picture is hilarious and it really looks like that mouse head is photoshopped.

Also lately there have been 7-10 smaller birds that look very similar to the adult Red Tailed Hawk, at least to my untrained eye.  Every morning for the last couple of weeks they are outside of the bathroom hunting playing and chasing each other.  These birds always hover with flapping wings when hunting for prey on the ground, and that behavior confirms them as the American Kestrel.  All of this group I see each morning appears from their coloration to be femail.

Since we moved in I have desperately wanted to clean and organize the garage. It has been a mess of partially unpacked boxes and lumber, tools and toys. Last weekend we made a good step toward getting it organized. It started with organizing the attic. I love this attic. For starters it has storage space, and quite a bit. I would estimate it is about a 14x12 foot area with a plywood floor for walking and stacking boxes. It is the size of a large self-storage unit. It is amazingly dust free for an attic. There is lighting and a catwalk that extends for probably half the length of the attic and provides easy access to all of the attic-based utilities such as the heating and air units, and cable and electrical wire runs and the like.

One minor downside is that like our yard and garage, the attic has mice. I put 3 brand new boxes of poison in the attic a couple months back, and when I checked them this past weekend they were completely empty, so that gives you a sense of the problem. Hopefully this also implies that the problem is much smaller now. I just hope they are not poison resistant super-mice that are simply getting a tasty snack from my poison boxes. But truthfully we never see or hear from the mice, so it is really only a problem in theory.

To make a long story shorter, I organized all the stuff we had already put in the attic, and we moved up a bunch more stuff from the garage. The garage is a lot more empty now, though we still have more to do. We also pulled down a bed that was left in the attic by the prior owners. It turned out to be a solid oak twin bed and trundle combo that looks like it will be perfect for one of the bedrooms. Score!

Here is the organized attic.

We harvested our first green beans tonight, as well as a few tomatoes and strawberries and enough lettuce for a salad.  Yum!  I sincerely hope the kids will like fresh green beans as well as they like canned ones.  We will try our best to cook them in such a way to have the same taste and texture.