I took this picture of one of the Phyllis Bide roses we planted on the fence earlier this spring, because it is growing so lushly. All the roses we put in the ground are going great guns. I can’t wait to get the rest in.

I am thinking that I should put some of the Sally Holmes roses—of which I have quite a few—around the back of the barn and guest cottage along the top of the bank.

Here is a close-up of the flowers on that rose bush. The hot sun gives this rose a lot more color than its parent in my current garden has.

Here are the two roses below the gate. If you look back in the archives around the time we planted them, you can see how they—particularly the lower one—looked pretty peaked there for a while. But now, they could’t look healthier.

I am so excited to see how well the roses are doing in this soil, because one of the reasons I wanted a place in the country was to have a huge rose garden. It is so encouraging to know that all I have to do is plant them and water them and they will be happy here.

The guest cottage got its furnace! It is tucked up against the south wall in the attic. It looks so tidy and symmetrical, like something in an installation instruction book. These guys just do a great job.

By about 2 pm, the crew was finished with the bore and took off. Now the soils engineer will need to inspect the holes and make sure they meet his criteria.

The thing that amazed me is the variety of the soil colors. They show somewhat in this photo, but in real life, the color range is even greater.

The is yellow on the left, red in the middle and tobacco brown near the saw horses and black in the foreground on the right. The tobacco brown near the saw horses is the most beautiful color. I want the floor of the house to be exactly that color!

The other thing that shows up in this shot is the big bare space in the middle where there are no holes. The reason for the bare spot is that the house will be built around a courtyard where there won’t be any piers.

Here you see a row of pier holes with their little lids marked with depths.

More adventures on Friday!

These pictures are actually from August 12th, but they did not get put up with their correct date. Because of the span of the stairs and the way they are built, when you went up the steps, the wood bowed quite a bit.

Although this was not a safety issue, my cousin Chris was concerned that several people on the stairs might cause problems. He went to the hardware store and bought some perforated steel bar, which he bolted to the underside of the treads of the wood stairs.

Because of the many screws attaching the length of the bar into each piece of wood, when you step on the stair, your weight is distributed over the entire span instead of just concentrated in the middle of the tread.

Now when you walk up the stairs, each stair seems completely solid. There are large holes along the center of the bar, so water will drain through between the two pieces of wood like it is supposed to. Ingenious.