Fall has Arrived!

I know I said I would try to update this sooner than the last time (5 months), and I think I may just make it, if only by a few days. :)

Just to catch you up, my last post was at the end of June, and it's now mid-November. We  have moved most of our stuff from Houston, and the Copperfield home is on the market.

It has been one of the worst droughts on record here in the Texas Hill Country, but I'm pleased to say we just got over an inch of rain this morning. In June our landscaper was just getting started, but now that's complete and things are looking pretty nice.





The front and side yard have Jamur Zoysia turf grass. It has a thick carpet and is very drought tolerant. Most of our plants and shrubs are native to the Hill Country. The pink ornamental plant here is Muhly grass.











We found a craftsman at the Chappell Hill Scarecrow Festival who makes these street markers. We asked him if he could put a scorpion on it, and he did a great one. Ask Winnie for the story behind this.

We have a drainage easement on one side of our property. On the left is what it looked like before and on the right is after the landscaping. It went from "The Ditch" to "The River"







Our back yard has a Buffalo grass trail around it, with native grasses hydro-seeded everywhere else.

The native plants are a combination of what the landscaper planted (Copper Canyon Daisy, Lantana and Salvia Greggii) and plants that grew wild on the property (Prickly Pear Cactus, Yucca, Agarita and many others). We also added a flagstone deck and a fire ring.









In the front we have wax myrtles lining our electrical equipment. We had to put the wire fence around them to keep the deer from tearing them up.












This is one of several "dry stack" walls that were built. The landscapers actually used a rock hammer to "shape" each stone to fit. No mortar is used on these walls. The plants here are Crape Myrtles, Wooly Stemodia, Mountain Laurels, Loropetalum, Blackfoot Daisies, Jerusalem Sage, Plumbago, Bottle-brush and Dwarf Yaupon.

The garage is coming along nicely as well. I finally got the El Camino up here. I'm installing the Rubbermaid Fast Track system that you can see behind the El Camino. It's a very flexible system that allows you to use several kind of connectors for hanging different kinds of tools. And if you don't like how you arrange things, just unclip and move them somewhere else.

I couldn't close without at least one critter picture. Thanks to Kelly for capturing these two studs asserting their masculinity during the rut.

Hill Country Livin'

I can't believe it's been over five months since I last posted an update to the blog. Time sure has passed quickly. Lots of changes, so I'll jump right in. Probably the biggest change, I retired from ConocoPhillips after 32 years of service. It didn't take very long out here at the lake to help me make that decision. We have been slowly moving furniture from Houston over the last few months, and we now spend more time at Canyon Lake than we do in Houston.

Our daughter Kelly is living in our home in Copperfield, but she recently became engaged and will be moving with fiance Anthony to Baton Rouge, La. That means we will have to get our act together, finish moving the remaining items from Houston and put the house on the market.


So what's been going on at the lake house, you ask. Lots, and here are some pics. I mentioned in my last post we were looking at flooring for the garage and patio. We got that done in February and it turned out very nice. We had a crew from Garage Experts in Pflugerville do the installation, and they did a great job.

We had our first house guests in March, when my parents. Kelly, Anthony, Tim, Nina and Merced all came out to see us.

We have been adding some furniture as we get settled in, but we are trying to space things out a bit. It seems like there is always something else we need to get.

We had quite a crew out for Memorial Day, 12 of us staying in the house at the peak. There was a testosterone bug going around, and everything in sight was deep fried, including corn dogs, onion rings, battered bacon and Oreo cookies! 

 We finally have our landscaping project underway, and the crews have been hard at work cleaning up the lot and are now starting to build some rock walls. The landscaper has told us it should be complete in a couple more weeks.

And after living on the lake for several months, we finally got our first boat ride!

What blog post would be complete without a few pictures of the critter population we are learning to live alongside.

I'll try to make it back a little quicker next time. See you then.

It's Ours!

Well, almost. The loan will fund on Tuesday, January 18. We signed the papers at the title company last Wednesday, but because the underwriters requested one more comparable, we didn't find out until late Friday afternoon that the loan was approved. We didn't let that stop us from sharing some champagne with our builder after we signed the papers!

We took the bar stools from home out so we could at least have a place to sit. We're taking a U-Haul truck out on Saturday January 22 with more furniture from home so we can start making weekend stays.

Other than a few finishing touches, the house is complete. Carpet has been installed in the guest rooms and media room and all the appliances are in.

The light fixtures are hung and the steam sauna is all hooked up and working. I can't wait to try it out!

We will probably be out the next few weekends getting the place livable. We still have major appliances to get (refrigerator, TV, home theater system to name a few). Phone, cable TV, internet access and security system are getting installed at the end of January. We also made a trip to Austin last Saturday to look at the garage flooring I want to have installed. We visited the home of a very nice lady who lives up at Lakeway on Lake Travis to see a recently completed installation. It was so beautiful, Winnie wants it installed on the back patio as well! Looks like I'm going to be working for a little while longer after all.