Wow I have not posted anything since April 9th. Time flies when you’re busy…where to begin…not sure where to start so let me just let it flow and dive right on in to try and get this blog caught up.
I don’t even remember much of April other than the swimming pool was completed and at the end of the month the deck project began.
May is always a busy busy month for us somehow every year, partly due to Visions. Starting off in May was the Grenada High School Visions Spring Show called One Moment More where it was about music from the past decade in movies. Here is a video of Justin performing Folsom Prison Blues.
After that it was time to move forward trying to get the deck complete before Graduation so that we could have a Birthday/Graduation pool party.
This didn’t quite go as planned with bad weather popping up often. We did manage to have a party at the end of the month, but I will get to that later.
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So graduation was looming, and I wanted to get the backyard done up real nice. I decided that I wanted me some stones in the backyard leading up to the deck steps. Some really really large stones. I thought about busted up concrete like from a sidewalk or something. I had a friend that suggested to me that he had some that I could have for free. I drove all the way to Ackerman, MS to find out that the stones were gone. The leftovers were too large anyways. I would have had to dig up ground, a lot of ground to put them in place. Lot of backbreaking work.
I then looked to local garden centers for some stone and found some nice ones. Some Arkansas Field Stone. Problem was that it was $260 for a pallet that only contained about 8 stones, and really they were not large enough to suit me. I had a ways to go with them.
Always thinking the hard way around something, I found my solution. I will mix up concrete or mortar in a wheelbarrow, then plop it out onto the ground creating my own stone, shaping it at random. Then imprint it with another stone, and color it up later with stain.
I did a few and it turned out to be exactly what I wanted. Problem now was the stone that I was using to imprint with was too heavy, so I looked to the internet rockmolds.com and purchased me a rubber stamp that looked like lava stone. This was the ticket!
Here is a video of what they look like.
Not quite done with them yet. I have several to make right below the steps on one side of the deck.
Feels damn good when your ideas become reality.
Here is a shot of the pool from underwater. I took this with my camera in a ziplock baggie.
Here is me jumping into the pool with the camera then I think I saw a leak in the baggie
Then came Graduation. Went really well. The boy graduated and ready to go off to school.
We had planned on having a party that weekend but the deck steps were not complete and weather was wet. We managed to pull it off the following weekend that rolled around and it went well. The shrimp boil was ON! Delicious! Goodtimes! Pics to come later if I feel like it.
Here is a gallery of some of the images from April/May.
As you can see…been busy.
