The golf club at Johnston Ranch

After a somewhat hectic week everything has calmed down considerably, and we're finally settling down a bit here in our new 'abode'. 

Doug and Brenda went back to Oregon, and the huge space of a 'normal' house is starting to feel a little more normal too. 

 

Most of the week was spend on picking out and ordering materials and appliances. Both bathrooms are going to be re-tiled and painted, the living room will get an accent wall with small stones, as well as the kitchen island, and James is going to build a wine-'cellar' in the dining room. 

And since there's going to be a pool installed in the backyard, all the little cobble stones have to go and a bunch of plants need to be re-located.

So, James hit the ground running as they say, and set up his table saw in the backyard and the tile saw in the side-yard .

 

For his first project he removed those last two cabinets on the left in the laundry room ..

                                           

 

..after which the floor was tiled and the wall painted ..

 

So now the freezer, which until now lived in the garage, could move in. Success!                  One project down, many more to go!

Here's a funny thing: the house has a security system with 6 cameras, and Doug is able to access those with his phone all the way in Oregon.                                                               We use one of them as an inside one, and set it up wherever there is work being done, so he can see exactly what's happening! How cool is that?                                                                   

The middle one at the top is the inside camera and that is James you see there, working in the laundry room.

In the meantime I'm trying to get used to cook in the huge kitchen. I've got two ovens and a microwave and several enormous work-counters!                                                                 We quickly noticed that the microwave runs way hotter than ours, so we had to adjust accordingly, which was a nice excuse to also have to test the ovens ..                                                               

                                    

So, first test .. oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with walnuts! Result: (according to James) perfect!

So far, so good!

After all that work it was time to relax a little and James booked a round of golf at Johnson Ranch, a course about 15 minutes north of us in the San Tan Valley.

 

 

 

We played in the late afternoon and had the whole course to ourselves, which is always very nice! It's a nice course, not too difficult or too long, but challenging enough, just perfect.

It's also the cheapest one around here, so I think we'll be playing it a lot this winter.

Afterward, we treated ourselves to some real Louisiana cuisine at the Angry Crab Shack. We ordered a crab, mussel and sausage boil, medium spiced, which was more than hot enough!

Always funny, those bibs!

James golfed by himself at the golf course that we are seeing from our backyard, the Poston Butte Golf Club. He got a good deal on GolfNow, otherwise it's a little above our budget.

When he came by the 17th (island) hole, I was ready with my camera:

That is the island you can barely see there in the middle of the picture above (just above the blue of the water), and that is James teeing off on the other side of it, in the picture below ..

Here he is walking up to his ball that he actually managed to get on there, and finishing it off below ..

He says it's a very nice course, but because I'll only play 9 holes it's unlikely I'll ever be on it. It's just too expensive, and most likely also too difficult for me. 

It took Merl' a while to settle down, but after Doug and Brenda left he started to come out of the bedroom and explore, and by now he's getting pretty relaxed about it all. 

Give him a chair on a patio and he's good!

OK, I think that's enough for now. We've already worked on a few other things but I think I'll post each project when it's done. That way I can show the whole process so it's easier and more fun to see what changed ..

I'll end with a picture of yesterday's sunset. It was a beautiful one, quiet, no wind at all and still quite warm ..this is our view sitting on the back porch .. could be worse, eh?

Life is good