Like dominoes, there are a lot of things that have to fall in place to accomplish even simple tasks around my parents house. Answering “where will we park?” is one of those.
Current Parking
The driveway at my parents house is about 400 ft long and takes a near 180 turn into the garages on the back. Unfortunately nobody has been able to park there for some time.
The culprit is the 40′ motorhome that my parents bought that dominates that space. That huge machine doesn’t really fit into the space nicely, and it makes it really difficult to park another vehicle in there. And so for years now nobody has. Instead my parents (and visitors) have been parking single file in the driveway and walking across the front lawn.
1st Domino
“Dad, when we move in, where will we park?” With more than just my parents living there soon, we need to find another way to park. It’s totally impractical for us to continue to try parking single file in the driveway indefinitely.
Because the area in front of the garages has not been drivable, other items have taken over that space. So, to answer “where will we park”, the answer was “right there were those bags of mulch are.”
2nd Domino
That answer naturally leads to “where are we going to put the mulch?” Well, in one of the flower beds of course. The only problem was that none of the flower beds were cleaned out and ready for mulch. So we set the younger kids to pulling weeds out of the flower bed bordering the soon-to-be-parking area.
The kids did great. They were aided a lot by Julie and her boundless energy who would go over and help them out when ever I took one of my all-too-frequent breaks.
3rd Domino
With that flower bed getting cleaned out and looking much nicer, it became painfully apparent that the tree in the corner of the bed was in dire need of a good trimming. And so that task was set upon as well.
A good 90 minutes were spent trimming and grooming that tree. There were numerous branches reaching out and rubbing against the house/shingles. Those were largely removed. Many branches were crossing over/under each other or growing down toward the ground that needed removal as well. And then a whole lot of others that were growing over the parking area were so low that a car would have a hard time getting through them. Some branches were so think that the loppers were traded in for a reciprocating saw.
4th Domino
Not letting that be enough, now that the weeds were pulled and the tree was trimmed we could easily see how much stuff and been placed under there while we were doing our cleaning. So now we needed to find a new place to hide quite a few “eye sore” items. That led to the need to clean off a pallet to place those items on…
You see how this is going right?
In order to fully complete one project another one is required, which needs another, which demands something different. It is a long line of dominoes that need to fall to make this house comfortably livable for the 12 people who are going to live there.
If there are any expert domino players out there, I’d love the help!
Did you notice that with all that work, I didn’t mention what we’re doing about the real problem, the motorhome? Well, my parents will be taking it on vacation shortly after we move in. While they are gone we will clear out a better place in the yard for it to go when they return.