I did something last time, and it send the post before I had finished. So to continue: My step brother had a cabin in this cute quiet Mountain community, it had a nice little lake, you could have a Sail boat, a Paddle boat or a Row boat, but no motor boats allowed. Well, that was fine by me, I had just spent almost twenty years going to out to our mobile home on the Colorado River, where the boats were so loud, they woke you up all most every morning, with their loud , soupped up engines. I was looking for quiet, cool, and lazy days, but the cabin we bought, one house from the Lake, needed a lot of work. It had a new roof, a galley kitchen that wasn't bad, the upstairs was big and the only beds up there were twins 6 of them, before they put the new roof on, water seeped into the house, into some of the furniture, and ruined the carpet. I wasn't sad, didn't like the old carpet, or the furniture, they were worn out, shabby, and smelled. The first thing we did was have our sons come and help us haul most of the furniture to the dump, and the second load was that ugly carpet. We got brand new carpet, and we bought a new couch and two chairs from Sears surplus store, one town over, also put a old TV in the front room and ordered Cable service. The deck was falling down in the middle, so that was our first repair, my husband wrote up some specks for a new deck, and we put in stairs going down into the back yard, also where we parked our truck. When we bought the cabin, we put in two parking spaces, but we had to walk all the way around to the front, the only stairs onto the deck or into the cabin were from the front. As my husband removed the old boards from the deck, I carried them out on my shoulder ( my husband made me a deep pad, I could put on my shoulder, so the boards wouldn't hurt my shoulder) I took, if I remember right !! about 4 or 5 boards at a time, on my shoulder down a small grade, and throw them in a pile. It took two weekends to get all the boards removed from the deck, the deck was so old, that many of the nails were sticking up, so to remove the nails with a claw hammer was really easy, and my husband put the nails in a old coffee can so as not to not step on the them, because they could have easily gone through our boots, and I would have been the one it could have happened to !!! I will tell you by evening when we stopped, I was dead tired, as I drug my self into the shower, my husband drove to this small cafe and got us a couple of hamburgers, as soon as he came in, in the shower he went, I set up two TV trays , filled two glasses with milk, put the TV on, and as soon he was dressed and sat down, we ate, and a lot of times we both fell asleep in front of the TV !!! I will tell you one thing, by the end of that summer, boy did I have muscles !!After the deck was finished, and it looked so good, we painted the cabin and trim, did a little stenciling on the top board on the front windows, made it look real cute !!! Next my husband built a stone wall, with stones he got off the job he was working on, they came from the River bed close by, so they were all sizes, some big, some smaller, when we started the wall, it was like a puzzle, we had to fit in the best rock to fit the space, he got some railroad ties and terraced off the back yard, so I could make a wild flower garden, we also planted some Pine trees and one big redwood tree, that redwood tree is about 15 feet high now, a couple of the Pine trees had to be removed a couple of years ago, we had a bad storm, and I don't know if it was ice or lightening, but they were split in two. My garden was so beautiful, I had people from all over the town coming to me, asking how I grew my plants, and what plants grew best !! My husband bought a old row boat, went fishing every weekend, I visited with the friends and neighbors, and worked in my garden. I had the best of both worlds, I worked in my garden at the cabin on weekends, and kept expanding and adding more flowering plants during the week in my garden, here at home. I loved my life, I was busy, healthy, and happy. More to come