We hit a major milestone today. The last equipment and debris is gone from the front of our house!
For 2-1/2 years, there has been stuff in the street. First a fence, then a backhoe, piles of dirt, rocks, a porta-pottie, rebar, concrete, huge stacks of wood, trucks…when we moved into the house in July, we still had a pile of boulders for landscaping. Now that the landscaping is done, Manuel Fernandez & his crew hauled the last of the debris away yesterday, then came today to pick up their Bobcat. We’re just another house on the block now. Sort of.
Here is the view from my office on the second floor yesterday morning. The hillsides now have mulch on the ground, covering the drip irrigation and the jute netting on the steep parts.
You can see we still have the white Christmas lights up on the deck railing. The two trees look very spindly, but should take off nicely in the spring. The thing in the lower left is the gas meter, which will be hidden behind plants in a year or two (I hope!)
In the right pic, the Bobcat is loading the last of the debris pile into one of Manuel’s trucks. By the end of the day, all the dirt, the leftover pipes, and the stack of bluestone pieces were all gone, leaving my blue BMW motorcycle sticking out like an antique orphan.
I don’t often show photos from the north side because of all the junk in the street, but here’s one taken today, after everything was gone. The cones are left over from Brent Harris Construction, and they have served their purpose well. The street is all nice and clean. Finally.
That ugly black pipe sticking out of the north side of the house is one of the drains from the 3rd floor deck. It’s been redirected into the drain box behind the north retaining wall, but I’ll go up there and re-plumb & paint the pipe, along the side of the house, so it won’t be so visible. You can also see the fire alarm bell, just under the triangular window in the top left. And our neighbor’s spectacular old oak tree on the right, which I’m still spraying twice a year to fight its sudden oak death infection.
All tucked into the hillside. What a nice house. As the new year came in, Nancy and I reflected on all we got done in 2008, and committed to hike and meditate more (and pay off some bills!) in 2009. This blog will continue, as I move my mother into the neighborhood, and start to get more involved in the town General Plan Advisory Committee.
By the way, my company, Sun Micro, is about to do a really big layoff, 6000-7000 people. If I get hit, this journey could become a lot more interesting really quickly!