Wildlife at Painted Views Ranch

Since our last post ......

We finally managed to get garage door openers installed, on all three garage bays, so we have been putting the car in the garage for the past week. The openers are belt driven and are much quieter than with a chain drive, and they have a battery backup (which is good to have when you live out in the country) and even though we have remotes in the vehicles we can open and close doors with our cell phones. It sure makes it nice when we come home with a load of groceries.

The weather has been raining and dreary the past couple weeks and with little sunshine nothing seems to be drying out. It's been mud, mud and more mud.

Of course that has delayed the start of construction on the fish pond. I drove the tractor through the pond site to try to remove some of the rocks that will be in the way and the ground was so mushy there are now bigs ruts from one end of the pond to the other.

In fact, it's been so muddy that our Ranch Foreman Rascal has been keeping up with his surveillance duties from the comfort of the balcony over the front porch.

 

We've been having plenty of wildlife visiting the ranch too. One day last week, as we were having lunch, a grey fox limped along the driveway in front of the house. He didn't let his left front paw touch the ground hardly at all. We wondered what may have happened with him.

 

And today a Great Blue Heron swooped across the front yard, not very far in front of the house. Not a good sign, considering there's a koi pond in our near future.

 

And with the weather lately, with fog and heavy clouds, most of the sunsets have been blocked out, with a few exceptions. Here's one of them. Stay tuned. There are bound to be more.

Moving In

We took possession of the house on July 10th and we've begun moving in gradually. Each time I go there to work on something I take a truckload of something with me.

 
I'd had such a good result with the peel and stick tiles that I put down on the bathroom floor in the barn that I decided to use them in a couple of places in the house; the closet that's off of the garage and also in my studio office.

 

The new bedroom furniture was delivered, and so was the refrigerator, so we decided to spend Saturday night there. After eight o'clock we made our way up to the second floor balcony to watch the sunset and take some pictures. Here are a couple of nice shots that I managed to get.

In this shot our driveway is visible in the lower left.

This is the first of many sunsets that we'll be enjoying in the years to come.

But the biggest surprises were finding out
how amazingly quiet it was up there on the mountaintop at night
and
watching all the private property security lights popping on all over the valley below.
That made for a pretty sight. We're wondering what the valley will look like at Christmastime.

Closing In on the Target

It's looking possible that we may actually be on target to close at the end of this month.

Yes, we know it's been a while since the last post, but because of a defective fan in a desktop computer, I've been without a way to post for a while. But now we're back in business so here we go...

The stone work has been completed on the fireplace. Here's before and after the stone went on. Now we're just waiting for the mantle.

The cabinets in the utility room have been replaced. (The first batch were the wrong color.)

Now it's just waiting for its counter top (and sink) and toe kick.

The tile crew has been hard at work. All the floor tile has been laid in the Great Room, Kitchen, Dining, Breakfast and Pantry and then covered with paper. The same tile was used (on the diagonal) for the kitchen back splash. And the second floor outdoor balcony has been tiled too, with a tile rated for outdoor use. The balcony railing is coming soon.

The garage doors have been installed.

Many of the light fixtures and fans were hung earlier this week .....

And the electricians were back again yesterday to (at long last) bring power to the house so they could begin troubleshooting all the appliances and fixtures.

Now that this panel has been installed and power has been brought to the house, if things go as planned, next week we'll finally be able to have power to the barn/workshop after waiting six months for it.

The trench was dug from the well house to the house, the water line was installed and is waiting for inspection at the same time the septic system is inspected.

But even as fast as things are going, we won't be the first residents in our new home. A pair of barn swallows decided that the ledge above the balcony door was a good place to build a nest! You may think that's cute, but after reading about them and the mess and health hazards they bring they won't be cute for very long. They're protected by Federal law and this nest wasn't discovered until after it became illegal to remove it, so they'll get this one breeding season. As soon as the birds leave the nest it goes, we'll scrub off the remnants and install screening before they come back next spring.

How's this for a framed landscape painting?

Here's one more photo taken from the breezeway between the house and the studio, looking west, as the sun was trying to burn off an early morning fog. It was taken before the electricians did their installs, so there's a ceiling fan hanging in the ceiling now. That'll make watching the sunsets much nicer in warm weather, won't it?