I’m sure you’re all dying to know how much I’ve actually accomplished from my giant to-do list I created a couple of weeks ago. It seems so long ago that I was full of energy and ambition – but it was only a mere two weeks ago. I have been really busy, but maybe I got a little ahead of myself. Me? Never. 

I was kind of thinking I would give a recap of what I said I wanted to get done, but lets not torture ourselves here – it’ll look much better if I just list the things I have gotten done and not have the original list to compare to. 

The birdhouses my sister and I made. I wanted mine to have a “green roof” and my sister built the other one. We had a brilliant idea to shingle the plain one with cedar mulch shingles, but unfortunately it was a total fail so we stripped the shingles off before the glue dried and before anyone thought to take photographic evidence of our failure. 

So here is the update on what I have accomplished on my stay-cation so far:
– Went to the U-pick. I wrote more about this in my last post on The Saskatoon Farm. But I did actually go back again for 8 more liters of sour cherries. So 12L in total. What the hell was I thinking? How am I going to deal with 12L of sour cherries? I really love making lots of work for myself, apparently. 
– Weeded and edged the big perennial garden in the front yard. God, this was horrible. I did it on the hottest day too because I was tired of looking at all the weeds suffocating the poor flowers. Plus, I was in some sort of mad rush to get it done before I left for the long weekend. I think I felt mostly guilty because this garden edges along my neighbor’s driveway and the part facing her was the worst. I had also declared to my neighbor the morning I started that “I am going to deal with this awful mess today because it looks horrible and I’m sorry”. She said she didn’t care, but maybe she actually secretly hates me because of the weeds and is too nice to say. Or maybe she feels equally guilty because she let creeping bellflower come into my garden from her yard. Regardless, I filled the entire black garbage bin with weeds and grass so that might give you an idea on how bad I let things get – it looks great now though. 
– Picked up the hoses. I’m not going to lie, they are not nicely curled up on a proper hose hanger, but at least they are no longer a safety hazard to anyone who enters my yard. 
– Weeded the back yard. The whole thing took me probably 20 minutes – it is really easy to weed now that the entire back yard is covered in mulch. 
– Put up the bird feeders. The chickadees are back! A few weeks ago back in July, my husband and I put up a 4×4 in the garden to hang bird feeders from. I finally got around to purchasing some inexpensive shelf brackets from Ikea, putting some metal hooks into them, screwing them to the 4×4 and hanging a couple of bird feeders from them. I only have two feeders hung so far because Ikea only had two brackets in stock, so I’ll buy a couple more to hang feeders from the other two sides as well. So far the chickadees and house finches love the feeders. And my cats love sitting at the patio window and drooling over the birds, wishing they were outside kitties. 
– Cleaned the greenhouse and planted some fall seeds on the lower level. I planted lettuces, kale, arugula and radishes. Granted the weather doesn’t dip too low, I should be able to be harvesting these until about December. 
– Started more hot peppers inside the house. My experience so far with peppers has been that they don’t mind being overwintered inside the house, so my plan is to keep these ones inside until next spring when they’ll be moved to the greenhouse. I am a wimp when it comes to hot peppers, but my husband loves to have his faced burned off, so I started some unbelievably hot peppers – scotch bonnet and bhut jolokia (the ghost pepper). I had started a few of these in June but the germination rate is really poor, so I’m giving it another go. 
– Put up the random decor items – some bird houses, the rain chain, wind chimes, etc. My sister and I also built two new bird houses this past weekend for my yard, so those were added today (photo above). 
– Cleaned the shed. I can actually walk in it now. 
– Trimmed the lilac bush. Actually, I just supervised my husband doing this. It looks kind of bad –  not because he did a bad job, but because it was planted in such a poor spot (by a previous owner, I will not take credit for this). Take my word, read the tags of bushes and trees before you plant them to see how tall and wide they will be spreading, otherwise you may be forced to give them terrible haircuts in order to be able to walk up to your front door. Poor lilac. 

Two of the bird feeders hung in the yard. So far the pesky squirrels have stayed away but I don’t trust them, so I’m keeping a close eye on these. 

That is about all so far. I have about 5 more days left to get things done. I just received the load of cedar mulch about an hour ago so I’ll be working on that mostly – it is enormous. But I have to say it is probably the nicest cedar mulch I have ever had delivered so I am giving a shout out to Bulk Mulch Depot. It was also pretty reasonably priced – I’ve always just bought bagged mulch from the store or gotten those cubic yard totes delivered, which I recently discovered is way, way, way more than I should be paying for mulch. It is $45/cubic yard from BMD, plus $110 delivery within the city, so if you’re getting 2 or more cubic yards, it is worth getting it delivered in bulk. 

So my plans for the rest of the week are dealing with the cedar mulch, painting the wheelbarrow, and staining and installing the privacy lattice on the fence. And of course doing something with 12L of sour cherries, I’ll be sure to let you know what I end up doing with them, I’ve got preserved cherries on the brain!

Back last fall, my husband and I decided that we were going to do some renovations inside of our house. We’ve done some small improvements over the last 9 years of living here, like painting, adding electrical to the basement, adding real doors to the master bathroom, switching out light fixtures and doing a ton of work in the yard. But we hadn’t done anything major and it was starting to show – the door leading to the side of the house was in bad shape, all the tile floors were in horrible condition and ugly and we had a non-functioning 1/2 bathroom on the main floor (it was in working order the first 4 years we lived here and then died about 5 years ago and was used as a storage closet since its death up until its recent resurrection). So we spent a few months planning and somehow managed to get my husband’s dear father to fly out from Ontario and help us rip apart the house and put it back together.  So since we spent all our money on that, we felt like maybe we should probably do the responsible thing and not go on a vacation this year. I will admit that it is a little disappointing for me – the last couple of years we’ve been doing a drive down to Washington and Oregon and spending a week in Portland where I can dream about living in a city where people grow vegetables in the hell strip and keep chickens in their front yards. Sigh, oh well. So instead I decided to take 3 weeks off of my job and get some stuff done around the house.

