We spent 2 or 3 afternoons over the past couple of weeks clearing honeysuckle from the hillside leading down to the river. If any of you have had any experience with honeysuckle, you know how prolific it can be. I refer to it as Buckeye Kudzu.
Unless we clear out some of this vegetation, it will block our view of the river once the leaves fill out. So, we attacked it with a chain saw and Roundup. We used the same approach in the field behind our last house and it was pretty effective. If you just cut it off, it will return with a vengeance. The other option is to pull it out with the roots but that is a much more arduous undertaking. I guess you would say we applied "slash-and-burn" since we incinerated everything we cut down.
As for beavers, I discovered that they have been active at the river bank immediately behind our house. They have felled 3 or 4 trees there. Now, if I could only train them to chew on the honeysuckle !
The siding guys finished up there work last Friday with completion of all the trim on the screened porch. Today I started installing the screen and hope to get that done along with the railing before the week is up.
Yesterday, Barb was doing some touch-up on the siding under the front porch and suddenly I heard her scream. It was not a scream of distress but rather one of those you might expect from a woman when she sees a snake or a mouse. Well, in the case it was a bat that was snoozing underneath the timbers. Hey, if you can't be welcome at the Batty house, where can you be welcome??
Speaking of snakes, she also found one of those critters when we were clearing honeysuckle. It was a garter snake about the size of my baby finger which Barb described as "huge".
She also has stumbled across two spiders over the past two days. I will admit...they were about as large as I have seen.
The guy who is doing our staining delivered the wood doors and all the interior trim work today. The doors are gorgeous and I can't wait to get them installed.
We are behind schedule selecting our flooring. If you haven't shopped for "wood look" flooring lately, it is a complicated product and there are a massive number of choices, so much so that it has created lots of indecisiveness on our part. We have visited dealers from Gettysburg (Ohio, that is) all the way down to Newport, KY. I think we are getting close though. Are last house had solid 3/4" oak floors which were very nice. However, we are looking at both engineered wood flooring as well as laminates this time around.
