Here are a few more pictures. This one shows some of the shrinkage that the logs have done. The trim that Carol is holding against the cabinet has a notch in it where it is against the cabinet,
that notch should be under the cabinet and it's a little over an inch to high right now. The cabinet is mounted on a piece of oak plywood that is mounted on the wall at the ceiling so that it will come down with the wall instead of tearing off the wall when it shrinks. This piece of trim was sitting on the cabinet below Carol's hand so it didn't have any place to go and it caused the
cabinet to move away from the stove which is just to the left of it and I had a heck of a time trying to get the trim out without messing something up. I got it out ok and cut the notch so it would fit again. This was a good example to show everybody some of the shrinkage and it has done more.


A little more landscape and this time we had a stone retaining wall put around the front yard and filled it in with more dirt so that the yard would be more level and look a lot better. We had 2 humongus dump truck loads brought in and 3 pickup loads but that still wasn't enough, we could use 1 more dump truck load. The wall isn't as high as I wanted it to be but it's a lot better than before.




We also had some work done here in the back. We needed it leveled out some also and needed a ditch put in between the house and the hillside to the left in this picture. We needed it to redirect the runoff from any heavy rain to that side of the house so it wouldn't pool in the low spots and get into the basement also to keep it from trying to wash out the driveway at the garage which is to the right in this picture. We haven't had any real heavy rains yet to find out how good it will work. It we can keep water out of the basement then we can finish the basement, we are hoping to anyway. There will be some pictures of the ditch in a later post.


This is a picture of where I spend some time out of the sun right in the middle of 3 cedar trees. A perfect spot to take an afternoon nap.



This is between the driveway and the road so it's the front front yard. I had it cleared out some and there were 2 big low spots, 1 in this picture and 1 in the next picture, that I had filled in with some of our infinite supply of rock and then covered over with dirt. We are planning on planting some fruit trees in this area.

These next 3 pictures are of a hiking and nature trail I made that turned out to be pretty good. It goes into the woods a little ways then to the right and up the hill and loops around into a small valley and up another hill then down and back onto this trail all still on our property. I took our 5 year old niece on it and she said it was boring, I guess because there was nothing but bugs and we didn't see any animals then but her 8 year old brother seemed to think it was ok. There are a lot of animals around tho, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, bobcats, deer, turkeys, chipmunks, armadillos, mice, bald eagles, bats, assorted small snakes and can't forget the occasional skunk or 2. We have seen all of these animals on or above our property except for the armadillo and turkey but have seen them in the local area. I guess we were making too much noise while we were walking around the trail. There have been sightings of black bear and cougar in this part of the country too but so far we haven't seen any but don't worry as long as you aren't the slowest in your group they won't hurt you.


This is the path that starts up the hill but with the shadows and leaves it's a little hard to see it.