The first few days were spent doing boring adult things, such as cleaning the house, doing laundry and taking my car in for servicing. How exciting. Then we took 4 days to drive through Saskatchewan into Manitoba for a family reunion for my husband’s step family. On our way to Manitoba, we made a detour in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan to eat at a friend’s restaurant called Harvest. The meal was amazing and afterwards we got a night time tour of the Historic Shaunavon Hotel – which we were told may or may not be haunted (unfortunately we did not experience any paranormal activity ourselves). The most exciting part of the tour was just hearing some of the history of the hotel – there was a bootlegging operation there at one time! The rest of the weekend was good as well – we got to experience some real Ukrainian tradition, mostly through food, got lots of family visiting in and had some really nice weather (people kept apologizing for the “crappy” weather (typical Canadians apologizing for things out of their control), but frankly it was nice to have some cool overcast days after the heat we’ve had in Calgary). I can’t say the drive was particularly exciting – my favorite parts were seeing the mustard and flax fields.

Now back home, I have two weeks left of my stay-cation and lots of things to do, especially around the garden. It is a bit of a jungle out in the back yard and I need to deal with it immediately. I haven’t done any weeding for weeks and those hoses strewn all over the yard are going to seriously injure someone. I have a few obstacles that I need to address though:

#1. It is so hot outside that I don’t have any desire to step foot in the yard past 11am.
#2. We have some temporary but horrible neighbors living next door who have decided that instead of taking out their garbage, they would prefer to chuck it out their patio into the back yard and let the magpies have a garbage feast. So that is pleasant. The garbage is truly the tip of the iceberg but the good news is that they will be gone at the end of August so I really only need to deal with their horrible-ness for another month.
#3. I’m leaving my husband for a few days during the long weekend to escape to my sister’s place near Edmonton where we will build bird houses, enjoy the air conditioner in her house and visit Devonian Gardens (yay, finally!).

Putting all of that negativity aside, I have some real ambitions for the next couple of weeks:

– Head out to the Saskatoon Farm for berry picking. The one thing a year that I love the most and my husband hates the most (besides Christmas).
– Finish staining the fence. This has apparently turned into a four year project.
– Drastically trim back the lilac bush in the front. This lilac is a monster that we severely cut back annually but it just grows back the next year even bigger. It currently tries to murder you as you walk up the front steps and likes to annoy pizza delivery people by hiding our house number.
– Paint the wheelbarrow. The poor rusty wheelbarrow.
– Purchase, stain and install privacy lattice to attach to the fence. Back to the awful neighbors that I would like to pretend do not exist. Of course, I’ll still be able to hear them, but the less I see them, the better. I’d also like to plant some alpine clematis to grow up this lattice to provide even more privacy.
– Finishing laying cardboard and cedar mulch on the front beds.
– Top up the cedar mulch in the back garden (obviously I’m getting a huge truckload of cedar mulch delivered)
– Clean & organize the shed. You currently can’t see the floor.
– Clean & organize the bottom of the greenhouse and possibly plant a few things in there for the fall garden.
– Squirrel proof my bird feeder pole and install the bird feeders. The pole is up, but no feeders yet.
– Install a few decor items (I have a rain chain that I got for Christmas last year and some other things waiting to go up).
– Paint the front door.
– Plant two new trees in the back yard. I’m thinking another dwarf sour cherry and a columnar crab apple. This one is dependent on my wallet.
– Repair the rain barrel. It decided to crack during one of the huge rain storms in June and I haven’t bother to fix it yet.
– Work on finishing up some final touches on the indoor renovations I mentioned earlier. We have some painting to do, installing the light fixture, mirror and hardware, and putting up the baseboards and other moldings – you know, easy stuff (not).

Of course in my imaginary world I get all of these things done and more. But reality is usually a different story – what with the Netflix and the afternoon naps and all. Since I love to make to-do lists and pretend that we have all the time and money in the world, here are some of the “more” things I imagine I would get done:

– Build a “catio”. I really hate the term catio. Thank you, Jackson Galaxy. Anyway, we live on a busy street and therefore I keep my cats locked in the house at all times and they secretly (or not so secretly) resent me for it. So I’d love to build a little fenced in area where they can hang out in. Ideally, it would be attached to the basement window so they can go in and out as they please.
– Rip out the remainder of the sod in the front yard and install some more raised beds for vegetable growing. Yes, I want to be one of those weirdos growing kale and squash in my front yard.
– Build a new front porch and front walkway.
– Build a privacy pergola in the back yard on the deck.
– Put together a little sitting area at the side/front of the house – a little gazebo or something would be amazing.
– Build a raised bed cold frame (I have a spare polycarbonate sheet left over from building the greenhouse that I kept for this specific reason).
– Build and install a window box planter for my kitchen window.

Everything on my “more” list are actually things we will probably eventually do – but we’re talking 5 year plan here. Do you ever take a stay-cation to get things done around the house? What kind of big or small projects are on your radar for this summer? Wish me luck on my crazy list of things I think I’ll be able to accomplish – I’ll be preparing a full progress report, or at least snapping some photos as little things get finished and posting them on my instagram account.