Now our front porch is starting to look much more "front porch"-ish:


                                  

That bench is an old Mexican school desk - the back of the bench is the desk for whoever was sitting behind.

The big copper bucket is....a big copper bucket. I don't even remember where we got it.

The little sign over the doorbell says "Friends Welcome. Relatives By Appointment".

(You might notice a bright red-and-white reflection in the front window - that's our big 12-foot tall Alabama banner out by the street : )

The house is looking nice these days - we have a chocolate yard to go with our chocolate walls. The yard looks much more finished, as long as you don't look at it from the west end; we can't gravel there yet, because that is where the big rigs will be driving in and out while they dig the pool.

 The permits have, indeed, been approved and released, so construction might start this week (but more likely next week, since this is a short week for business) and they should also be starting on the fence simultaneously. When that's done, and we've finished gravelling, then...then....then I'm sure that Ethel will find something else to do.

That's the nature of homeowning, as I'm beginning to expect; it was never like that before, though. We did some things with the house in Park City, but it didn't need much; the house in Anthem was already everything-ed, and what they did was better than we would know to do - all we did there was update appliances.

The house in Vermont was a rental; the house in Tucson was already landscaped out front; all we did there was dig a little pond and put in some grass in back.

But with this house, it's a never-ending story; although it had every conceivable upgrade, it had almost nothing done to the lot (and an acre of desert is a LOT of lot)  and the internal walls were all neutral colors

Our 16 tons of Madison Gold rip-rap and 40 tons of Table Mesa Brown, however, were NOT sufficient to do the entire yard, but I suspect that we've gone a bit thicker than the 2" suggested for the smaller gravel, and we've covered a lot of extra territory with the rip-rap. So we're going to need to buy more gravel later.

In fact, we're going to need more everything later :)