Well...summer's almost here!

Okay, I know what a lot of you are thinking; Summer's BEEN here, you idiot! It's H-O-T outside and the kids have been out of school for nearly a month!

That's the key, right there; the KIDS have been gone for nearly a month, but I'm finishing up with the school year TOMORROW, and I can't wait to get started with the summer break!

MDB and I have a really nice vacation planned and I can't wait to get it started! We're basically staying close (who can afford to drive very far THESE days?) and re-creating our honeymoon from last year, which was AWESOME, BTW!!!

I've got several projects to complete as well. First, I have to rebuild our back fence. That's going to be a two-day job because I'm sinking a new post and putting in a gate back there. Our back fence backs up to a pipeline easement, so it'll be nice to be able to keep the grass trimmed behind the fence and keep the critters at bay!

After the fence, I need to build a storage building back there so we can clear some of the yard and garden stuff out of the garage. That will take about a week altogether. Fortunately, I've built two similar buildings before this one, so it should go fairly quickly, not to mention that this one is only going to be 64 sq ft, so it's not as ambitious as previous undertakings.

After the building is built, I'm adding a patio cover onto the back of the house. MDB wants it to look like the existing roof from outside, so it's going to have a standard wooden deck and composite shingles just like the rest of the house; should be interesting! That one's going to take several days because I have to sink posts in concrete and give that time to set up before we can begin installing rafters for the roof decking, roof decking itself, or shingles. Once the framing is up, the actual shingles ought to go up pretty quickly. When I built the last storage building I built, I ordered a pneumatic roofing nailer (which didn't arrive until I was finished, naturally!), so the job of putting up the roof ought to be MUCH easier with the nailer than it was by hand! Roofing work, this time of year ESPECIALLY, is BRUTALLY HOT!!!! I really feel for those poor souls who have to do that kind of work this time of year!

Anyway, it ought to be relaxing! Woo-hoo!