You live on such an amazingly beautiful property Rado. It's just magical. And I love the way you're helping it grow into an even more beautiful one in your spare time.
Thank you for sharing!
Ditto on all that!! It's amazing how much you accomplish in all that "spare time" you have after work and 2 hrs commute. And you a city boy, you say. Got any efficiency gurus to recommend?
Anyway, it all looks fantastic!
Hi to you and GF
and SG
and all! Thought I'd be spending more time on photography, but spent the whole fall stabilizing a collapsing stone basement wall at some friend's house. 130 or so years old - one of those Boston society 'summer cottages' - 110 ft long, 14 bedrooms, 6 fireplaces, etc. yet not ostentatious, on 35 acres w/ 1000+ ft of shoreline near the Cape Cod Canal. A great place and great friends when they're there - five siblings and their 96 yr old mom come and go - they've about adopted me the last few years.
But brutal work - digging, moving 200 lb stones, mixing bag after bag of concrete, up-down-inside-outside. Somewhat interesting to excavate and resurrect the old drainage system which diverted 4 downspouts out 25 ft to a drywell the size of a VW But when the plumbers ran the line from a new well they just chopped through the drain pipe. So water overflowed at the downspouts, washing all the old lime mortar out of the wall, replacing it with soil and roots, water and mud flooding out on the basement floor, the ground sinking so it sloped towards the house, and the wall bulging inwards up to 8 inches in places. Honestly, a significant part of my motivation is that I'm so offended by what the plumbers did, as well as the many futile 'band-aid' "repairs" over the years that didn't address the cause, not to mention the electrician who ran the main power line through the gap between the settling stone and the sill it's supposed to support, or the shinglers who didn't create an overhang over the stone, so all the sills often get wet....grrrrr!
[Rant}
So many contractors just do their thing, ignoring, covering up, even causing future problems. No concern for the overall best interests of the house or the owners - just do their thing, make it work, get paid, next. I'd talk to other contractors and say "Wouldn't this more thorough approach make for a better job?" And they'd say, "Well yeah, sure - that's how I'd do it on
my house...." In other words, contractors generally operate from the assumption that it's not economically feasible to do the best job, and so each decides what constitutes adequate, or pretends to some mythical 'industry standard,' or 'does it the way everyone else does.' And that's the good ones who honestly want to give you a 'standard' job at the 'standard' rate.
[rant]
At least my friends appreciate my work - in fact are thrilled, because they have complete confidence in my abilities and that I have their best interests in mind. I mostly worked for people like that - never gave quotes, just time and materials. Mostly they were more or less friends, making me even less likely to charge what I really should have. It's no wonder I never could make much money.
I thought I gave this stuff up 20 years ago. 66 years young is not invincible - for every hour of work I pay with 1 to 2 hours of total veg, with hands and arms sometimes too sore even to manage a mouse or keyboard for long. I used to ignore the aches and pains - now I'm beginning to worry about doing permanent damage to myself. I'm planning on living to 100, for starters, and would like to do it in relatively good shape.
It's the curse of being too good at what I'm tired of doing. I can fix pretty much anything about a house, and better than almost anyone, and I'm incapable of doing less than the best I can imagine. But it's not how I want to spend my time. It's always nice to supplement my subsistence income, but I want to do that selling photos. I should mention that this same family has been extremely supportive of my photography from the start, have bought a number of them, and have orders in for some for Christmas presents - I've got to print them soon.
Well - that's more than I set out to say, and I've got stuff to do. I'll be by occasionally. Be well.
Happy Thanksgiving !!! 
