Building The Love Shack

Dear Bloggers, I confess, it has been ten days since I last posted.

I have gotten emails asking where we are. I will get you updated with the where’s, when’s and why’s.

To get you on track, in one week, it has been a year since I had my shoulder repair surgery.  On the last visit to the surgeon, he told me to start doing more with the arm. Ha Ha… words one should never say to this overachiever.

With those words, I’ve spent the last few weeks getting caught up on all the things I have not been able to do in three years.

As you know three years ago I had bowel reconstructive surgery with them taking out eighteen inches of my bowel. They also made me wait a year for that surgery. In the meantime, I was put on limited activities.

With that repair and not using my mid-body muscles,  I overcompensated and overused my arms which came to the tear in my shoulder which lead to my ball of the shoulder coming out of the socket. Add another year of limited activities while waiting for the surgery.

Next week the year is up for recovery and another year of limited activities is over. I’m happy to say after three years of sitting on my behind watching it gown larger, I’m doing great and getting back to my normal go-go lifestyle.

And so, this is how playing catchup looks.

Between work, Wedding Season (which has been extremely busy this year) and the gardens, the decks and the roses I don’t think I have stopped.

I’m also getting to all the jobs that got left undone in the house.

Room by room and garden by garden, I’m now starting to see the light of day.

Now we head to the Love Shack.

Last weekend we started phase one of the addition to the deck.

The deck is going to have to happen in four stages because of time and puppies.

We started phase one with Husband taking apart some of the existing deck to add post to support the privacy screening. Once the posts were set and the framing was in, husband had to split the boards to make the privacy screen material.

 

 

That’s where Jodi and I came into play. We spent a few hours putting weather sealer on the boards that were cut.

In the meantime, we were cleaning up the yard from the Wet Spring and trying to burn the wood from back when we took down the tree two years ago. The wood was also wet and took some effort but with the help of our neighbor, we got it going.

The birdhouse finally made it into the tree, after three coats of water sealer were applied.

 

 

In the meantime, husband was cutting and nailing the screening boards to the new post. A very time-consuming job I learned with having to make all the cuts and shape the sides of each board.

 

 

 

 

We stopped working for a nice surprise when one of the Weekend Warriors, Barry and his friend stopped by to say hello and see how things were going.

There has also been an increase in other visitors to the cottage. Now that we are there for our fourth year, more of the cottagers are coming over to see the progress. I think we might be getting accepted in the cottage country( That does take time. Another blog about old school cottage country will come one day.)

We also took some time to go through all the extra supplies we had purchased for the build.  With so much to do, time ran out and we will have to finish the boards this coming weekend.

Jodi and I took the extra parts we bought back to Home Depot.  For once I came out with them owing me money. Which of course didn’t last long as we needed another bucket of putty and two cans of primer for the new drywall.

You know that old saying, “I owe, I owe, off to work I go”. Ours goes more like this “Off to work we go, so we can spend all our money at Home Depot”.

Since I was already there, and now that we have most of the old wood burned, we have room to plant some shrubs, which we also picked up at Home Depot. We can add planting to this weekends jobs.

In the meantime, I’m doing some extra baking and cooking. We are very excited to say we have company coming in a couple of weeks. Instead of spending time in the kitchen, I want to spend it with them.

We met this wonderful couple on a cruise ship six years ago and have stayed friends with them and traveled with them each year. This will be their first time to Canada. We’re taking them up to the Love Shack and just might turn Julie and Gary into Weekend Warriors.

On the plus side of getting all this work done, it’s finally warm out and I have some color in my pale white face and Woo Hoo… I lost five of those twenty pounds I put on sitting on my butt for the last four years.

That’s the update. Yup, we’re still here. Now back to work for me… No rest for the wicked.