How I spent my summer, so far

We made it back in late April and on May 1st, we started renovating an apartment. This required tearing out the carpet, painting, replacing some subfloor in the bathroom and laying new linoleum tiles through the kitchen, bath and hallway and new carpet in the bedrooms and the living room.
I got in a few motorcycle rides and in late May, I broke my femur on my left leg. I ended up with a custom brace to told everything in place so my leg wasn't flopping around. It won't let my leg bend enough to get on the bike though.
In June, I kept busy with rental property issues and we finally got the neighbor over to do some work on our deck. I had torn the old deck off about two years ago because it was beginning to fall down because the retaining walls were starting to press in and pinch the deck. We found out that the deck wasn't built that well to begin with. So we finally got around to doing the new deck so that people looking to buy the place wouldn't need to worry about it.
We tore out the old railroad tie flower beds and retaining walls and replaced it with a new retaining wall and had the old flower bed graded down to match the rest of the hill so that we could mow it. 

 Then the Amish crew put the deck up.

The dog enjoys spending time on the deck and it is nice to be able to sit on it and enjoy the view once again ourselves. We spend a lot of time on it. I only did half of the original deck because of money constraints and we really didn't need that much deck.

The original deck.

The new deck and retaining wall. 

Between the retaining wall and the house, I had the top soil scraped off and dumped in stone to make it more maintenance free and I put lattice on the railing by the stairs and built a gate to keep the dog on the deck.

Becky decided that the wallpaper in Patrick's bathroom needed to come down before the open house and she ended up scraping off two layers of wallpaper off and taking off all the paper off the wallboard. She learned to tape corners and then how to skim coat the walls. Eventually she got it painted a gray color and it looks really nice. Here she tapes in her first corner.

 

My goal is to get out of Ohio in September and get started on our next trip. Hopefully, by then the house will be sold. I traced out our last trip on a small map. We covered close to 8500 miles and enjoyed just about ever one of them.

 If we leave in September, I want to head towards Florida and spend some time down there diving and getting in my last twenty dives to get to 200. I was hoping to have them in by now but this broken leg is holding me up.

Proverbs 16:3 Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.