One Man's Treasure...

The weather has been crazy around here.  It got cleverly warm and snow was melting by the boatload.  Which means we have been finding lots of ... oddities in the yard.

Aw, how cute.  But what the hell is it?

Aw, how NOT cute.  This pile of "treasure" was all over the yard, under the snow.  And actually, it's only a small part of the original pile - back in January we had a few warm days; some snow melted, and we hauled out everything that wasn't frozen to the ground.  But on Monday, it was over 70 degrees out.  At one point I was wearing running shorts and tall rubber garden boots.  I was the height of spring fashion.  Mom and I took down the basketball hoop that for some reason was hanging in a tree out by the road, in the woods, where there is absolutely zero room to bounce a basketball.  I also made this...

...while ripping down a wall:

I'm guessing the previous owner put it up to get some privacy between their side of the property and the apartment where they had tenants.  The "wall" was made from two layers of vinyl siding screwed to rotting posts.  It was butt ugly.  Now it's gone.

So it was in the '70s, and last night it snowed.  Crazy weather, yeah?  I've got an icicle tree growing by the garage.

Awesome.

Backtracking to sometime last week, this was my side yard:

I took the picture from my bedroom window.  During the winter that never ended, the snow was up to the top of that red fence.  Last week a lot had melted, but see my foot prints?  That snow was still up to my knees.  Just past the patch of green grass the property drops down to a stream (which is more like a roaring brook right now), and to the left of the bare grass is the pile of slate I mentioned in a previous post.  I hoofed out there to take a look and brought a piece inside.  The idea I wanted to try turned into this:

Cool.  I wanted to use this piece for a horizontal painting, but it had those two little holes at one end so this is how it ended up.  Ann thinks the slate might be roofing shingles but they are all different sizes.  When my yard drains and is no longer a swamp I will bring the whole pile over to the house so I can see what is there.

On the renovation front, I have one very important thing to say:  it's all about the little things.

Like power tools.  Especially cute power tools.  Now I can add extra shelves to my cabinets.  The uppers are 36" high rather than 30", but they only came with one shelf so I took the shelf out of all the base cabinets and added them to the uppers.  But I really despise the clips that came with these buggers, and the holes in the cabinets are not 1/4" like all of the clips at the hardware store.  Hence, power tools.  I drilled the holes bigger so the clips fit, and voila.  Done deal.

Yes, I still have to paint the doors and drawers.  It's driving my mother crazy.  I will get there.  The painter's tape is still up because I haven't painted the undersides of the uppers.  And I've got a ton of touch up to do, but that didn't stop me from a little decorating.

Remember, it's the little things.