It's a mess in my backyard! The contractor team has ripped the siding off of one wall to expose the framing and begun to replace the termite-damaged wood. As with any repair it's a good news/bad news situation. The top beam (to which my husband and I had planned to attach a header for our second floor replacement deck) in the wall isn't as bad as we thought. But one end abutts an upright corner section that was so badly eaten that the beam IT supported is beginning to sag. It holds up the inside corner of two floors. In the living room I could see a little cracking going on next to the ceiling trim. We called them just in time! Now there's a wad of 2x4's holding it up.
Meanwhile a trench has been dug 300 feet long for our new water main. It's a huge swath about 10 feet wide through our manzanita "forest". I had him clear a bit extra at the crest where I'll build my greenhouse one day. We now have a gigantic pile of crushed manzanita to burn if it ever rains again. Replacing the water main has been on our to-do list since we moved here five years ago. Being made of some inferior black material that can't possibly be code-approved, this line has broken half a dozen times since we arrived. If you're lucky, you'll never discover the joys of digging four feet down in the rocky red soil then working in the mud in the dark cold rain. This will soon be just a pleasant memory.
I'm looking forward to a sunny cool day and, hopefully, a hike up the mountain at Skunk Hollow with LuLu.