Birds = Blocked

We had beautiful weather again this weekend, which made it a bit tough to work on the house instead of play. We compromised by doing a little bit more work on our new hedge strip. Since that strip of land gets more sun than anywhere else on our entire lot, it's the ideal place to grow vegetables and other edibles, and so we went out to the nursery and got a whole bunch of stuff. We just put different types of groundcover at the beginning of the driveway (I can't tell you exactly what because I'm not very knowledgeable about plants), such as corsican mint, cottoneaster, rosemary, something with purple flowers, and some sort of cute moss. Throughout the driveway we put more rosemary, corsican mint, orange mint, chocolate mint, a few different kinds of basil, a few different kinds of oregano, and strawberries (some of which have tiny baby strawberries on them right now). At the end of the driveway nearest the house, we planted chives, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and roma tomatoes. We're very excited for them to grow.

Then it was on to the real purpose of our weekend: bird blocking. Ever since we put up the walls and the windows, the wall's still been open at the top, allowing insects to enter. Bee-creatures of all varieties especially liked to visit. Plus the bird blocking was the last thing we needed to do before we put in the 2x4s that will span our ceiling between that wall and our new beam. Every single roof rafter pair had a different spacing, though, which meant we had to make each piece of bird blocking separately and to custom measurement. It was a pain in the butt, as was nailing so close to the roof, but it's done now and we're quite happy.

You can see that we also finally put the flashing up around the windows. We'll put up the Tyvek house wrap later, as we need to replace the eastern-facing window in our nook as well so we can put siding on that side of the house before winter. We think the bird blocking turned out pretty well.

We get the 4th of July off, so we hope to clean up our living/dining area and begin work on putting the other beam in. Once that's in, up the ceiling joists will go, wiring will be done, and we'll be getting ever-closer to having a complete room in our house.