A Poop(yard) Kinda Day!

A beautiful Saturday morning with promise of warm weather, sunshine and not a single thing to go and do today!!!  You know what that means?

Yup... Our Old House Projects!!!

I woke up about 5:30 and couldn't go back to sleep.  Dangnabbit, a morning we could sleep in, and here I was, wide awake???  I got up and brewed some coffee, baked up some muffins and whipped up a batch of cookies too while I had the oven going.

Steve wandered on down once he smelled the good stuff baking, and we shared a cup of coffee out on our front porch. The sun was shining in from the east, and our dogs were relaxing by our feet. What a wonderful way to start a day.

First on our list of Our Old House Projects was to get the air compressor pulled around to the front of the house and run the air hose into the foyer.  Steve has a nice air powered finish nailing gun, and I had prepped the quarter round base trim with matching stain.  Before we went on vacation, we yanked out the carpeting in the foyer to discover how nice the hardwood flooring underneath.  All we needed was new quarter round trim to cover the areas where the old base coving and wall-to-carpeting tack strips had been.

Here is Steve, hard at work, making cut and cut again tiny increments to get the wooden strips to fit perfectly.  I was the "gopher" and "keeper of the dogs" who wanted to KILL the air compressor!

The foyer is such a pretty part of Our Old House... 

I love the old cast iron grates, vintage heat registers

 and that little antique table which was left behind by the previous owners.

That little closet door is where we keep all the grandtot toys, and also Steve created a little reading nook with pillows and a pad at the bottom of the stairs deep inside the closet. He put in a light fixture and we have a container of books to read.  The grandkids and the dogs curl up in there and have a secret hiding place inside.

The pocket doors lead into the livingroom, 

but we close them during the winter to keep the heat in the livingroom 

and not let it flow up the open stairwell until right before bedtime.

Okay, it's 9 a.m. and it's time to start our next project. 

Our doggers have a little "poop yard" between our house and garage.  We blocked off an area with pieces of 6 ft tall kennel panels.  It worked great during the frozen winter months.  Part of the area is a cement slab but when covered with snow, the dogs could use the entire space as their poop yard. Now that it's spring, it's pretty muddy and the small surface of available grass is getting down trodden and I don't think the grass will grow well with two dogs using it. 

When we had Duke and Duchess, we could attach either of those dogs to a rope at the back door that was on a runner cable, and they zoomed down past the garage to do their business in the backyard.  They were very confident and outgoing dogs who minded us well with commands and recalls and a real drive to please us.  Well, that was fine.

But with Finney and Binney, they are both quite the scaredy cat type dogs.... and if either one got loose, I am not sure we could ever get them back!  I know for sure that Binney would run wildly in any direction and not ever come back. Each can slip out of their collar in a flash, because their tiny heads are smaller than their thick ruff of fur around their necks. They each need harnesses to go for walks on a leash. Instead of hooking them into a harness each time to get them out to do their duty, we opted to fence in the section of grass between the house and garage to make them a "potty yard" which is now getting kinda small with two of them using it.

This is what we had made last winter:

Like I said, it worked well enough, but there is not enough grassy room for two dogs.

We never leave the dogs out here alone, we are always in the kitchen watching out of the window, making sure they each do their thing before letting them back in the house.  They are monitored to make sure they don't goof off and forget to go.  Nor would I ever want something to happen to them if left outside alone.

But this yard just needed a bit more "poop room" don'tcha think?

So yesterday we bought some new treated lumber planks and some spindles.  I used solid colored stain (white) last night and gave them all a good first coat on sawhorses down in my workroom in the basement.  They dried overnight and we were ready to get to work. We hauled out the sawhorses, drills, level, and screws.  Time to make a new wall of fencing that matched the house better.  We needed a gate too, so that was worked into plan.

We had to disassemble part of our existing porch
 to work in the new planks horizontally.

It went together as we assembled on site in the matter of a few hours... with a lunch break and some time to reconfigure the gate and latch.  It all worked out and we were done!  (I still have to touch up the stain in spots)

It sure looked a lot better than the black kennel panels. 

This is the side of the house we use most often.  

The doggers gave it their seal of approval! 

Once we got the new fence and gate mounted into place, now we could move the two black kennel panels to the other side of the house... This would expand the "poop yard" further into the side yard along the north side of our house.  It worked out perfectly!  We only had to remove one branch of the lilac and one shrub near the diningroom. That part went easy, and we attached it tightly to the house. It doubled the size of their "poop yard" and we can still see them out the window over the kitchen sink. 

 Binney signed the deal with her stamp of approval 

by peeing just on the border between the old "poop yard" and new area!  LOL

We took a break to visit with our neighbors out in the back yard.  We are VERY fortunate to be surround by "dog loving people" and we all gather with our dogs in the back where all of our yards meet.  It's a wonderful time.  Between four households, we have 9 dogs and they all get along great!

Sadly, our neighbors to the west of us had to put down one of their beloved dogs a few months ago, while we were gone on vacation.  RIP sweet Chloe!  Laurie had dogger treats for ALL the dogs today!  It's like our own little Dog Park. We don't care which dog poops in who's yard, because we all pick it up no matter what.  (except R.C who runs over it and blasts it apart with his lawn mower!)

Some of the old dogs, like Cheyenne, relax in the sunshine and ignore the young ones.

Little Binney and Finney are learning their socialization skills. 

 Soon Finney was dashing after silly rambunction Pierre, 

and someone kept throwing balls to keep them all entertained.

Finney and Binney are on long ropes of course, but still can socialize and sniff and play with the other dogs.  What a great community we live in, with such happy neighbors and friendly silly doggers!

Once our tasks were all done, we ran over to Shopko to get Steveio new shoes... New Balance were on sale until tonight, so we rewarded him for his hard work today with a pair of new shoes! LOL

I wonder what projects we will get done tomorrow???  We are going out to a Sweet Adelines Concert with Pa Pfundtner tomorrow evening, but I am sure we can find something during the day to keep ourselves occupied.  Hmmmmm???