The Moat

You know the old saying, "When it rains, it pours."  And that has been true for us in many ways, both literally and figuratively, during the past few weeks.

First, you might remember our debacle with the emergency roof job.  Well, that left us with no gutters, and although we quickly called a bunch of places for estimates, our jaws hit the floor when we started getting prices back.  They were astronomical - far higher than we were expecting or prepared to pay.  We continued to get a few more estimates, but unfortunately the only company that gave a price under $1000 was super shady and we were not comfortable with him nor were we confident that he would do a good job.

So we negotiated a price with one of the other contractors and signed a contract, only to find out a few days later that he had to cancel on us because he got a bigger contract that was going to pull away all of his staff.  So then we were back at square one.

Ultimately we had to suck it up and pay way more money than we wanted to, to a national company that we sort of hated, but in the end they came through for us.  We send in the contract and they told us "they were scheduling 30 to 45 days out."  "But we don't have any gutters!" we exclaimed, but clearly the receptionist didn't care.

You see, that's where the "literal" rain comes in.  If you've been anyway near Pennsylvania for the past few weeks, you know that we've been getting a TON of rain. It was just pouring off of our house, damaging some of gardens and saturating the ground near our foundation that is already pretty bad at keeping water out of our basement and garage.

Fortunately, three days later the company called to say that they were coming tomorrow, weather permitting.  The weather held up, the gutters were installed, and then it poured for the next couple days.  Although it was really painful spending that much money on gutters, in the end we were so desperate that it felt well worth it.

Then it was realized that some of our downspouts were clogged.  This resulted in DH digging a trench (that I affectionately called "the moat") through our driveway so that the could run new pipes.

Using the tiller to aid in the digging process

 The moat made turning around in our driveway rather difficult

 The new downspouts and the means by which we can fill the moat with water to protect the castle

 Creating the rock waterfall at the end - he's so handy

Once that was finished and filled, he then started working on yet another trench on the other side of our house, that will hopefully connect to an existing pipe that waters the plants/mulch on our enormous driveway garden.

All of this work and all of that money and in the end, none of these projects really add anything to the value of our house.  It's sad, really.  And that's just a small sampling of all of the work we've been doing recently.  More on that to come.