It’s been six months since SLO County issued the shelter-in-place order.
When the shelter-in-place order was put into effect, like so many others, I could no longer work from my office, located in downtown SLO. As a result, I found myself confined to my home, my wife’s ‘Honey-do’ list staring me squarely in the face.
No excuses now.
Home projects
When we were in escrow on our home a year and a half ago, my wife shared that she was most excited about planting fruit trees, a good-sized garden, and giving our small flock of chickens a safe place to roam and forage.
The problem was that Bambi’s family are regular visitors to our yard (we live over the Cuesta Grade), and also, every once in a while the neighbor’s dog gets out.
We needed a deer fence.
The photo below is the area she was talking about, taken prior to building the chicken run and coop and removing that dead tree.
Plenty of potential!
Drum-roll…
....
....
Voila! A deer fence!
Not a couple hours after I had completed this project—which is no small feat for a guy who’s never built a fence before, mind you—, my wife looked at me, smiled, and said, “Looks nice, honey, but I actually need another fence inside the deer fence, to keep the chickens out of the garden area, too…”
“…A chicken fence?” “Uh-huh.”
Behold, a chicken fence.
There’ve been other home projects I’ve worked on too—like installing an attic ladder, removing tree stumps around our property, installing additional deer fencing (they’re a sneaky bunch), replacing some of the kitchen flooring due to a leak—but I’ll spare you the stories.
Perhaps all the closures and cancellations has meant that you too have had more time to focus on those delayed home projects. Even though it feels great to check off some of those
‘Honey-do’ list items, you can’t deny that this is truly a challenging season we’re all in.
While there’s plenty of disagreement on how best to handle the virus, I think we can all agree that regardless of what’s best, this time feels like we’ve all been forced to erect fences around ourselves—to keep the ‘deer out of our own gardens,’ so to speak.
Fences are good, and so are home projects. But people are meant to be together. Like many of you, I’m looking forward to the time when our fences can be dismantled and those home projects can take a backseat again, behind restored relationships and community.
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