Lest anyone thinks that we haven’t been doing much work outside of documenting the contractors progress, we have. its just not very glamorous, and its slow to boot. (Well and we also had a few visitors, who blissfully distracted us from drudgery of renovation – thank you friends :)

In the last two weeks, Sergey finished up preliminary work on our little dirt patch outback – soon(ish) to become an urban garden oasis. That required another van rental for the dump run (bonus points if you can find the john hiding somewhere),

and then some serious dirt work to level the ground and get it sloping away rather than to the house:

I must say that Otto and I are quite pleased with the results:

Ah, but Sergey wasn’t done yet. He had to move onto the front of the house, to clean up a deceased rat. extremely gross, no pictures, outside of these awesome full gear get up: