Life- the Good and the Bad!

Life isn't always all Good, but without the Bad, we wouldn't appreciate the Good, right?

LaVerl noticed a very wet, muddy place coming into our driveway.

Ugg!  A water leak!

We had to get our friend, Jack McCall with his backhoe to come dig it out so LaVerl could find out where the water was coming from.

 

 Then LaVerl started digging! For some reason the water wouldn't turn all the way off, so water kept coming out of the water pipe, so it was a muddy mess!

The mud was thick and like quicksand! His big rubber boots kept getting sucked in and he'd have to pull them out!

I think the little boy in him liked playing in the mud!

 He had to cut out big roots from the huge Elm tree that probably caused the break in the first place! It was pretty tricky trying to fix it with water still flowing out of the pipe.

The good this week was LaVerl worked on getting the Trex on our upper balcony off our bedroom! We are short 4 boards, so he didn't quite finish! The BAD was when we drove over to Show Low to pick them up at Home Depot, they had ordered brown instead of gray!!

LaVerl also made time to take my little cub scouts fishing. This was the first time some of them had caught a fish! Good times!

 
Also, some of our kids, Tami, Kari and Mark, entered a Triathlon in St. George, UT and won 1st place! Way to go! 

Before the month was over, we got some pretty strong winds! 
We woke up to this!! We had some dead trees on the south side of our house and one of them blew down and broke our fence.

Also along our driveway, the small bushes we planted 30+ years ago, have turned into huge bushes, or else have died, so I got a 'wild hair' and started pruning, trimming and cleaning. Now we can see our playground area.

 

Enjoying the HARVEST!

Fall means apples and pumpkins around our house and kids coming home to enjoy the harvest.  All 3 of my girls got to come home for a few days and it was really fun. Kari's boys loved helping Gpa fill up the garage with wood.

Rivers really wanted to ride a horse, so we asked Tony, a guy renting some pasture from us if he'd let the kids ride his horses. He was so super nice to take the time to saddle one of his horses and let the boys ride and feed them apples. 

This was Fantasia!

This one was Zip, he won some major races when he was younger!

Elijah and Rivers loved it!

Did you know Eagar has a Zoo? Its been here awhile, but I hadn't ever gone. We all went and it was GREAT! They take you on a 2 hour tour and its definitely hands on and fun.  The kangaroo in the bottom right corner of this picture has a baby joey in her pouch!
They are the size of a lima bean when they are born, then live in their mama's pouch until they are 8-9 months old. This one popped its head out while we were watching, it was really cool! 
(It's a tail that's showing!)

They have a very friendly camel named 'Christmas' that came close enough that Elijah got to put his arms around its neck. 

The sloths were pretty cool too.

Climbing trees and eating apples! Great fun!

 We've never had so many apples fall on the ground before. It was a weird year!

From this----

 

 It was lots of work having to cut out all the bad parts, but we did it. Colter said this was the BEST applesauce he'd ever eaten!

Adlee loved it too.

 

Lilly was a great little helper! Landon too.

---to This!!
We made 62 quarts of beautiful apples.
 

Then on to Picking out their favorite pumpkins!


 

Monday we roasted hot dogs and made S'mores. It was a perfect evening, not too many more of those left before the cold comes.
Adlee's hair!! We were all cracking up!

I just wanted to add this Fall picture of J'net and I when they came to Eagar.

MAJOR PROJECT---DONE!!

I haven't posted in awhile because we've been busy!! We had to replace our old deck, it was over 30 years old, the nails were coming up, the boards were rotting, it was in bad shape. I thought it would be a simple thing to do- take the old boards off, put the nice new Trex decking on!  NOPE!  It turned out to be a 

MAJOR PROJECT!! 

LaVerl started taking the boards off Sept 19th. This turned out to be very hard and time consuming. The boards would not just yank up, no, some had screws in them and when he tried to unscrew them, the heads were stripped. So he had to grind them off and then pull the boards up.

 I tried to help as much as I could. I hauled all the boards to the back and set them where I want to use them to build a really cool tree house!!

 What we found under the deck boards was not good!! The big supporting beams were rotten!! That meant replacing them and having to pull the other supporting 2x6's off by removing all the hangers!  So time consuming!!

 LaVerl was a pretty good sport about all the work.  He'd just work on the deck when he didn't have other electrical jobs.

 After taking out the rotten beams, he replaced them with nice new ones. In the mean time, we had gone to Home Depot and ordered all the new grey TREX. Basically-fake wood. Its beautiful and is supposed to last 30+ years!

 The full length of the outside beam had to be replaced!

 While LaVerl is doing all the hard stuff, I painted all the white plastic lattice the gray color of our trim. I also cut and stapled up a very fine chicken wire to keep the critters from going under the deck.  No more skunks down in our window well!!

 We also painted our white lamp posts black. That's a lot cheaper than buying new ones!

The new beam!

 

 Sometimes when I wanted LaVerl working on the deck, he went fishing with his buddy. I guess that was okay! But really, all day to catch one fish!! (although it was a big one).

 Back to work. LaVerl added more center supports down each middle side.

 Then we oiled/varnished all the old boards.

 LaVerl tried really hard to level everything up. He added a bunch more footings, used a bunch of wood shims, and we strung string across everything checking for high and low spots. After 3 weeks, we were ready for the fun part!

 Oct. 8th--Getting the first board on!!  Yay!!!

Then more boards! Those 20 foot ones were really heavy! I helped LaVerl all day, I did all the pre-drilling, looking for measuring tapes and pencils, and moving electrical cords. We were hoping to get half way before dark! (but we didn't)

 

 We worked until dark the next day,  but didn't quite finish. We have a window well right in front of our back door, which required more work. LaVerl had to build a little hatch door so in case of a fire in our basement, someone would be able to climb out. 

 Finishing up!! 

 We got all the lattice stuff back up and everything cleaned up!

 It was lots and lots of work and time, but we love it! I was really pushing to get this done before winter sets in and WE DID!

We still have to put more Trex up on our balcony off our bedroom!
OK- 2 weeks later--
  When our old deck rotted out, one of our lamp posts that was attached to it fell over in a big wind! So we had to fix the light and then cement it in the ground this time!