Sunday, July 15, 2012

Saturday painting and Monsoonal rains....

Saturday was for work on the painting in the den for me...  I started this project yesterday when I rode the motor scooter over to the Lowe's to purchase a gallon of color test paint....  I call it color test, because I didn't purchase a 5 gallon pail...  Now that is more of a commitment, than a test!!

I never left the house all day but stayed right with that color testing here in our den....


Pictures are notoriously wrong in color, but this is called hopsack....  Its a brown that has a little more caramel color to it than the chocolate milk color we used back in Kansas...


Looking the other way the lamp doesn't distort the color so much, but still it is hard to see the color has more warm brown in it than milk chocolate....  We had to do that because the white is a swiss coffee kind of cream color... So the brown has to blend with that.

As you can see we don't have much furniture in these rooms...  The recliner was in the motorhome from last winter when we stayed here at the RV park....  I brought its right chair in the trailer when we came this time..  When Loyce saw the completed walls, her comment was that now we had to go get some furniture for our nicely painted den.................Uh, what did I start?

Late in the afternoon, we had the big monsoonal temperature change from over 100 to about 80 with a massive downpour...  The rain washed mud down our street out of the unfinished back yards along our street...


The water was running down the curb on our side like a river full of mud..  This picture was actually quite dark, but I brightened it up with the photo editor...


I made this picture bigger because across the street behind the mail boxes you can see the big pit they build to hold the monsoonal run off.  They don't get much rain all year, but when it does rain, it pours and makes massive water washes unless the water runs into holding pits where it can soak slowly into the sandy desert ground...  Without these holding pits, the storm sewers wouldn't have anywhere to run off to...  We don't have the usual creeks that are normal back in the Midwest...



And finally our side yard looking from the door in the garage...  Remember when I said the monsoon would destroy our grading if we didn't do the landscaping almost as soon as we could?   Well, that soon as possible can't come soon enough, as we have this same lake all around the house...  The pond on the North side was even worse, but I didn't want to wade in the mud to go around there and take its picture..  This is after it stopped raining for a while...

But at least it washed the dust off of my truck!!!

Retired Rod

8 comments:

  1. Nice to have some cool rain for a change! Even if it makes puddles!!

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  2. wow thats alot of water-I can see why you need to get the landscaping done asap....nice tho that the rain cooled things off for you...and you got a clean truck out of the deal )

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  3. Nice rains in Arizona this year! We were to have had monsoonal rains here in Montana yesterday and last night--I think we got two drops.

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  4. Janna's right - we sure didn't get the rain the weatherman said we would. Got a little during the night last night and that helps a little. But AZ needs all the rain it can get also. Even with it washing away all the yards. Our RV Park has a big pit for run off also. Never have experienced the monsoons down there so it's hard to imagine needing that pit.

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  5. Rod - thanks for the Monsoon pictures. We are in California, but heard there was a storm at home. Looked like a good one. Nice job on the paint!

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  6. A temp of 80F must seem like the North Pole to you guys after the blistering heat wave you've had. That's quite the water runoff and I can see why you're anxious to get the landscaping down - better hurry up with that painting, more work is waiting.

    I looked closely at your house and couldn't see any gutters and downspouts. Is that the normal in Arizona where it doesn't rain much or did I just not see them?

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    1. Rick, I asked about that as well when we were building this place, and the answer was that with only about 3 inches of rain a year, there wasn't enough water to use the downspouts much... Some folks go ahead and put them on, but with your yard made from crushed rock, you might have to rake it around some after one of these gully washers but other than that....

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  7. The desert smells so wonderfully clean and fresh after a rain. I bet the creosote is really on a "high" right now. Watch for flash floods in low areas (in the outlying areas). I heard Tucson had 3 inches of rain (!) on the Fourth.

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