Water Spigot

I have to admit...this one's a David project, not a Hannah project.  I was on standby to fetch tools and stuff.

Last year our outdoor water spigot for the back yard froze and burst.  This bursting was definitely our fault; we forgot to turn the water off during the fall.  Still, it brought the spigot to our attention, and, gung-ho homeowners that we are, we had to find a way to improve it!  In all honesty, the old water pipe wasn't in the best location.  It ran along the top of our basement stairs and hung with the shut-off valve right at forehead level in the basement, high enough that you couldn't see it, but low enough that it hurt when you ran into it.

As a solution, David decided to re-do the plumbing, moving the spigot over to the other side of our outdoor basement entrance.  In the process, he got to learn a yet unexplored technique in our home-improvement adventures--soldering pipes together!  Lesson one: soldering plumbing is very different from the soldering I did in Jewelry class in high school.  Lesson two: if you do it wrong, the pipe leaks.  Lesson three: hot solder hurts when it drips on you.  It may have been a bumpy journey and included an unplanned trip to Ace Hardware for more couplers (and corn seeds), but by the end of the day, we had a brand new spigot, in a spot that makes sense, with a fancy new frost-free valve thingy that won't burst...even if we forget to turn the water off again this fall.

Here's David drilling a hole in the side of our house.

Copper pipe sticking out of the aforementioned hole

David, crawling into the cramped space beside the basement stairs and underneath the pantry floor, all so he can feed the pipe through the floor rafters as he drills the holes one by one.  I'm glad it wasn't me, as this is one of the more spider-y places in our house...

Trimming a piece of pipe

Voila! Water!

I'm very happy to have water available to the back yard again!  Now I don't have to tote my watering can back and forth from the greenhouse to the kitchen sink; I can just drag the hose out to where I need it (appreciate the little things)!

As for the greenhouse, here are some new pictures.  The tomatoes are starting to get big!

Tomatoes...the one in the forefront is a monster!

Broccoli, kohlrabi, and brussels sprouts.  These guys are all related, and I love the heart-shaped leaves they have when they first pop out of the ground.

Peppers in the background, snapdragons in the foreground.  I planted an absurd amount of snapdragons this year.  Pictures of the front flowerbed will certainly be in order :-)

Finally, my daffodils are blooming!  Nevermind the ugly fence...that's another project for another day.