Something pretty, hooray!

 We had a ton of people come out to help this weekend, and it’s pretty amazing how much got done. Many thanks to Eden and his wife, Noc, Steven – both Allred and Akins, Randy, Simon, and my Mom!

After working all summer long hauling heavy stones, gravel and sand, I’ve developed a big case of the “oh hell naw”s and consequently have been trying to keep myself busy with air-conditioned, inside tasks as much as possible. Though I did weed and weed-eat the front garden bed and help put together the curtain-hanging system on Saturday, as well as haul rock this morning. My inside task on Saturday (along with Simon and my Mom) was making colored citronella candles in mason jars. Props to the tutorial at Positively Splendid for walking us through the process.

Melting wax in the makeshift double boiler.

Action shot with wax-stirring and a partially-filled candle.

A fresh hot candle in the perfect mason. With part of someone’s fingerprint.

Candle cooling and hardening. We made 14 for the wedding and one for fun.

The candles becoming more opaque as they cool and harden.

Stacking up extra stone to sell back to the landscape company,

We had a skink visitor while stacking stone.

Lights are up! The outside-working folks rocked this job. And everything else we had on our list – we were scrambling to keep up by the end!

Adam and our lovely volunteers got the stair bases and stepping stones hashed out, utilizing our extra retaining wall stone.

They also got the fire pit mostly done using extra retaining wall stone. Beware the inaccurate blueprint provided by Belgard for this..

Here’s a shot of the nifty fire bricks.

Today, Adam and I painted the hallway… Yay! We’d been talking about this for a while.

Party time! Excellent!

I guess that’s about it. Thank again to everyone who showed up to help – you’re all lifesavers! Next week should be all about cutting bluestone pavers to finally finish up the patio corners and stair tops. Oh, and we plan to actually have a functioning patio by then. And the house well be clean from power-washing. Huzzah!